Don the Con gave his first State of the Union address the other day. Some (most) Democrats in the audience failed to applaud when he gave his big lines– Republicans stood and enthusiastically applauded some of his more ridiculous claims. Later, at a rally, he called those who failed to applaud treasonous:
“They were like death and un-American,” he said. “Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not?”
As Masha Gessen reports in the New Yorker, during the time of Stalin, in the USSR, failure to applaud enthusiastically enough was definitely considered treasonous. Is this where Don wants us to go? Vlad “the Impaler” Putin has already gotten his country back into that territory.
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
Certain Comments Make You Wonder
“My main question is why the Republicans, spearheaded by Nunes, Jordan, and Goetz, are undermining the investigation and supporting Trump.
The answer seems to be that Republicans believe in a strong state that will break labor unions, set minorities against each other, weaken public education, and strengthen monopoly capitalism.
Their ideology overrides any internal doubts about the messenger.”
Diogenes
Belmont MA 5 hours ago
My main question is why the Republicans, spearheaded by Nunes, Jordan, and Goetz, are undermining the investigation and supporting Trump.
The answer seems to be that Republicans believe in a strong state that will break labor unions, set minorities against each other, weaken public education, and strengthen monopoly capitalism.
Their ideology overrides any internal doubts about the messenger.
silver
Virginia 4 hours ago
Devin Nunes is going after Rod Rosenstein to torpedo Robert Mueller’s investigation of the president. It’s that simple. Rosenstein is the underpinning of the Special Prosecutor’s probe, and should the Deputy AG go away, so will the investigation of the president, reasons Nunes. That’s not upholding law and order and Nunes and the Republicans know it.
The president owes his election to the FBI and James Comey. The field agents within the bureau did not want Secretary Clinton to win and there was something of a palace revolt against Comey to release his letter to reopen the investigation of the Secretary. Thus, Comey and the FBI handed the presidency to the GOP candidate on a silver platter, and this is how Republicans show their gratitude. The GOP and this president are bonded by similar antisocial attitudes which is why they are such a perfect match for each other.
Jeremy Mott
West Hartford, CT 7 hours ago
Trump virtually declared war on North Korea last night. It is now only a matter of time till the first strikes of that war.
Trump so very much fears the charge that he’s “all talk, no action” that he is jettisoning the strategy of patience and diplomacy and a unified front with other nations so he can “go it alone” to prove his strength. (His bone spurs have miraculously healed.)
Oh, yes, Trump made a plea for national unity last night. But new reports say Trump believes national unity will result only from another event like 9/11. Or a war.
We Americans must take to the streets before the bombs start to fall and the artillery begins to fire. Trump’s bellicosity makes war inevitable unless we stop him in the street — and stop his war before it starts..
Steel Magnolia
Atlanta, GA 7 hours ago
Goldberg assembles some terrifying pieces:
–The derailing of Victor Cha’s proposed ambassadorship to South Korea after Cha “expressed reservations about a preventative American strike on North Korea.”
–The public parade of the grief of Otto Warmbier’s parents, whose innocent son was tortured and ultimately died at the hands of the North Korea, bringing the cameras back a second time to linger on their faces, red and contorted in unmitigated pain.
–The exhortation of Ji Seong-ho, who was maimed by North Korean famine and believes Christians have a duty to destroy the regime, to raise his crutches in defiance and perhaps a call to arms.
And there is yet another–one that pulls these pieces together in even more frightening context: Previewing his address, our president decried the country’s lack of unity, spanning back several presidents, and touted his ambition to be the great unifier. Then he went on; “I would love to bring our country’s back in a great form of unity without a major event–very tough to do. I would like to do it without a major event because usually that major event is a bad thing. Unity is what I’m really striving for, to bring the country together.”
Reading Goldberg’s column in this context brought terror to my soul. In his desperation to be free of the Russia investigation and his driving boundless need to be the most “tremendous success” in presidential history, would our president actually start a holy war?
Arthur Swanson
Ardsley, New York 7 hours ago
President Trump is foreshadowing his next move. We need a “unifying event” to bring this country together and for him to get the love he so desperately graves and that he believes is owed to him. Republicans in Congress need to act immediately to limit his authority to deploy nuclear weapons. Otherwise, consciously or unconsciously he is going to get us into a war, probably with North Korea. He had producers to reign him in when he got too crazy on “The Apprentice”. Chillingly, right now, he has free reign to write whatever final script that he wants.
UCB Parent
CA 22 hours ago
It seems to me that we need legal protection now not only for the special prosecutor, but for the leaders and personnel of the FBI. (I am thinking of those agents that Trump has been demonizing.) How else can it remain independent of the White House? Otherwise it could become a mere instrument of the President’s power, which is more or less what Trump demanded of Comey. Of course the same could be said for the career staff at other federal agencies, such as the EPA. All are vulnerable to a President indifferent to the truth and the rule of law.
This comment was in response to an article describing how senior officials at the FBI seem to be pushed out day after day under Don’s administration. It is because of the investigation at the FBI that started before the election, based on a drunken conversation between a diplomat and a loyal American who reported it to the FBI. Despite Republican propaganda, the “Steele dossier” is far from being debunked and was not news to the FBI; they had already started looking into potential Russian attempts to blackmail Donald J. Trump from the years before he was a candidate for President. Don borrowed a lot of money from Russians to stay afloat and keep his projects going after American banks stopped lending to him. His casino bankruptcies and other failed financial dealings made him persona non grata to banks in this country, so he cast about elsewhere. Currently he is financed through Deutsche Bank, which has been implicated in numerous money laundering scandals. Don the Con has not said a harsh word about any Russian in the last twelve years.
“I believe that Donald Trump in the White House will be more abusive to the constitution than Barack Obama and that’s saying a lot.”
That was before he was offered the job of Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has some more obsequious things to say about Don the Con. After his ascension to chief steward of America’s environmental quality, he changed his tune to suit the type of butt-kissing statements expected from Don’s sycophants:
“After meeting him, and now having the honor of working for him, it is abundantly clear that President Trump is the most consequential leader of our time. No one has done more to advance the rule of law than President Trump. The President has liberated our country from the political class and given America back to the people.”
No-one has done more to advance the rule of law down the road to hell, paved with good intentions towards his own ego. “Most consequential” , “done the most to advance the rule of law”, “liberated our country from the political class”, “given America back to the people.” Apparently these phrases have double meanings; the hidden message is: “Most powerful narcissist in the world.” We are doomed if the people who know the truth about Don don’t rise up en masse to overthrow him in November.
By then, Don’s minions will have come up with a plan to steal the mid-term elections; such tactics as starting a war with North Korea, setting up a disinformation campaign to paint the Democrats as Communists (or worse, Eurocrats), and using social media to turn swing voters are under consideration or already underway. Not excluded yet are direct hacking of election databases maintained by the States to disenfranchise potential anti-Trump voters, or even indicting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for “crimes” committed during their time in power. Remember, the Republicans had a contingency plan to impeach Hillary before she could take the oath of office if she won the election. What is more, the Republicans have already succeeded in immortalizing Antonin Scalia, the second most racist Supreme Court Justice in modern times, in the person of Neil Gorsuch.
(quotes courtesy of axios.com; image courtesy of pixabay.com)
Multiple news agencies have reported that Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI, will retire in March after twenty years with the agency, and is going on leave immediately. The Washington Post first reported last week that Don the Con, our 45th President, had asked Mr. McCabe last summer how he had voted in the presidential election, during a conversation in which he claimed to be considering McCabe as Acting Director shortly after abruptly firing Director James Comey.
Mr. McCabe’s wife had run for the Virginia State Senate as a Democrat in 2015, and had received $200,000 from the Democratic National Committee plus half a million dollars from the PAC run by Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Hillary Clinton (a political campaign in which Mr. McCabe played no role whatsoever)– so there was in reality no chance of Don’s allowing Mr. McCabe any real authority. Mr. McCabe was able to finesse Don’s question by telling him he didn’t vote, and was able to warn the Don not to make an appearance at FBI Headquarters “to boost morale” after firing its popular Director (because it would not go over well with the rank and file.)
Axios had just reported on January 23 that FBI Director Christopher Wray threatened to resign rather than fire Mr. McCabe under pressure from Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. Axios also quoted a statement from the White House Press Principal Deputy Secretary that described former FBI Director Comey as “politically motivated” (in what way a registered Republican could be “politically motivated” rather than just apolitically disgusted by a corrupt President was not explained by the Principal Deputy.)
Mr. McCabe’s neutrality, much less integrity, is suspect in Don’s eyes even though he was appointed by President GW Bush and worked under two registered Republicans, James Comey and Robert Mueller. There is a clear element of paranoia in Don the Con’s thinking here, not just defensiveness. Don is a fan of conspiracy theories, and he has probably already signed on to the one about a “secret society” within the FBI dedicated to taking him down because they are jealous of his charisma.
If Don is not already aware of the extent to which his campaign shared data with the Russian government (the actual assistance the Russians gave to Cambridge Analytica was hacked emails and access to Russia’s army of bots for targeted ads and content) then Mueller’s investigation will soon clarify it for him. There was a dedicated computer link between Trump Tower and the Kremlin and a secret operation that linked swing voters and supplied content meant to increase their insecurity.
White voters were found to pick Trump over Clinton if they were insecure and suspicious of established politics and the democratic system. Black voters could not be induced to support Trump by any feasible means. People who had suffered at the hands of the system, such as laid-off factory workers and people who had lost their houses to foreclosure, had become vulnerable to propaganda that linked their insecurity to immigration or “politics as usual.” Targeting insecure voters with propaganda that increased their anxiety only made them more likely to vote for an anti-establishment candidate, which is precisely what Trump pretended to be.
In reality, Don the Con is the ultimate establishment figure, having a vested interest in keeping the status quo intact, including racial and sexual discrimination, oil consumption, pharmaceutical company profits, and the rich getting richer.
Don’s reputation at the FBI is “in tatters” but there may be a hard core of Trump supporters in the depths of certain FBI offices, such as that in New York. In fact, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, who hired the notorious spy and Russia expert Christopher Steele, stated before Congress that Steele feared the FBI had been “co-opted” by Trump supporters– and cut off all contact with them– after FBI agents were cited in the New York Times on October 31, 20016 claiming that they had investigated Trump and found “little” connection to Russia.
In fact, there were already strong grounds for suspicion and the NSA and CIA had become involved in the widening investigation. On October 12, 2016, the NYT reported: “Hillary Clinton’s top adviser said the FBI is investigating Russia’s possible role in hacking thousands of his personal emails, an intrusion he said Donald Trump’s campaign may have been aware of in advance.”
It was only after the first Tuesday in November that the combined intelligence agencies put together and presented to both Obama and Trump a document which described Russia’s role in hacking the election. It appears to many that our intelligence community, including the FBI (and ultimately President Obama) failed to warn us that Russia was hacking our election when there was still time for the American people to do something about it (like not voting for Don the Con.) The claims in the NYT on October 31, 2016 about FBI agents not finding any Trump-Russia connections seems especially inappropriate, particularly when combined with their announcement about the re-opening of the Clinton e-mail investigation.
“Although prices are often justified by the high cost of drug development, there is no evidence of an association between research and development costs and prices; rather, prescription drugs are priced in the United States primarily on the basis of what the market will bear.”
From the abstract of the 2016 study in the JAMA, “The High Cost of Prescription Drugs in the United States”
The NYT article referencing this study uses Humira as an example of this phenomenon:
“The price of Humira, an anti-inflammatory drug dispensed in an injectable pen, has risen from about $19,000 a year in 2012, to more than $38,000 today, per patient, after rebates, according to SSR Health, a research firm. That’s an increase of 100 percent… A prefilled carton with two syringes costs $2,669 in the United States, compared with $1,362 in Britain, $822 in Switzerland and $552 in South Africa, according to a 2015 report from the International Federation of Health Plans.”
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
Don’s number one reason for claiming that Mueller was prejudiced against him and trying to fire him, last June, was that, after Mueller had resigned from his golf club (possibly because he moved away), the club had failed to refund his membership fees as Mueller had requested by letter:
The dispute was hardly a dispute at all. According to a person familiar [with the] matter, Mueller had sent a letter requesting a dues refund in accordance with normal club practice and never heard back.
(Stolen from the Washington Post via Slate, courtesy of Slate chief news blogger
(photo courtesy of pexels at pixabay.com)
Dr. Lukasz Niec, working in a Michigan hospital during a flu epidemic that is still ongoing, holds a valid green card (he’s still a citizen of Poland) and has been in the US for forty years since his father brought him legally into the country as a child. He was convicted of a misdemeanor as a teenager that involved “moral turpitude” (whatever that is) but has been practicing medicine for the last ten years without a hitch. He was abruptly detained, incommunicado, by ICE agents on his first day off after a week of double shifts. His crime, according to ICE? He was convicted of two offenses 26 years ago as a teenager: receiving stolen goods and destruction of property worth less than $100; one crime was “erased” from his record– but these crimes involve “moral turpitude” and are reason enough to deport him. The real reason for his arrest? He has had 18 contacts with the police over the past few years, all involving traffic violations such as not having proof of insurance, not changing the address on his license, and parking near a fire hydrant. His worst offense? Driving drunk (“under the influence” in 2008, for which he served probation for a year, and for which the court “set aside” his conviction. ICE officers claimed that he “came under scrutiny” because of these mostly trivial violations of traffic laws. His employer, Bronson Healthcare, has appealed for his release, noted his service to the community as a physician, and argued that they need him back at work.
It appears that this man is a target for law enforcement officers who apparently have a vendetta against him; perhaps it is related to his ex-fiancee, who has a child with him and is trying to prevent him seeing her. She charged him with child abuse last summer because of a bruise which she claimed was a bite mark; the case was dismissed because the bruise didn’t look like a bite mark and it was unknown who caused it or when it was suffered.
In addition to these complications, the judgement of “moral turpitude” seems arbitrary. If something is against the law, doesn’t that automatically imply “moral turpitude”? Or is it only for “moral” crimes?
PS The fact that this man came to the attention of ICE because of numerous contacts with the law, none of which have resulted in convictions in the past ten years, highlights the trick that law-enforcement personnel play on people who are arrested, then found not guilty: they keep a record of the arrests and act as if the arrest alone is enough to taint a person with law-breaking. After all, if he was arrested, he must have been guilty of something– right? It’s always guilty until proven innocent.
People who have been detained, even when they are released following a hearing, have their DACA status removed even though they were actually detained by mistake: this happened to Daniel Ramirez, who was picked up at the same time when ICE agents came to arrest his father (their original target.) Agents claimed that the fact that he had a tattoo on his arm showed he was a gang member. Even though his lawyer, Luis Cortes, disproved this to the satisfaction of an immigration judge and Ramirez was released after a month in custody, he was left without DACA protection and lost his job. (This information comes from an article in “The New Yorker.”)
(The reports about Niec came from an article , one of several on the case in “Michigan Live” by unknown authors since Dr. Niec was taken away on January 16; national newspapers have picked up the story. Interestingly, numerous comments on the Michigan Live story were submitted by people who seem to have a vendetta against him, inflated the child abuse allegations from dismissed to convicted, and consider his traffic offenses to be sufficient reason to deport him.)
(The picture, by Mohamed Hassan, comes courtesy of pixabay.com)
More than 80 voting machines in Detroit malfunctioned on Election Day, officials say, resulting in ballot discrepancies in 59% of precincts that raise questions about the reliability of future election results in a city dominated by Democratic and minority voters.
“This is not the first time,” adds Daniel Baxter, elections director for the city. “We’ve had this problem in nearly every election that we administer in the city of Detroit.” Baxter says that the machines were tested for accuracy before election day in accordance with state and federal guidelines, but that sometimes the machines “hit up against each other and malfunction” as they’re being transported to the precincts.
(This comes from Time magazine in a news piece by CHARLOTTE ALTER on December 14, 2016)
(Illustration courtesy of pixabay.com)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 
Comment of the Week: Calvinism and the Rich
Ron Cohen
is a trusted commenter Waltham, MA 2 days ago
The bait-and-switch scam that Krugman decries didn’t appear out of thin air. It was devised by some very rich people as part of a long-term strategy. Why do they care so much? Is it really about money? Or is it something deeper, more visceral, a need to dominate and impoverish everyone else?
The great English historian, R.H. Tawney, in his magisterial work, “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism” (1926), tells us that by the mid 1600’s, most English Puritans saw in poverty “not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion … but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.”
This ideal of individual morality, derived from Calvin, has been with us ever since. But it has surfaced with renewed zeal in our time, with men like the Koch bothers, Robert Mercer, Art Pope and Sheldon Adelson determined to spend whatever it takes to replace democracy as we know it—a leveling force—with a fascistic, plutocratic model of government.
For these billionaires, however, religion is not the motivator. Rather, it’s how they see themselves, their self image, that drives their lust for power, their need to dominate. They are the “makers,” deserving, while the rest of us are “takers,” undeserving and cadging off their efforts. Identity politics isn’t just for Democrats anymore.
For a penetrating interpretation, see George Monbiot’s short but defining piece in The Guardian: http://tinyurl.com/p5dg6b5
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com and Maklay62)