What's the Rationale for Raising Taxes on Billionaires?

There's a lot of talk about raising taxes on the rich, with Elizabeth Warren announcing her candidacy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engorging conservatives' ... ire, the peripatetic Bernie Sanders, and the backlash Howard Schulz has gotten for demanding Democrats genuflect before him and his billions.

The question, though, is why should we raise taxes on the rich. We don't want to punish people for simply being successful -- it's the American dream. Is there some underlying logic that would justify taxing billionaires at 70% or higher, as we did during the 1950s (which conservatives always look back at nostalgically as the pinnacle of American greatness)?

There is a long-standing tradition of taxing things that cause problems in society. For example, alcohol and tobacco. It's a way of punishing sins that we have found impossible to make illegal, but wish to discourage or minimize.

The case for taxing alcohol and tobacco is clear: alcohol is a dangerous drug, costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars in increased crime (40% of violent crimes are committed under the influence), automobile crashes, lost productivity and medical costs due to accidents and alcoholism. Tobacco costs billions of dollars in lost productivity (smokers are always on break), medical costs and causes millions of deaths due to cancer and emphysema. And it's the leading cause of home fires, costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Gambling costs billions in lost productivity and embezzlement by gambling addicts. So we tax gambling heavily, or give government a monopoly on it, as with lotteries.

So one argument for taxing billionaires is that their lust for wealth causes problems, just like alcohol, tobacco and gambling. And sure enough, billionaires do cause many serious social problems.

Look at the Sackler family, the people behind Purdue Pharma, who were responsible for pushing prescription opioids and addicting millions of Americans, killing hundreds of thousands in the last decade.

Other pharmacy billionaires (like Martin Shkreli) have been jacking up the price of prescription drugs 10-, 20- and 100-fold, solely to increase profits. This forces millions of Americans into medical bankruptcies. Millions of patients are rationing their insulin and hypertension medications, and some have stopped taking them altogether, causing numerous complications and death in many cases. These guys are committing blackmail: your money or your life.

Oil, coal and pipeline billionaires keep denying that burning fossil fuels causes climate change. But we're already seeing the effects right now, today, with the drastically increased destructive power of extreme weather and the massive flooding that accompanies it.

Industrial agriculture billionaires have made farmers dependent on genetically engineered corn and soybeans, forcing them to spend themselves into the poorhouse buying seed and the chemicals required to poison weeds. These companies then sue farmers who try to plant seed from the grain they grow, the way farmers have for thousands of years. And now Donald Trump's tariffs have yanked the market out from under them.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey have set Americans at each other's throats, severely damaged the free press and helped put a narcissistic man-child in the Oval Office.

Uber's Travis Kalanick has turned thousands of Americans into struggling "ride share" drivers, and made the lives of struggling old-school cab drivers a living hell, causing many to commit suicide.

Hedge fund billionaires buy companies in hostile takeovers, take out big loans against those companies, pay themselves big returns, run the business into the ground, declare bankruptcy, then bust the company up and sell the pieces, screwing all the employees and the people they borrowed money from.

Walmart and the entire fast-food industry pay workers peanuts and force them to work part-time, so they can avoid paying full-time benefits such as health care. Millions of Americans are working 60 to 80 hours a week, taking two or three different part-time jobs, and they still don't have enough money to live on.

Even relatively benign billionaires, like automobile execs, create social costs by increasing the demand for more and more freeways, and reducing the demand for much more efficient modes of transportation like mass transit. And large businesses in general increase government expenditures by requiring government spending on infrastructure like roads and ports, as well as schools for educating their future employees.

Pretty much every person or company who makes billions of dollars is incurring some kind of social cost that they're not paying for. So society should recoup that cost by taxing them at a compensatory rate.

In their lust for the almighty buck many billionaires ignore the problems their businesses cause. The things they do may not be explicit crimes, but their greed causes more social harm than all the two-bit crooks put together.

Greed is a sin. One of the seven deadly ones. And we should tax it.

The Billionaire Drug Pushers

There are several lawsuits against drug kingpins in the news of late. One is against "El Chapo" Joaquín Guzmán Loera, and is filled with stories of prison escapes, border tunnels, IT guys turning states evidence and raping 13-year-old girls.

The others are far more insidious. Legal action is being taken against giant drug companies, like Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin. This company is squarely behind the opioid epidemic. In 2007 Purdue and three executives pleaded guilty to a host of crimes that led directly to the addiction and deaths of thousands of Americans every year.

Recently more details have come out about why Purdue started the drug epidemic: it turns out the real villains in this story are the wealthy, self-entitled family of billionaires, the Sacklers, who serve on the board. They pushed the CEO and faceless corporate bean counters to push drugs to more and more victims.

The Sackler family, ever more greedy, demanded more aggressive sales tactics to hook more patients on OxyContin, while at the same time referring to their customers as "reckless criminals." Their other activities included:

• The spoils of OxyContin allowed the Sacklers, as board members, to vote to pay themselves more than $4 billion between 2007 and 2018. Figures for individual payments during those years are sprinkled throughout the lawsuit.
• Members of the family personally ordered Purdue to increase the sales force on a number of occasions.
• The family was directly involved in pushing for higher—and more dangerous—doses of OxyContin.
• For years, the McKinsey & Company consulting firm had worked with Purdue to come up with sales tactics. According to a redacted section, the consultants "had reported to Purdue on opportunities to increase prescriptions by convincing doctors that opioids provide 'freedom' and 'peace of mind' and give patients 'the best possible chance to live a full and active life.'"
• Board meetings for the US-based company were held in exotic and luxurious places, such as Bermuda and a castle in Ireland.
• Members of the Sackler family worked on a secret plan codenamed "Tango," which would have expanded Purdue's business into addiction-treatment drugs. [They wanted hook addicts coming and going.]
  
• Purdue employees actively tried to avoid the Sacklers because of their relentless and aggressive demands
• Richard Sackler allegedly sought revenge on an insurance company for dropping coverage of OxyContin amid the epidemic of abuse.
• The Sacklers allegedly knew about but did not report suspected cases of diversion and abuse by doctors.

A trial against another drug company, Insys, is in progress now. Insys resorted to more traditional drug pushing tactics: they hired a former stripper named Sunshine Lee to be the sales director. In addition to the old standard of bribing doctors to prescribe more opioids, they used more conventional drug pushing tactics. Sex:

In testimony Tuesday against the rest, former sales representative Holly Brown made the lap-dancing allegation against her former boss, Lee. Brown testified that in mid-2012 she, Lee, and other sale representatives took one Dr. Paul Madison to a club after a dinner event sponsored by Insys. Brown said that her superiors had told her to focus on Dr. Madison, who was known for prescribing a lot of opioids. She described his office as a “shady pill mill” in a “dingy strip mall in a not-so-nice area of town,” according to reports.

Brown recalled an encounter she witnessed that night between Lee and Madison, saying, “She was sitting on his lap, kind of bouncing around, and he had his hands all over her chest.’’

Lee, a former stripper, had no experience in the pharmaceutical industry before working at Insys, prosecutors noted. According to Bloomberg, court documents reveal that Insys whistle-blowers quoted Burlakoff as saying that “doctors really enjoyed spending time with [Lee]” and that she was “more of a closer.”

Brown echoed the idea, saying in her testimony that Lee played up her sexuality during sales pitches. She dressed in a “sexually suggestive manner’’ and “showed more cleavage than the average sales rep,’’ Brown said.

Prosecutors reported that Insys paid Madison at least $70,800 in “speaker fees.”

A border wall will do nothing to stop the biggest drug epidemic facing this nation: prescription drugs pushed by giant pharmaceutical companies and the rich fat cats behind them.

The Sacklers and Insys make the best argument yet for a 70% tax on billionaires. The country needs to be reimbursed for the death and destruction their unbridled greed wreaks upon the American people.

There is no global warming

Trump's Groundhog Day Stock Market Tweets

Vox is a great site. One of the services they provide is reading Donald Trump's tweets (so I don't have to), and remembering what he said in previous tweets.

Which is something that Trump is apparently incapable of. Trump has now bragged about the Dow hitting 25,000 at least three separate times. Most recently on Jan. 19, but also on July 14th and Jan. 4 of 2018.

As Vox points out, Trump is bragging that he has trashed the stock market, which has become extremely chaotic and/or stagnant since he started screwing up the economy with tariffs, government shutdowns, border invasions and other stupid pet tricks.

But what does this bragging over reaching the same milestone over and over and over again -- like Bill Murray waking up to "I Got You Babe" in Groundhog Day -- mean? There are two possibilities:

The first possibility is 1) Trump is clueless: he just doesn't remember that the market surpassed 25,000 at least twice before. He's a senile dotard, addled by Alzheimer's, who is unfit to be president.

Now, Trump uses Twitter so that he can communicate with his supporters completely unfiltered by the news media. In this way he escapes any and all fact-checking and he can completely ignore the truth, shaping reality to his whims.

So the other possibility is 2) Trump thinks his supporters are clueless. He doesn't think they can remember what happened six months or a year ago, and he brags about the exact same non-accomplishment repeatedly, even though the bragging reveals how totally disastrous his presidency is.

So, Trump's Twitter feed reveals either that he is a total idiot, or that he thinks his followers are gullible idiots.

Ironically, the thing that seems to irk Trump followers the most is that moderates and liberals think they're stupid for supporting Trump, yet  -- unless he is a total idiot his followers insist he is not -- Trump clearly thinks they are even stupider than the liberals do.

Trump is taking his followers' support for granted, constantly feeding them bullshit and treating them like idiot children.

When Trump's followers finally get fed up with him -- and they will: they got tired of being taken for fools by the Republican establishment for decades -- these people are either going to give up on politics forever, or march on Washington demanding Trump's head on an impeachment platter.

Four Bucks for Cheerios Is Not a Lot. Four Bucks for Starbucks Coffee Is Highway Robbery

Talking heads are shocked that Howard Schultz, the billionaire who owns Starbucks and is running for president as an independent, doesn't know how much a box of Cheerios costs.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, amid a media tour rife with awkward moments, got stumped by Morning Joe on Wednesday when asked: “How much does an 18-ounce box of Cheerios cost?”

“An 18 ounce box of Cheerios? I don’t eat Cheerios,” the billionaire responded to host Mika Brzezinski.

When she revealed the price was four dollars, Schultz was shocked.

“That’s a lot,” he said.

To be honest, springing gotcha questions like this on billionaires is bogus: I didn't know much a box of Cheerios costs. We haven't bought Cheerios in years -- we make 1-minute oatmeal in the microwave. And I have no idea how much a box of oatmeal costs.

What's shocking is that Schultz is pretending to think that $4.00 for a box of Cheerios is a lot. Especially compared to how much coffee costs at Starbucks. Maybe Mika should have asked Schultz how much a Caramel Frappaccino costs.

That $4.00 box of Cheerios contains 18 servings, almost three weeks of breakfast. The cereal has actual nutritional value, including dietary fiber, which most Americans don't get anywhere near enough of.

Coffee at Starbucks costs between $3.00 and $6.00. For one serving. It's a frill, nothing but empty calories (most of them have 100 to 150 calories, some as much as 600!). Starbucks coffee has no nutritional value and is a huge drain on the American pocketbook -- more than a thousand dollars a year for regular customers. It's a huge waste of people's time, as millions go out of their way to stop at Starbucks, where they waste ever more time waiting in line for their orders.

Starbucks has also added drive-through windows at their stores, resulting in millions of gallons of wasted gasoline as people queue up, their engines idling as they wait for their orders.

Schultz made his billions selling people an overpriced luxury product that no one needs, that is actively harmful to the nation's productivity and health.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that this master of worthlessness is threatening to run for president as an independent. Such a run could siphon off just enough votes from the Democratic candidate to give Trump a second term.

No third-party candidate has ever won an election, but they have affected the results: Ralph Nader gave Bush the presidency in 2000. Ross Perot may well have given the election to Clinton. Twice. And Jill Stein drew enough votes away from Hillary Clinton in 2016 to give Trump the win in Wisconsin and Michigan, and if Stein hadn't run Pennsylvania might have gone to Clinton as well.

The last thing this country needs is another egocentric billionaire narcissist with no political or government experience running for president. We've already got one of those, and it's been a total disaster.

Yeah, It's Cold. And Yeah, It's Because of Climate Change

Every year we go through this: we have a cold spell and Donald Trump and all the climate change deniers gloat: "It's cold! There ain't no global warming!"

Yes, it's cold in the Midwest. As I write this it's -28 degrees in the Twin Cities, and the low was -30 degrees.

But if you look at other places, it's not cold. Why, in Anchorage, Alaska, it's 33 degrees above zero. And in Juneau, it's 39 degrees above zero.

It's 67 degrees warmer in Alaska than in Minnesota. How can that be?

Climate change.

Climate change has completely screwed up the jet stream. In the past the jet stream bottled up the cold air around the North Pole. Now that the arctic has warmed so significantly that the jet stream is weakened, and that cap of cold air at the pole is no longer stable. It wobbles around a lot, and now the "polar vortex" has slipped down into the Midwest.

But don't worry: this is temporary. By Saturday it'll be 39 in Minnesota, a swing of almost 70 degrees in just a few days.

Meanwhile, Australia is being roasted by record-setting high temperatures, over 120 degrees in some places. And 2018 was the fourth warmest year on record. The other three warmest years were 2016, 2017 and 2015.

When the four warmest years on record are the last four years, you just can't deny that the planet is getting hotter at a record pace. And the primary cause is the trillions of tons of greenhouse gases that we are putting in the air.

Assimilation Is Always the Goal

Tom Brokaw, a news anchor who's usually a hero to opinionators at the Washington Post, has come under fire for his comments about Hispanic assimilation. Brokaw said:

I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities. And that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.

As Paul Waldman notes, this is basically a non-issue. Children of immigrants are all learning to speak English as a matter of course. And this isn't anything new: my grandfather came to the United States from Norway in 1905, and when my dad was born in 1933 they were still speaking Norwegian at home. My dad couldn't speak a word of English until he started school, but, just like the children of Latino immigrants today, he learned English quickly and was soon speaking like a native.

That's what kids do.

I grew up on the West Side of St. Paul, where there were a lot of Mexican immigrants. My best friend's dad was Mexican and his mom was a blonde, blue-eyed northern European. The kids on the corner were Mexican. All of them spoke English just like the rest of us.

I have several Hispanic acquaintances that I play volleyball with, and they all speak English with native fluency. We're in the process of building a house, and a fair number of the workers speak Spanish on the job. But all the ones I've engaged in conversation have no problem understanding English and answering my questions.

But there are still a lot of people who are freaking out every time they hear someone speaking Spanish at the grocery store. Wake up, people! Latino immigrants aren't the only ones to continue speaking their native language when they emigrate to the United States.

Almost every time I shop for groceries at Aldi, I come upon someone speaking Russian. The other day at volleyball two women were speaking Russian to each other. It's nothing to freak out about!

There are thousands of Asian restaurants in this country where the employees speak Chinese, or Korean, or Japanese in the kitchen. What's the big deal?

Services at synagogues often have prayers in Hebrew, and Latin was used in Catholic churches within the lifetimes of many of the people who are whining the loudest about assimilation.

Yet, a couple of years ago, some stupid woman bashed a Somali woman in the face with a beer mug for not speaking English. The irony of it: the adults were speaking in a foreign language so their own kids wouldn't understand.

When people come to this country they bring their languages, their customs, and their food. In the great melting pot of America we take the best imports and toss the rest.

That's how pizza and Kung Pao chicken have become as American as apple pie.

The vast majority of immigrant kids will forget their parent's native language and become monolingual like most Americans. Immigrants come to this country to become Americans, and they really want their kids to be accepted as Americans.. They fully intend to assimilate, and they're trying, but learning a new language is hard. When nativist jerks run around screaming "Speak English!" they're just making the assimilation process that much harder.

When I was in high school I volunteered at the Jewish Community Center to help Russian Jews emigrating from the Soviet Union adapt to life in the United States. ESL programs can really use native speakers to help learners practice their conversation skills.

If these people are so worried about recent immigrants assimilating, they should volunteer to help them learn English instead of just ranting.

Trump Finally Shows Some Spine

Everyone is on Trump's case these days. The Democrats, of course, are talking investigations and impeachment, but Anne Coulter is calling him the biggest wimp since George Herbert Walker Bush. Lou Dobbs says he caved on the wall.

But the fact is, by reopening the government Trump finally showed some spine. Trump has been letting racist know-nothings on the extreme right lead him around by the nose for the last ten years.  To court these nihilists, Trump has been forced to mouth idiotic nonsense, such as claiming Obama was born in Kenya, praising neo-Nazis after Charlottesville, pandering to dictators like Putin and Erdogan, screaming about walls and caravans, and claiming "Mission Accomplished!" with ISIS, when the terrorists are still killing people in Syria and bombing cathedrals in the Philippines.

Reopening the government was the first “presidential” action of Trump's administration, after years of craven pandering to racist dickheads. Trump finally manned up and broke out of the prison that talking heads like Coulter and Dobbs have put him in.

Of course, it happened 35 days after the stupidest and most cowardly and self-defeating action of Trump's entire presidency (worse than firing Comey): shutting down the government.

So instead of gloating that Trump caved, Democrats should reward him by opening serious discussions about border security. They should adopt the proposals that the experts who know what they're talking about have suggested. They should give Trump a little money for physical barriers (a few more in the right places are actually fine). But only if Trump makes a permanent deal on DACA, and not some phony temporary gimmick that he'll just threaten to yank out from under them the next time he wants something outrageous.

Trump could use this opportunity to become a real president, one who represents the entire country, not just the ever-shrinking population of old, white separatists and confederate apologists.

Of course, that won't happen. Trump is incapable of change: he's already threatening another temper tantrum, forcing a second shutdown or declaring a national emergency.

He's obsessed with looking strong and tough, but by having to bend over every time Coulter says "boo!" Trump is only showing that he is a stupid, weak, yellow-bellied, senile old fool who lets himself be controlled by people who despise everything that made America great.

Trump has confused anger with strength, hate with toughness, fear with vigilance. A strong leader is one who does right by the whole country, with an eye to the future, who bucks the demands of corrupt and moneyed malcontents who care only about enriching themselves and their own ilk.

Yesterday Was A Good Day

Why Can't Giuliani Make Up His Mind?

It sure does seem that Rudy Giuliani is a total idiot. One day he'll give an interview where he says that Donald Trump was trying to make a deal with the Russians from the day he announced till the day he won the election. This is tantamount to admitting Trump was making foreign policy decisions to benefit himself.

The next day Giuliani will say that was just hypothetical, and he was making assumptions about what Trump was saying, or that someone in his company might have been making deals, but there's nothing wrong with that, and anyway Trump was totally oblivious about what was going on with those deals in his own company, or the changes to the Republican Party platform to remove sanctions on Russia so that companies could make those kinds of deals without being charged with the same sorts of crimes that the Trump administration is hammering companies with that do business with Iran.

Which begs the question: if Trump has no idea what his company, or his campaign or his government are doing, and refuses to take responsibility for the actions they take in his name, why is he president?

One day Giuliani will say that Trump never told Cohen to lie to Congress about his Russia deals. The next day Giuliani will say that Trump and Cohen might have talked about Cohen's testimony before the hearings, implicitly admitting that Trump tried to get Cohen to fudge his testimony, but that there's nothing at all wrong with that.

Why is Giuliani talking at all? He clearly has no idea what anyone said or did, and he's just spouting his own suppositions. What kind of a lousy lawyer is he?

Is Giuliani senile, lying or just stupid? Yes, on all counts, but he has also assumed the same garbage-filled speaking style that Trump has: say everything, toss every wild theory out there, contradict himself endlessly, then deny everything in the hopes that the public will just throw up their hands in confusion and forget about it.

Then, when the truth comes out, and we know with absolute certainty that Trump really was trying to get dirt on Hillary from Russian hackers, and really was trying to cut a real estate deal with the Russians, the White House will say that this is old news, everyone always knew that Trump was talking to the Russians, and no one cares about it because he won the election anyway (pussy-grabbing!), so we just forget about the collusion, the backroom deals, and the conspiracies to sell out American foreign policy, NATO and our European allies so that Trump can plaster his name on a tower in Moscow and feel like big-boy dictators like Vovka and Un and Recep.

This is the strategy: lie, and lie, and lie and lie, and repeat the lie five different ways, and then come up with five new lies, and sow so much chaos and confusion that no one has any idea what went on, and hope that they just get tired of the mess and want it to go away.

The irony of it all is that the Russians were always playing Trump for a fool. They've been stringing him along for decades, dangling a shiny Moscow tower in front of him since the 1980s.

If Trump had lost the election, it's inconceivable that Putin would have given a prominent American politician -- an enemy of his state -- such an ostentatious symbol of power and wealth in the center of Moscow. It would make Putin look like he was giving loser Trump a consolation prize after Russian hackers failed to get him elected.

And if Trump won and Putin let him put up a tower in Moscow, it would make Putin look even weaker, rewarding the winner of the election from Russia's greatest foe with a huge Moscow propaganda blitz.

So this deal was never going to happen. Trump had to remain a reality show gadfly and backstage voyeur at his soft-core porn beauty contests to have any shot at Trump Tower Moscow. As soon as he won the Republican nominee any such deal was off.

But Trump was still going after the deal until election day. Only a greedy narcissistic sucker could actually believe that there was any chance in hell for that Moscow tower. Trump has got to be the worst deal maker in American history.

He can't negotiate his way out of a paper bag. Or a month-long government shutdown of his own making, as shown by the fact that all sides flatly rejected his Saturday proposal for ending the shutdown.

Trump's only negotiation tactic is a flat demand: my way or the highway. That's why the shutdown won't end. He doesn't have the slightest clue on how to negotiate a deal that benefits all sides. He views every deal as a zero sum, with the only acceptable outcome is him winning everything and the enemy losing everything.

And that's not how democracy works.

Even Trump's fans are getting tired of this stupid routine: the latest polls show that his voters are starting to blame him for the shutdown.

Which they should, because he claimed he would own the shutdown and never blame the Democrats for it. And then he promptly blamed it on the Democrats.

Trump is always trying to have it not just both ways, but every way, the sure sign of a con man and liar. I am still completely baffled that the Republicans in the Senate still have not realized they'll be going down the toilet with Trump when he finally gets flushed.

It seems the only way out is for Senate Republicans to save Trump from himself by passing a continuing resolution to fund the government with a veto-proof margin. Trump would sign the bill defiantly, saying that he would continue to fight for the wall tooth and nail, and then it will quietly die.

Just like it died during the two years that Trump and the Republicans had total control of the entire federal government, but never did anything to start building the wall, because no one actually wants the god-damned wall. It's just a hammer for Trump and white nationalists to pound Latinos and liberals with to make them squirm and scream.

But Senate Republicans are too cowardly to rear their crocodilian heads from the swamp, for fear that Trump's nihilistic supporters will primary them come re-election time.

What Are You Doing For Others?

Christmas 2018

This year my youngest sister, M, drove up from Texas for Christmas with her husband and two sons. Because my brother-in-law is Latino and my dad is a racist dick, we didn't spend the holiday at my parents' house as usual, but at my sister J's house instead.

This year M gave my mom a DNA test from Ancestry.com. Tests from 23AndMe.com and Ancestry.com have become a popular gift in recent years. They purport to help you find long-lost relatives by looking for genetic similarities, allowing you to fill in the gaps in your family tree.

While these tests may have provided some entertainment and insight, they have also caused a lot of problems and heartache. By this time, thousands of people have discovered that the man who raised them is not their real father, that mom cheated on dad or their mother was raped.

Entire family histories are being rewritten as people try to establish whether grandma really was Irish, or German, or American Indian. Elizabeth Warren has injected DNA testing into the presidential race.

Neo-Nazis are finding out that they're not as racially pure as they thought they were, and are not at all happy about it.

And family DNA tests are being used to find serial killers. The most famous of these is the Golden State Killer, who was found by investigators through a commercial online DNA database. Actor Patton Oswalt and his wife, Michelle McNamara, who was writing a book about the serial killer when she died in 2016, are largely responsible for keeping the public spotlight on the case.

Now, these DNA tests are nowhere near as accurate as the companies that sell them pretend they are. They've picked out a few genetic markers that are indicative of ethnicity, but because the databases are incomplete and genetic inheritance is random, these results are nowhere near definitive.

Anyway, on Christmas Eve M pulled me aside and in a grave whisper told me that, based on DNA testing and Ancestry.com, our maternal grandfather had lived under an assumed name.

She hadn't told our mom yet, and wanted it kept quiet. But she was clearly disturbed by the revelation.

We never knew anything about grandpa, except that he had come up from the South sometime in the 1920s. He came to live with us when my grandmother died of breast cancer in the 1960s. After her death he started drinking heavily, imbibing the "white lightning" he made on his hog farm, which had an outhouse and no electricity (though he did have a phone).

He collapsed one day and lost the use of his legs. I never knew exactly what the problem was, but now I'm guessing alcoholic neuropathy.

Ancestry.com connected M to a family in the South, and a genealogy tree with a man, AH, who'd gone missing in the 1920s. Photos of the man's nephews, who died years ago, were dead ringers for my grandfather.

According to the family history my sister dug up, AH was a moonshiner -- prohibition was still in effect in the 1920s. The cops broke up AH's still and were after him, but before he left town he tracked down one of the cops and shot him dead in a church.

How reliable is this narrative? Is it just a story someone made up to explain a missing uncle? And just how accurate are these DNA tests anyway?

Is it wise to ruin my mother's memory of her father, branding him a murderer after all these years? My sister hasn't mentioned any of this to my mom yet; she's still waiting on Ancestry.com for the results of my mother's DNA swab.

But why not just tell her now? If grandpa wasn't a murderer, she'll tell my mom because it's such an interesting story. And if he was, she's still going to tell my mom because why would she go through all this effort and expense to verify it, only to keep it a secret? She just wants to know.

But it really shouldn't matter to my mom. Despite the paltry jealousies of Old Testament and Greek gods, the sins of fathers should not be visited upon their sons and daughters.

At this point, the truth about my grandfather is purely academic. He's been dead for 25 years, and we'll never know what happened with absolute certainty, so whatever my sister finds out it won't change anything, except perhaps to cause my mother sorrow.

My grandfather's drunken actions almost a century ago have no bearing on my mother. Unless, of course, she knew about what he did and kept it a secret, or continued to say what a great guy he was after learning he was a murderous moonshiner.

Which brings to mind the hypocrisy of the Daughters of the Confederacy and other apologists for Civil War traitors. Confederate soldiers went to war to keep human beings enslaved. They either believed in slavery or were cowed by the slave masters who ran their states into committing treason against the United States and killing their fellow Americans.

The treason and defense of slavery by Confederate soldiers should not reflect poorly on their descendants. But by refusing to acknowledge their ancestors' crimes, Civil War apologists inherit their ancestors' crimes, branding themselves as liars, racists and traitors.

It's rather ironic that, if the story about grandpa is true, my father harbored a drunken murderer for more than 20 years. Yet he won't let the stable, solid, gainfully employed father of his own two grandsons into his house because he's Latino.

The New Hitler Youth

Ah, the new Hitler youth...so respectful of other cultures and veterans...


Get ready for a world of pain, boys! Your faces are all over the inter webs. It won't be long before people find out who you are...

Ah, the white male threatened...

Gillette ran this great ad about men being the best a man can be. Here it is...


For those of us that are secure and comfortable in our masculinity, it was a great message. But some older, white men aren't that way...especially the gun humper snowflakes. Man oh man, are they PISSED OFF!! Check this asshole out...

He might as well have a sign hanging around his neck that says WHITE MALE DINOSAUR THREATENED. I also like the fact that he's in a cotton field in a not so subtle racial dog whistle. They are so cute when they try to get all the attention and stuff, right?

I'm kinda hoping that these guys actually do try some sort of armed insurrection. Something tells me that President Pelosi isn't going to be too kind to them.

Neither will the gentlemen they will encounter in prison:)

No Fancy Words

Trump Is Still Working for the Russians

Last week we learned that the FBI was so concerned about the huge number of Donald Trump's Russia connections that they actually opened an investigation into whether he was working for them, something he declined to immediately deny in a Fox News interview.

Trump reacted Saturday during a telephone interview broadcast on Fox News Channel after host Jeanine Pirro asked whether he is currently or has ever worked for Russia.

“I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked,” he said. “I think it’s the most insulting article I’ve ever had written, and if you read the article you’ll see that they found absolutely nothing.” Trump, however never directly denied the claim, a fact which quickly became a Twitter meme.

Eventually Trump did deny it, in the same way that he denies grabbing women by the pussy. But no one is buying his denials, not even Republican senators, judging by recent actions on the Senate floor with regard to sanctions on a Russian oligarch.

Last year Trump levied tariffs on aluminum and steel imports, proclaiming they were necessary for reviving American industry.

The world's second-biggest aluminum producer is Rusal, owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is tight with Vladimir Putin. Rusal dumps a lot of cheap aluminum on the United States.

The company is under sanctions because of Russian meddling in the last presidential election, to help get Trump elected. Deripaska also paid Paul Manafort millions of dollars. Manafort worked "for free" as Trump's campaign manager, until secret payments from pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians were revealed.

But, despite all these highly suspicious Russia connections, Trump's treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, decided to remove sanctions on three of Deripaska's companies, including Rusal. So you gotta ask: why is Donald Trump still carrying water for Putin's pals if he's not working them?

At least some Republicans understand how absolutely terrible this looks. In a Senate vote, 11 Republicans joined Democrats in a vote to maintain sanctions on Rusal.

Munchkin Mnuchin says sanctions on Rusal have to be lifted to avoid damaging the aluminum market. Huh?

Thousands of American soybean farmers are declaring bankruptcy because of Trump's trade war with China, yet the tariffs are still in place. Thousands of federal employees are being forced to work without pay. National parks have become disaster areas. TSA workers and FAA controllers being stretched to the limit, increasing the risk of aviation terrorism and air traffic control disasters. Yet Trump's government shutdown is in its fourth week.

Why is Trump going out of his way to reassure the Russians that he has their backs, when he spits on American farmers, American companies like GM and Harley Davidson, and federal employees?

Hitching Your Wagon To The Star Of A Loser

You're Locked In Here With Me

To quote Alan Moore: “None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.” 🤣 https://t.co/8TCmKNJlkD

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 11, 2019

As if I wasn't already in love with her...

I can only imagine how 'splodey the heads of right wing bloggers and commenters are right now. You assholes are so fucked.

And D-O-N-E...DONE!

Build A Wall!!

Trump Shutdown Increasing Terrorism Risk

Donald Trump claims that the whole reason we need to build a wall at the Mexican border is to keep out terrorists.

The fact is, essentially zero terrorist suspects come over the southern border. More actually come in via the Canadian border, but the vast majority come in through airports.

For example, this Justice Department report says that in fiscal year 2017, of the 2,554 encounters DHS had with individuals on the terror watch list who were traveling to the United States, "335 were attempting to enter by land, 2,170 were attempting to enter by air, and 49 were attempting to enter by sea." It is unclear which land port DHS was mentioning.

Since the real entry point is airports, clearly we need to beef up security at airports. Ironically, Trump's shutdown is blowing a hole in airport security.

During the shutdown TSA agents are being forced to work without pay. As a result many are calling in sick. And many are deciding to call it quits altogether.

Clearly, Trump does not give a damn about the security of this country. He is demanding a wall for two reasons: first, Ann Coulter has him pussy-whipped, and second, he wants to claim he fulfilled a campaign promise, hoping that he can gain re-election in 2020 and avoid going to jail before he dies of Alzheimers.

Of course, the biggest terrorist threat is from people who are already here, such as the racist right-wing men who have been shooting up schools, synagogues and churches over the past few years.

The Perils of PDF

Paul Manafort has always been a weasel. After decades of making millions of dollars shilling for evil foreigners like Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi and pro-Russian Ukrainian dictator Viktor Yanukovich, Manafort agreed to run Trump's presidential campaign for free.

Nothing suspicious about that. No sirree. 

Manafort lasted only a few months: he was ousted when his name was discovered in a Ukrainian ledger indicating he received $12.7 million in secret payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. By that time, however, Manafort had already accomplished his main goal: removing the pro-Ukrainian independence plank from Republican Party platform at the Republican convention.

Despite receiving tens of millions of dollars from foreign dictators over the years Manafort was heavily in debt (perhaps because he spent his money on nonsense like a $15,000 ostrich-skin jacket).

Manafort's legal problems really cranked up when prosecutors got hold of emails he sent to his buddy Rick Gates, asking him for help in creating fraudulent profit and loss statements so he could avoid taxes. Manafort couldn't figure out how to covert a PDF file to Word format.

And that wasn't the last time PDF caused Manafort problems. Yesterday Manafort's lawyers submitted a PDF file that tried but failed to redact an embarrassing revelation: While running Trump's campaign Manafort gave internal campaign polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian operative with connections to the Kremlin.

Manafort and Kilimnik also discussed a Ukrainian "peace plan," which would mean dropping sanctions on Russia for the invasion Crimea and the ongoing occupation of eastern Ukraine.

These details, plus the Trump Tower meeting with Jared Kushner, Don Jr., and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya (who was indicted yesterday in an unrelated case that firmly establishes her ties to the Kremlin), and literally dozens of other contacts between Trump campaign operatives and Russian officials, spies and other organizations like the NRA, make it abundantly clear that the Trump campaign and associated PACs conspired with the Russian government to steal the presidential election.

It also doesn't help that Trump constantly repeats pro-Russian propaganda, such as his comments on Montenegro ("Very aggressive people") and Afghanistan ("The Soviets invaded to fight terrorists"), as if Trump was Putin's ventriloquist's dummy.

Trump apologists, such as Rudy Giuliani, have essentially admitted to all the facts above, and have been reduced to claiming that "collusion is not a crime." The thing is, collusion is just another word for conspiracy.

And conspiracy is a crime: Trump conspired to commit campaign fraud in the form of hush money payments to porn stars and Playboy playmates.

It is a crime for foreigners to spend money to influence American elections: it's an illegal in-kind campaign donation. The Trump campaign clearly conspired with Russians who funded vast social media campaigns to sway Americans to vote for Donald Trump or Jill Stein, and to defame Hillary Clinton and dissuade black Americans from voting at all.

In essence, Giuliani and Trump's apologists are going for the "pussy-grabbing" defense: everyone knew Trump was a sexual predator in November 2016, and he won the election anyway, so he should be able to get away with it.

Since "everyone knew" Trump was in bed with the Russians before the election because "everyone knew" that Manafort was a Russian plant and "everyone knew" about Trump's numerous connections to Russian oligarchs and mobsters, the American people obviously didn't care he conspired with a foreign power to steal the election.

Trump's defense, in the end, will be that his conspiracy with the Russians is "old news," and it should just go away.

Quote of the Day

The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.

---The Economics of Soaking The Rich, Paul Krugman

Conservatives Think The Nation Is John Lithgow in Footloose.

Apparently, conservatives think that we are in the film "Footloose" and dancing is evil. So evil, in fact, that spreading a video around of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing in college, was employed in the hopes of making her look bad. Here is he original tweet from a Q Anon psycho...

Here is America's favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is...
...High School video of "Sandy" Ocasio-Cortez @AoDespair pic.twitter.com/j3hTnwErib

— AnonymousQ1776 (@AnonymousQ17763) January 4, 2019

Ooo...scawee...my god, the humanity! A person having fun!! Must be a commie because only commies have fun!! The response to this (ahem) expose was hilarious. It shows just how fucking out of touch the right is these days. Here's the best one...

Now she's totally done for. Newly unearthed video reveals that when @AOC was in college, she was ... adorable. https://t.co/EkqXTrQSAo

— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) January 3, 2019

"They will thrash and spit and bellow..."

Jon Pavlovitz has an amazing blog that I enjoy every day. His recent piece, The Extinction of the White American Male Dinosaur, is his best post yet. I found myself thinking of all the angry and hateful old white men that used to post here and over on Kevin Baker's gun blog, especially these two parts.

In the coming days, the Tweets will become more erratic, the legislative assaults grow more transparently desperate, the hate crimes more brazen, the sermons grow more alarmist and incendiary. These Jurassic, soon-to-be-amber-trapped relics, will act is if the very sky above them is falling, because in very real ways, it is. They will thrash and spit and bellow, in an effort to buy themselves a few more days and a bit more power and another Federal judge or two, but they cannot stave off their inevitable disappearance, as progress and civilization and time swallow them up. 

The misogynistic, supremacist nostalgia of their dying glory days is dissolving, in the glorious refining fire of what is coming on the horizon: color and diversity and new and young and wide open. The wall-builders and the close-fisted and the table-monopolizers will not survive this evolution.

Indeed, they won't.

This is what the future looks like, assholes. You aren't in it.

The Discomfort of Thought

Happy New Year!!

Welcome to 2019 AKA the year we take our country back from the internet trolls. It's also going to be the year that Donald Trump will leave office-either by choice or force.

We here at Zombie Politics would like to extend our thanks to all of our readers, especially the new ones who have joined from Quora and Twitter. We used to average around 100 regular readers a day and now we are up to three times that and more sometimes. A large part of the increase has been due to Nikto's solid commentary. Thanks, buddy!

We appreciate your readership!

How Can Trump Supporters Look At Themselves In The Mirror In The Morning?

Yesterday, a former Mossad chief pointed out the obvious.

"Officials in Moscow looked at the 2016 U.S. presidential race and asked, ‘Which candidate would we like to have sitting in the White House? Who will help us achieve our goals?’ And they chose him. From that moment, they deployed a system [of bots] for the length of the elections, and ran him for president,” former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo told the audience at the Marker’s digital conference in Israel on Monday, where experts gathered to discuss online disinformation campaigns and bots.

“What we’ve seen so far with respect to bots and the distortion of information is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the greatest threat of recent years, and it threatens the basic values that we share—democracy and the world order created since World War Two,” Pardo noted, according to Haaretz.

And that's from the best intelligence agency in the world. So, how do Trump supporters look at themselves in the mirror every morning knowing that they are supporting a traitor to our country? They are acting against the interests of our country. Why? Because they have only one conviction: hating Democrats.

That makes them traitors and here is where we should send them, starting with right wing bloggers and commenters.

I wonder how many of them are actively involved with Russian trollbot farms. In fact, perhaps many right wing bloggers and commenters aren't even real people. They used fake names and certainly seem like caricatures to me.

If they are real people, I just don't see how they can NOT be completely disgusted with themselves.

Trump 2018 Should Listen To Trump 2013

Who the Hell Is Running this Country?

An article by Erik Wemple on the Washington Post posits the following: Television is running this country.

Wemple concluded that Donald Trump didn't read Jim Mattis's resignation letter because it contained serious rebukes of the way Trump runs our foreign policy, but Trump didn't realize this because he fired Mattis in anger a couple days later, after talking heads on Fox News told him that Mattis had insulted him. So Trump fired Mattis two months early.

Logically, one could infer that Trump hadn't read the letter. It was, after all, a whole page long. Another inference could be that Trump had read the letter, but hadn't understood it because it contained multisyllabic words.

Further evidence that Trump is being run by conservative blabbermouths comes from his decision to shut down the government. He had originally agreed to sign a continuing resolution to keep the government open (i.e., he had been talked into a deal by Democrats), until Ann Coulter starting whining that Trump supporters would abandon him if he didn't get the wall. I.e., Trump was pussy-whipped into shutting down the government by a scrawny blonde.

But then there's this:

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was made hastily, without consulting his national security team or allies, and over strong objections from virtually everyone involved in the fight against the Islamic State group, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.

Trump stunned his Cabinet, lawmakers and much of the world with the move by rejecting the advice of his top aides and agreeing to a withdrawal in a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, two U.S. officials and a Turkish official briefed on the matter told The Associated Press.

Trump pulled out of Syria because Erdogan, the dictator Turkey, told him to.

Could it be any clearer that Trump is a senile old man who can be talked into any deal, who then changes his mind in an instant when he talks to someone else? Television isn't running this country.

The last person to fill Trump's empty head with a stupid idea is running this country.

I am truly getting tired of whining about Trump, probably even more tired of it than people who listen to me whine about Trump. But at this point it should be crystal clear to anyone who cares about the future of this country that he is incompetent, ignorant, petty and sclerotic.

And unable to make up his own mind about anything.

Republicans in the House and Senate seriously need to read him the riot act and tell him to resign so he can play more golf spend more time with his family. Mike Pence will pardon him when Pence becomes president and deliver the coverup Trump wants by shutting down the Mueller investigation. Hey, that's what Gerald Ford did.

After that Trump can watch Fox News all day long (instead of just until lunch), and not have to listen to any more of those stupid intelligence briefings that he totally ignores anyway.

Oh, and stay out of jail too.

No Room For Immigrants

89, 24 and 2

89 indictments, 24 convictions, and 2 prison terms...wow, that's some "witch hunt."

Trump's 2018 Christmas Presents

So many great things are happening together. We are really winning!

Trump is pulling American troops out of Syria, against the advice of all his advisors. All our allies, our entire military, and most Republican senators are horrified. Dictators in Iran, Russia, Turkey and Syria are thrilled.

Sanctions against a Russian aluminum company owned by a Russian oligarch are being dropped.

Trump is going to shut down the government, throwing the entire government into chaos.

Trump's secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, the "only adult left in the room," resigned because he can't stand working for a man who shits on American allies and gushes about being in love with the murderous tyrant running North Korea.

Oh, and the stock market is going down the tubes, erasing all the gains from the "Trump boom."

And it's just another Thursday.

Could it be any clearer that Trump is taking his marching orders from Moscow, which is intent on driving this country into chaos and turning us into a third-rate banana republic?

I am so tired of all this winning.

The Deep State?

When I hear people foam at the mouth about the deep state, I chuckle. Why are they so pissed off about civil servants? Moreover, have they forgotten where the spoils system brought us and why there was reform?

 Perhaps a review is in order...

  The Spoils System: Definition and Summary

Being A Good Guy With A Gun While Black

The last few weeks in our country have shown that being a good guy with a gun while black doesn't really work out. Why? Racism.

The killing of Mr. Bradford is not a stand-alone example. Three days before his death, a young man named Jemel Roberson was buried in Illinois. An aspiring police officer and legal gun-carrier, Mr. Roberson singlehandedly apprehended a mass shooter at Manny’s Blue Room bar in Robbins, where Roberson worked as a security guard. A Midlothian police officer responded, and shot and killed Roberson. In June, Navy veteran Jason Washington was shot and killed by Portland State University police in Oregon, after reportedly trying to stop a fight outside a bar. Witnesses say Washington was trying to de-escalate the situation, including confiscating his friend’s gun. He had a pistol permit. A grand jury declined to indict the two officers involved.

There has been zero outrage from the gun humpers on their blogs and forums. Why? Because they categorically refuse to admit that racism is still prevalent in this country.

So, the "good guy with a gun" thing is a lie in more than one way. In addition to it being a lie by having a gun will somehow magically turn everyone into Jack Bauer and save the day, it's also a lie because you have to be the right color to be a good guy with a gun.

We Will Never Forget. We Are Coming For Your Guns

Pray The Gay Away?

Loyalty vs. Ass-Kissing

The Trump administration, being the chaotic dumpster fire that it is, is going through more convulsions. John Kelly, Donald Trump's chief of staff, is out. A new attorney general has been selected, as well as a UN ambassador.

It's often said that Trump demands loyalty from his aides. This is wrong: he demands ass-kissing, sucking up and brown-nosing.

Loyal people have the best interests of their bosses -- and the country -- at heart. They have integrity and are usually competent. They will tell their bosses the truth even when it hurts, and give the best advice for the long term, even when they might take a temporary hit. Their primary concern is the safety and welfare of the American people.

Suck-ups and ass-kissers are opportunistic weasels. They are usually incompetent, having risen through the ranks solely by means of brown-nosing and backstabbing. They tell their bosses what they want to hear, even when they know it's wrong and will hurt the country in the long run. They are selfish and self-serving.

Trump started out by hiring a few people who had some semblance of competence and loyalty. But after two years he has fired every person with a shred of integrity, or they have quit. For all their faults, people like Nikki Haley, Jeff Sessions, John Kelly and Rex Tillerson had some semblance of competence, dignity or self-respect (though rarely all three at the same time).

Their replacements are all ass-kissing sock puppets who simply regurgitate Trumpian double-talk.

Heather Nauert will be the next UN ambassador. Her qualifications? She is attractive, blonde and worked on Fox & Friends. No diplomatic training or experience, except for blabbering at State Department press conferences in the last year.

Trump appointed Matt Whitaker attorney general, but when it became obvious his nomination would go down in flames Trump had to take his third choice, which Trump now inanely says was always his first choice.

The new AG nominee is William Barr, who was attorney general from 1991 to 1993. His qualifications? He thinks presidents have unlimited authority, that they should use pardons to cover up their crimes and that Hillary Clinton should be hounded to the grave for having an email server.

Barr was the AG who advised George H.W. Bush to cover up his own involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal with executive pardons.

In 1979 Iranian revolutionaries overran the American embassy in Tehran and took 50 Americans hostage. A couple years later the Reagan administration sold missiles to Iran and then used the profits to illegally fund the Contras (right-wing death squads) in Central America.

Yes, incredible as it seems, Ronald Reagan and George Bush broke the law to sell weapons to Ayatollah Khomeini while Iranians continued to yell "Death to America!" so Reagan could beat Jimmy Carter in 1980. And then they used the profits to illegally fund killers who murdered American nuns in Nicaragua.

That's the kind of criminal behavior that Trump's new attorney general thinks is just fine: but running your own email server is against the rules! Lock her up! 

Clearly, Trump hired Barr because he has experience using executive pardons to allow the president to break the law.

But Bush only got away with pardoning his Iran-Contra co-conspirators because he had already lost to Bill Clinton. A better example is Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon: Ford lost his re-election bid, in large part due to that pardon.

Federal officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution and protect the nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That is the only loyalty real Americans should have.

Trump is trying to turn this country into a nation of ass-kissers and suck-ups instead of loyal patriots.

Loyal patriots will eventually sell Trump out to save the country. Ass-kissers, having no real loyalty, will ultimately sell Trump out to save their own asses.

Ass-kisser Michael Cohen has already turned states evidence against Trump, while suck-up Paul Manafort and brown-noser Roger Stone are still wangling for executive pardons, so they have yet to sell Trump out.

The Mueller investigation may be proceeding too quickly for Trump to wait to pardon Manafort and Stone. But doing so while still president risks impeachment. It would also have a catastrophic effect on his re-election prospects -- and those of every other Republican office holder.

In the end, Trump can't win: the ass-kissers will eventually sell Trump out. And then they'll paint themselves as loyal patriots.

Here Is the Real Voter Fraud

In recent years Republicans have been screaming about voter fraud, but the real fraud is what Republicans have been doing.

The first fraud is the way they've gerrymandered the states. In 2016 they received a minority of the popular vote in Congress, but because of the way they gerrymandered districts around the country after the 2010 election, they still wound up with a majority of seats in the House.

The second fraud is the disenfranchisement of millions of voters, placing onerous restrictions on voting, most particularly voter ID requirements, but also restrictions on former felons, closing of polling places, intentionally misallocating resources to cause long lines in minority areas, etc.

The voter ID requirements have always been bogus because in-person fraud, where you show up at the polling place and pretend to be someone else, almost never happens.

No, as I have long said, the real action is in the third Republican fraud: absentee ballots. Usually it's small potatoes: people voting twice by filling out their senile parents' or spouses' ballots, or wealthy people voting in both Florida and New York -- because if they own property in two places, they deserve two votes!

But Republicans have now been caught red-handed committing absentee ballot fraud on a massive scale in North Carolina.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections, which has twice refused to certify the results in the Ninth District, now plans to hear evidence from an investigation into allegations of widespread electoral fraud committed by an operative for the Republican campaign [of Mark Harris]. Testimony submitted in a set of affidavits outlined a type of scheme known as ballot harvesting, in which people are hired to pose as state employees to collect absentee mail-in ballots from voters and then either alter the ballots to support preferred candidates or destroy those that support an opponent. According to previously unreported court documents, operatives in Bladen County, which has become the epicenter of the current scandal, have been accused of tampering with absentee ballots for at least the past three election cycles. The documents also allege that the conspiracy involved some of the most powerful individuals in the region, including the county sheriff and the head of the local Republican Party, both of whom were connected to a local Republican political consultant named Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr.

Republicans should be the first in line to stamp out this kind of fraud, because it's being used against them by other Republicans:

Harris ultimately ousted the incumbent Pittinger in the 2018 primary by eight hundred twenty-eight votes, claiming ninety-six per cent of the absentee ballots in Bladen County. On Thursday, Pittenger told Spectrum News, “We were fully aware of [the accusations of fraud]. There are some pretty unsavory people, particularly out in Bladen County, and I didn’t have anything to do with them.”

The question is, if this Republican knew he lost the primary due to absentee ballot fraud, why didn't he raise holy hell? Has the Republican Party become so inured to corruption and fraud that they just roll over when another Republican uses it? Do they think, "Oh, well. He just played the game better than me. He had the sheriff in his pocket, I'll just have to take my lumps."

Is the entire Republican Party corrupt, from Trump at the top all the way down to the grass roots county level? And is it just the Republican Party? Mark Harris is a pastor and a leader in the Baptist Church in North Carolina. Is the entire Baptist hierarchy corrupt as well?

Republicans and evangelicals didn't invent this kind of fraud. But Trump's endless corruption at the very pinnacle of American democracy and their tacit endorsement of his fraud and lies, the Republican Party and the religious right have given up any pretense of honesty and integrity.

The election in NC-9 must be overturned. And not just the general election, but the primary as well: Harris's Republican primary opponent Pittenger was royally screwed. Mark Harris should not be the Republican candidate for Congress: he should be in prison.

This is the problem with amorality and corruption. It spreads like a disease, infecting everything it touches. Once you convince yourself that committing fraud against Democrats is justifiable, it's just a tiny step to committing fraud against fellow Republicans.

And when you see Donald Trump using and discarding associates like Michael Cohen, having them lie for him in congressional testimony and to the Mueller investigation, and then bitching when they turn state's evidence, how long will it take every Republican to emulate him?

Welcome to Trump's hell, where liars, frauds, sexual predators, election hackers, neo-Nazis, foreign agitators, polluters, mail bombers, synagogue shooters, poisoners and murderers like Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman have totally free reign.

Voice of America Is Still Here

Last week Donald Trump expressed a desire to imitate Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and create his own version of Pravda:

Trump pitched the state-run network as an alternative to CNN. "Throughout the world, CNN has a powerful voice portraying the United States in an unfair and false way," Trump wrote on Twitter. "Something has to be done, including the possibility of the United States starting our own Worldwide Network to show the World the way we really are, GREAT!"

The thing is, there's already such a network: Fox News. Yes, it's hard to tell whether Trump is controlling Fox News or Fox News is controlling Trump, with Sean Hannity constantly buzzing in Trump's ear and even appearing at campaign events.

I calculate the odds of Trump dumping VP Mike Pence for Hannity as vice president in 2020 at 60-40. Trump's hired pretty much everyone else who's left in the White House based on much they kissed his ass in interviews on Fox News.

All joking aside, the US government already has a news service that provides factual reporting around the world: Voice of America.

President Franklin Roosevelt created the VOA during World War II to broadcast behind enemy lines what its current director, Amanda Bennett, said was "truthful news about the war, in contrast with Nazi propaganda."

VOA was a lifeline for people behind the Iron Curtain during the Soviet era, because it reported the truth, warts and all, about Russia, Europe and the United States. That tradition continues today: take a look at this article about rampant absentee ballot voter fraud in North Carolina.

VOA, a government agency, is reporting the same truths that CNN, NPR, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and other "mainstream media" organizations are reporting.

During the worst of the Cold War most Eastern Bloc citizens had a positive view of the United States and America, because VOA and Radio Free Europe didn't slant the news. They just gave the facts.

That's how you earn people's trust.

But Trump doesn't have a clue about that.

Worth A Million Words

NRA R.I.P

This recent piece from the Christian Science Monitor effectively declared the end of the NRA's stranglehold on gun legislation. Consider the facts contained therein.

Democrats in congressional races defeated more than a dozen Republicans who hold an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA), including longtime Reps. Mike Coffman of Colorado and Pete Sessions of Texas. In Georgia, Democratic candidate Lucy McBath, a prominent gun-control activist who lost her son in a fatal shooting in 2012, ousted Rep. Karen Handel, the Republican incumbent. A ballot measure to dramatically tighten Washington State’s gun policies passed by a wide margin, and across the country, 60 percent of voters who headed to the polls favor strengthening gun laws. 

Gun violence prevention groups advanced that cause in this year’s election. Candidates endorsed by Everytown for Gun Safety, founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, won 46 of 57 congressional races. Everytown and Giffords – a group founded by former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was gravely wounded in a 2011 mass shooting – spent a combined $11.8 million on the 2018 campaign, or $2.4 million more than the NRA.

Guess who else votes now, assholes? We do. And we have the young people on our side (aka the NUMBERS).

Further,

The $9.4 million that the NRA contributed to campaigns this year marked a drop of almost two-thirds from its spending in the 2014 midterms.

It must be hard to spend money without all that Russian flow coming in anymore...hee hee...

The gun lobby is dying. Thank god.

Maricopa County Man Nearly Shoots Off His Dick

A couple of days ago at a Maricopa County Wal Mart , a gun humper was adjusting his penis extender in his waist band and guess what happened?

He shot himself.

And, yes, I laughed about it. Heartily.

Then, of course, I wondered is said person was Kevin Baker or one of his trolls. But it appears it was not one of them.

Darwin's natural selection at its finest.

Whither The Trump Followers

With Cohen now singing about Russia, Paul Manafort's plea deal falling apart and Trump whining about flipping, it appears as though we are near the end game with the Trump presidency. What will his little troll followers do now? Here are some ideas...

1. Stage a revolution.

I'm hoping for this one. Nothing would please me more to see a bunch old, white fat assholes with tits being carted off to prison and having their guns taken away for good. Perhaps they could to go Gitmo (the place they wanted to stay open) and serve their time next to the people that they racially hate for no reason.

2. Crawl back into the hole from which they came.

Unlikely and also my least preferred. I want my xenophobic dickheads out in the open where I can see them and they can be fired from their jobs for being racist. They seem to emboldened now and pissed off to do this.

3. Help out the NRA.

Apparently, the NRA is losing money. Kinda sucks when they don't have all that Russian cash anymore to help commit domestic terrorism. Since they are losing members, maybe a fresh infusion of insecure paranoids would be helpful.

4. Leave the country and move to Russia.

This would be AWESOME. They love them some Pootey-Pute and his authoritarian dongle. I'm sure he has room for them.

5. Become nice people and lose the hate, anger and fear. After all, it's ugly.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA....like that is ever going to happen.

I'm going to be LMAO when Trump and Pence both go down with the Russian thing and Nancy Pelosi ends up president.

Romaine Lettuce And Assault Rifles

Another Black Friday

Today is Black Friday, the biggest shopping day during the year, the point at which retailers "enter the black."

Courtesy of the Thanksgiving episode of Jeopardy, I learned that there were many other Black Fridays. The one that is of greatest interest is the 1869 Black Friday:

The Black Friday, September 24, 1869, gold panic was caused by the efforts of two speculators, Jay Gould and his partner James Fisk, also called the Gold Ring, to corner the gold market on the New York Gold Exchange. The scandal took place during the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, whose policy was to sell Treasury gold at weekly intervals to pay off the national debt, stabilize the dollar, and boost the economy. The country had gone through tremendous upheaval during the Civil War and was not yet fully restored. This period, known as the Gilded Age, was a time of great industrial growth which invited much investment and speculation.

Abel Corbin, a small time speculator, married Virginia Grant, the younger sister of President Grant. After the marriage, Gould and Fisk approached Corbin, taking advantage of his brother-in-law relationship with the president, and persuaded Corbin to introduce them to Grant. Gould and Fisk hoped that befriending the President would get them privy information about up and coming government gold sales—information with which they manipulated the market. It worked, resulting in a scandal that undermined the credibility of Grant's presidency and the national economy. Gould and Fisk used their personal appearances with Grant to gain clout on Wall Street in addition to using their insider information.

The parallels between this and the Trump administration are astonishing. 

It's not just the one guy married to the president's daughter. It's the president himself, and everyone of his cronies, from his son-in-law, who uses the court system to screw over people who rent apartments from his company, to the secretary of commerce, who is linked to Russian-owned banks in Cyprus, to the secretary of education, who is linked to education lenders and the sister of Erik Prince, who ran the mercenary outfit Blackwater and also solicited help from the Saudis and the UAE to manipulate social media to help the Trump campaign. Literally dozens of other Trump appointees have already been fired or resigned for various misdeeds, conflicts of interest and general incompetence.

Trump hasn't set off a gold panic yet, but the stock market has been experiencing precipitous drops regularly. Our European, Asian and North American allies have been alienated. Tariffs are really starting to hurt American farmers. Trump is defending murderous Arab princes, Russian dictators, and is "in love" with a dumpy North Korean nuclear megalomaniac who has suckered Trump into a phony denuclearization deal.

It's only a matter of time before Trump or someone trying to cash in on their relationship with him is caught with their hand in the till and causes another economic panic.

Trump and Saudi Arabia

Thanksgiving

Holiday Rant

Folks, when we talk about the "holidays," it's Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. Other days in the calendar year are not "holidays." They are posers...pretenders to the throne of what are the actual fucking holidays. Here's a handy guide to help you understand...

1. Thanksgiving (the best holiday-food, family, football, laziness)
2. Christmas (Santa, sleigh bells, winter wonderlands, gifts, Jesus, if you are Christian)
3. New Year's Day (party, go out if you are cool, stay in if you lame and trying to be trendy)

That's it. There are no other holidays. When we say "the holidays," these are them.

Next we move on to days of observance which are very important in both a civic and religious way but aren't holidays in what should be the definition of the word. They should not EVER be referred to as "the holidays."

Civic
1. Veteran's Day
2. Memorial Day
3. Labor Day
4. 4th of July
6. Dr. King's day
7. President's Day

Religious
8. Easter
9. Rosh Hashanah
10. Yom Kippur
11. Ramadan
12. Diwali

This category could use an addition as well-Voting Day. It should be a national day of observance with everyone given the day off. But again, not a holiday.

Halloween is a children's holiday...as in, LITTLE children. If you are an adult that dresses up like a slutty __________ or goes to bars in some sort of douchey, ironic costume, it's time to grow the fuck up. If Halloween is your favorite holiday, re-evaluate your life.

Drunken bar festives like St Paddy's Day and Cinco De Mayo are complete and utter bullshit. How many more bar holidays must we have?

Next, we have a massively irritating list of what I think are bullshit, made up nonsense days that need to go away.They should also not EVER be referred to as "the holidays."

1. Valentine's Day-frame job by high maintenance partners who are massively insecure.
2. Mother's Day and Father's Day-shouldn't we honor our parents every day?
3. Columbus Day-racist and imperialist bullshit
4. Flag Day-really?
5. Arbor Day-WTF?

Finally, we've started to see a trend lately of new holidays trying to worm their way in...things like Donut day and Pizza day. The last thing this country needs is more days to stuff our faces.This shit needs to end yesterday.

Don’t let people in this country define what a holiday is. Stay strong, people!