lemmings

10/13/18 from https://trofire.com/2018/10/13/how-americas-white-supremacist-culture-keeps-the-most-vulnerable-on-edge/:

Starting a conversation on how vulnerable populations navigate a world that often seeks out to make life harder or harm them Thom Hartmann gets a call from a man who has to deal with both America’s racism and American indifference to the blind and disabled communities.

HotCoffee,

I also just got back from the feed store with 300# of assorted seed. Farm stores fascinate me with their diversity of products.

FOX kicks butt and it is comical to listen to the lefties wonder why nobody cares about CNN & MSNBC.

I literally never turn on CNN but when a comment is made about their bias, it usually has a link and I do catch that. They seem to have a lot of asswagons on staff.

MSNBC is on for the first five minutes of Chris "tingle up my leg" Matthews just to watch him squint and spit at the camera. I want to buy him some teeth. He has aged ten years since Trumps landslide win.

Now, possibly the best two and a half minutes ever put on YouTube.

...meanwhile, back to important issues...

Alexander Hamilton Was Obsessed With the Threat a Presidency Like Trump’s Poses for America
This isn't the first time our democracy has faced the founder’s nightmare—but it is the most dangerous.
Independent Media Institute, September 19, 2018
By Thom Hartmann:

Presidential economic adviser Larry Kudlow suggested to the Economic Club of New York that, after the elections, Republicans will target “spending” on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with “reforms” (cuts) to help pay for the massive deficits created by Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut for billionaires.

Conservatives have controlled our government for three definable periods in recent history—the Gilded Age of the last three decades of the 1800s (progressives followed from 1901 to 1920), the Roaring 20s (progressives followed from 1933 to 1980), and the Reagan Era that started in 1981 and continues to this day.

Each conservative era has led to terrible suffering among working people, each ended in a wipeout financial disaster, and this one will probably be no different. Republicans have already radically cut long-term unemployment insurance, killed “welfare as we know it” (with the help of Bill Clinton), and cut the budgets of Social Security and Medicare to the point where it’s hard to get anybody on the phone. They’ve deregulated much of the fossil fuel industry, sold off public lands to mining and drilling interests, and slashed away at the EPA.

But this time, there’s a larger concern than the survival of the economy, the environment, and the middle class. This time, democracy itself may well be at stake.

The 2016 takeover of our government by Trump and his billionaire oligarch cronies could be the nightmare that Alexander Hamilton identified, warned us about, and then refused to believe could ever come to pass.

A little history is in order.

In the largest sense, today’s right-wing insanity started with the corporate and wealthy “conservative” backlash to the progressive and trust-busting policies of Teddy Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Woodrow Wilson from 1901 to 1920.

In the spring of 1920, a presidential election year, Republican Warren G. Harding, famously corrupt and horny (he had an out-of-wedlock child the year before the election, and the rumor persists to this day that his wife poisoned the 57-year-old president four years later for refusing to stop his affairs), had secured his party’s nomination for president.

He ran on a platform that sounded populist, although his major goal was to return the oligarchs who financed him to power after they’d taken a hit from three previous progressive administrations. Harding’s main slogan was that era’s more modest version of make America great again: “A Return to Normalcy.”

The other slogan of his campaign, and, indeed, of his presidency, was privatization and deregulation: “More business in government, less government in business” was his personal favorite slogan, used also on the campaign trail.

Harding’s goal was to deregulate business, while outsourcing government functions whenever possible. And he did it, particularly the deregulation part, including “freeing” the bankers and stockbrokers.

Well-informed Americans of the time saw Harding’s policies as a recipe for disaster; we’d been through all this with the takeover of American government in the last 30 years of the 1800s, referred to by then as the Gilded Age, which ended with the “Great Panic” of 1893-1897. The robber barons of that era treated everybody except the morbidly rich as serfs, right down to fomenting murder and police violence to disrupt workers agitating for unions, better pay or decent working hours.

Thus, during the 1920 Harding campaign came H.L. Mencken’s famous quote about the willingness of the American electorate to follow hustlers, con men, and downright demagogues like Harding. On July 26, 1920, Mencken published an essay in the Baltimore Evening Sun that included:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Of President Harding’s rhetoric, as if foreshadowing Trump, Mencken wrote in 1921:

“It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

And were Harding’s followers similarly like Trump’s, and were his speeches like Trump’s rallies? Mencken wrote:

“When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly able to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.

“Such imbeciles do not want ideas—that is, new ideas, ideas that are unfamiliar, ideas that challenge their attention. What they want is simply a gaudy series of platitudes, of sonorous nonsense driven home with gestures. ... The roll of incomprehensible polysyllables enchants them.”

Mencken and the educated of his day saw great danger in Harding’s simplistic sales pitch that if we only let the very, very wealthy have free reign, they’d make everything right in America.

And Mencken was right. Harding’s election ushered in 12 moronic years of Republican rule, and along with it came massive deficit spending, widespread corruption and cronyism, a declining standard of living for working people, and a stock market fueled by deregulated speculation that was so on fire the era was called “the Roaring 20s.” And then, of course, came the inevitable crash that always follows “conservative” overreach on behalf of the rich.

But as corrupt as Harding was, both personally and politically, he wouldn't have been bad enough to frighten the people who founded our republic. That distinction has to go to Donald Trump alone.

Alexander Hamilton—himself an advocate for a soft oligarchy in America, and one of the founders who helped write the Constitution—had a nightmare about a group of hyper-wealthy people launching a multigenerational assault on the Enlightenment ideals of America, leading to the election of a wealthy con man as president. And it sure looks like his nightmare is all about Trump and his Fox News followers.

On August 18, 1792, when Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury for George Washington, he wrote a rebuttal to those who were skeptical that an American democratic republic could survive over time, when buffeted by the winds and forces of accumulated wealth and the love of some people for aristocracy.

Titled, “Objections and Answers respecting the Administration of the Government,” Hamilton started out by suggesting that as long as we continued to have regular elections, the oligarchs wouldn't be able to gain a toehold in government:

“The idea of introducing a monarchy or aristocracy into this Country, by employing the influence and force of a Government continually changing hands, towards it, is one of those visionary things, that none but madmen could meditate and that no wise men will believe.

“If it could be done at all, which is utterly incredible, it would require a long series of time, certainly beyond the life of any individual to effect it.”

He then pointed out that in 1792 we had a broad, diverse, and local press all across the nation and the highest literacy rate in the developed world; such well-informed people wouldn't be vulnerable to despotism, unless there was some sort of serious chaos—what he called “convulsions and disorders” that would be caused or exploited by “popular demagogues.”

“To hope that the people may be cajoled into giving their sanctions to such institutions is still more chimerical,” Hamilton wrote. “A people so enlightened and so diversified as the people of this Country can surely never be brought to it, but from convulsions and disorders, in consequence of the acts of popular demagogues.”

But if a group could take over the government and turn it against itself, deprive it of its protective function for the people and instead leave citizens to their own devices, Hamilton was somewhat concerned that a despot could take advantage of the ensuing chaos:

“The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.”

So, Hamilton reasoned, it wasn't the politicians who may step into the fray with an oligarchic message who were the “true artificers of monarchy”—it was the uber-rich who promoted the destruction of a state devoted to the “general welfare” of “We, the People”:

“Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy…”

These usurpers of the democratic order in America, then, would prepare the way for a true despot to rise to power, even in America. Hamilton may have had some concerns about men from his generation attempting such a thing; his next sentence was, “Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected.”

But it was unlikely anybody in 1789 had that kind of wealth or power; John Hancock, the wealthiest of the founders, had a net worth of only about $700,000 in today’s dollars. The first millionaire in America—in today’s dollars—was a shipping magnate who hit that level in the 1790s.

If such a thing were to actually happen, Hamilton wrote, it would be through somebody like the uber-wealthy, ultra-conservative Cato, who was a “harsh ruler” of his wife and slaves, and deplored the liberal Greek literature and sexuality that was all the rage.

“It has aptly been observed that Cato was the Tory-Cæsar, the whig of his day,”Hamilton wrote.

So, if a Cato-like man or group of people with massive riches were to succeed in taking over most of the levers of power in American government, Hamilton believed, our nation then would, actually, be vulnerable to a despot rising to the presidency.

Because that office of president includes “Commander in Chief,” the man would have to heavily flog his support for the military while, in secret, scoffing at the very idea of the liberty that would otherwise be insured by a truly democratic government.

This wealthy hustler’s main method to seize power would be to bring the government of the United States “under suspicion” while building a base of the “zealots of the day.”

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate [hugely wealthy] in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanor—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

Hamilton knew that the uber-wealthy Roman senator Catiline tried twice to overthrow the Roman republic by a broad conspiracy of the rich combined with populist rhetoric, and the wealthiest men of Roman society put together his second conspiracy. Similarly, the later Caesars held power through similar means, splitting the populace against itself in a way that eventually led to the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Thus, Hamilton’s next paragraph was a simple and stunning warning to those who were entrusted with the “popular Government” of the United States:

“No popular Government was ever without its Catilines & its Caesars. These are its true enemies.”

The Catilines and Caesars of our era are the morbidly rich billionaires who have set out to seize control of every aspect of the political life of America, just as they tried so disastrously in 1920.

While we’ve always had wealthy people influencing politics to their own benefit, what’s happening today is something altogether new, as documented by Jane Mayer in Dark Money and Nancy MacLean in Democracy in Chains.

It mostly started back in 1971, when Lewis Powell wrote a call to arms to his friend and neighbor, Eugene Sydnor Jr., who was at the time a director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The “Powell memo” called for wealthy industrialists and companies themselves to fund a giant machine that could capture the U.S. government and turn it away from the protections for citizens and the environment that were being championed by Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader (named in the document) and toward a system that was, essentially, an oligarchy.

A small but incredibly wealthy number of what we’d today call billionaires or oligarchs were energized by Powell’s call to arms; they quickly stepped up and funded an entire right-wing infrastructure to bring this about.

Some started think tanks to influence public discussion and reframe issues of power and wealth along oligarchic Libertarian lines. Others funded a society for lawyers that could be a feeder system for getting reliably oligarch-friendly judges into state and federal courts. Another started a network of billionaires to pool their money to flip elections. And one even kicked off a 24/7 right-wing “news” channel to influence American public opinion in a way that would show up at the ballot box.

Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972, and Powell then championed the “right” of oligarchs to own politicians in the 1976 Buckley v ValeoSupreme Court decision, blowing up campaign finance limits by ruling that when billionaires want to spend their own money to elect or destroy politicians, that spending of money was protected under the First Amendment as “free speech.” (Citizens United vastly expanded this power in 2010.)

It was a long slog for the oligarchy. In 1980, when billionaire David Koch ran for vice president of the United States on the Libertarian ticket, most Americans looked at his platform and laughed. It said, in part:

“We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.

“We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.

“We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.

“We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.

“We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.

“We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. The present system, in addition to being inefficient, encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence. Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.

“We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.

“We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.

“As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.

“We support repeal of all laws which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.

“We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.

“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.

“We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.

“We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We support abolition of the Department of Energy.

“We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.

“We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.

“We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.

“We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.

“We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.

“We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.

“We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.

“We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.

“We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

“We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“We support the repeal of all state usury laws.” *

* Notice what’s lacking from Koch’s list: abortion, prayer in schools, the Ten Commandments, Israel, or bans on gay marriage. All of these issues were added, in part at the suggestion of multimillionaire Jerry Falwell and billionaire Pat Robertson, to bring the rubes from the White Evangelical movement into the fold. Adding in guns brought in big money from the NRA. Combining these two factions with the Koch’s billionaire buddies produced the modern Republican coalition.

David Koch’s Libertarian vision was definitely not how most Americans thought our government should look.

Just a quarter-century earlier, President Dwight Eisenhower had weighed in on these Libertarians and John Birchers (Fred Koch, David’s father, as a big fan of the John Birch Society) and the Koch brothers’ spiritual forbearers, the oil-rich Texan Hunt brothers, in a letter to his ultra-conservative brother, Edgar. He wrote:

“[I]t is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything—even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government.

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.

“There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

But this wasn't an effort of a single generation, as Eisenhower had imagined and as Hamilton figured would always be the case. And it wasn't modestly financed by a few insider bankers and industrialists like Harding’s campaign. It was, rather, a multigenerational program, funded over the decades with billions of dollars, and with a national presence so large that the Kochs’ vast network now is better funded, is better staffed, and has more offices than either the Republican or Democratic parties.

Most of the original funders of Powell’s plan to turn America into an oligarchy are dead, but their multigenerational plan continues to roll along. And now many of the goals that Powell and the 1980 Libertarians first articulated—and Hamilton had nightmares about—are near completion.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of 5-4 decisions, has handed the power to alter elections to a few hundred billionaires and well-funded organizations (including foreign governments), and billionaire oligarch Trump has taken the White House with the help of billionaire oligarch Murdoch, Hamilton’s nightmare is nearly realized.

The question now is whether enough Americans have awakened to this reality to show up in November to defy the wealthy purveyors of fear and discontent who want complete and final control over our nation.

Tag, you’re it.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/alexander-hamilton-threat-america

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The Thom Hartmann Program - 1st hour - 10/31/2018

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...back to class, trolls... (1 of 2)

(5/29,/18 - Independent Media Institute / Alternet

"9 Ways Authoritarianism Is Taking Hold Under Trump
-- The president and his neo-authoritarian acolytes are following an ancient playbook."

By Thom Hartmann:

As our country slides into an ugly Americanized form of neofascism, there’s good news: nonviolent protest, when in the service of progressive, egalitarian goals, almost always wins out when it reaches a national critical mass. And we may well be on the verge of that right now. But we must understand what we’re up against.

Donald Trump and his neo-authoritarian acolytes are following an ancient playbook.

Part Machiavelli, part Caesar, part Mugabe/Duterte/Mao, it always includes a few simple and primary elements of seizing and subverting normal political power.

Here's how the president is building authoritarian institutions.

1. Lie Often — Lie Big.

As President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out, the Big Lie technique wasn't invented by Hitler but was essential to his success, and in the 1944 election, the Republican Party began to turn it on Democrats.

FDR wasn't having any of it.

“The opposition, in this year, has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it’s foreign,” FDR told the nation during that year’s presidential campaign.

“They’ve imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad,” FDR said. “Remember a number of years ago there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book and was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.

“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood. Always a big one. For its very fantastic nature would make it more credible. If only you keep repeating it over, and over, and over again.”

As George Lakoff pointed out in his brilliantly titled book Don’t Think of an Elephant,in order for us to process a lie—even knowing it’s a lie—we must first imagine it as a truth, a reality. (I also wrote at length about this in my book on using neuro-linguistic programming [NLP] in politics, Cracking the Code.)

If you hear, “Don’t run into the street,” you must first imagine running into the street to know what “don’t run into the street” means. You have to clearly visualize it.

If you hear “FBI spies were in my campaign,” you must first clearly imagine FBI spies in the Trump campaign, before you can process the fact that every intelligence agency and even the administration itself say that there were no spies (unless they were foreign) within the Trump campaign.

That simple act of creating the visualization that is then knocked down by the correction of the lie, instead embeds itself into consciousness as a temporary pseudo-reality and, for people inclined to believe, the actual belief of reality, of the asserted lie. From there, the lie makes its way to the conscious mind as a belief or “fact.”

Whether the lie is about a particular religion or race being “vermin” or “animals,” and whether it’s said in 1934 or 2018, doesn't much matter: once the mental picture is formed, reality begins to waver for even the most well-informed among us.

And trying to rebut the lie only strengths it, because the rebuttal presupposes the possibility that the lie could be true. Every time a Trump or GOP lie is rebutted, it’s also repeated: The rebuttal actually strengthens, in the minds of the already-converted, the reality of the lie, and makes it easier for the uncertain to begin to believe it.

This is why fully 48 percent of Republicans believe that over 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 election, and similar or higher percentages of Republicans believe climate change is a hoax, the GOP tax cuts “for the middle class” were real, and that deregulating environmental and workplace protections will lead to higher wages and more jobs.

All lies; all repeated over and over again; all believed.

2. Consolidate Power While Challenging or Co-Opting Institutions That Enforce Accountability.

Every authoritarian leader who’s come to power in history, from Samaria 7,000 years ago to today’s administration from the White House at the top, to the EPA under Scott Pruitt, makes this their second big move. Weaken the institutions of accountability, while intimidating your own allies into submissive servility.

That judge was a Mexican. The investigation into Trump is a witch hunt. Congress doesn't have the authority to investigate Republicans.

People in Trump’s own party, like Corker, McCain, and Flake, who are willing to challenge the president, got politically destroyed, so others became afraid to challenge him. Meanwhile, those American politicians and foreign powers that suck up to him and his relatives in the Trump Crime Family are richly rewarded.

This behavior is a calling card of tin-pot dictators, but it’s also the key to the power held by most national-scale modern authoritarian regimes. And once the allies of Dear Leader begin to bow to the authoritarian on bended knee, the process can take on a momentum that makes it unstoppable until it’s totally and irrevocably defeated by an external power (think Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan in World War II).

Packing the courts is the final step in this process, as we’ve seen in every country in history where democracy has died. Senate Majority Leader Republican Mitch McConnell set this process up by denying President Obama his constitutionally provided-for court appointments, ranging from the most routine to the Supreme Court itself. Now the GOP court-packing operation, even to the point of defying centuries-old Senate traditions like blue-slipping, has moved into hyper-gear.

Even “prison reform” efforts have been co-opted to include “mens rea” (“state of mind”) changes in the law that will insulate CEOs and billionaire corporate owners from decisions they make that lead to death or environmental destruction if the prosecution can’t prove that such an outcome was not only predictable, but was their specific intent. It will end corporate perp walks for all but the lowest-level flunkies, and is tied to virtually every Republican or bipartisan “sentencing reform” effort.

And to the extent that the electorate may hold these new authoritarians in check by voting them out of office, wide swaths of the American electorate are being purged from voting rolls with Kansas’s Kris Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program, or blocked from voting for lack of the “Republican-certified ID” like a state-issued concealed carry permit (students with government-issued student ID need not apply to vote).

If they successfully navigate all these barriers, voters (particularly minority voters, or voters in Democratic-heavy districts) still find that their voting machines, like the ones in Detroit in 2016 that failed to record over 75,000 votes for president(Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes), are “defective.” If they do work at all, they’re put out in such small numbers that working people must wait in lines for 6 to 12 hours.

The speed with which these deeply anti-democratic changes are happening in America today is, to most historians, extremely alarming.

3. Attack the Press.

British conservative (and advocate of the American Revolution) Edmund Burke coined the phrase “the fourth estate” in 1787 to describe the press when arguing that Parliament should open itself up to newspaper reporters. Along with the legislative, executive, and judicial “estates” of governance, every functional republic since that era has included strong protections of the press as a pseudo fourth branch of governance, an explicit and public check on the abuse of power.

But to an autocrat whose wealth, power, and longevity in office depend on the abuse of power, a free and independent press is a danger. This is why Hitler shut down the independent press in 1933-’34, although he kept the appearance of press diversity by allowing many of the formerly independent newspapers to be acquired by media companies his cronies owned.

Historically, the two strategies emerging autocracies use in this regard are to:
1.) Attack the credibility and right to existence of the independent media while,
2.) Consolidating and expanding the reach and power of friendly media, typically owned by cronies of the autocrat.

Between cries of “fake news” and “pull their credentials” directed at “legacy media”; a push for corporate concentration of that media that started when the Reagan administration ended the Fairness Doctrine and corporatized NPR; and the elevation of billionaire-owned/affiliated media outlets like Fox, Sinclair, and the large terrestrial radio networks that pretty much exclusively carry right-wing talk radio, this process is already far down the road in the United States.

4. Vilify Protesters, Minorities, and Political “Enemies” to the Point of Provoking Violence.

This administration and the GOP they’ve captured have become the party “of dreadful fear and hate” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against. We see it in institutionalized police violence against African Americans and immigrants; excessive arrests and punishments of people protesting Trump’s inauguration and speeches; new laws punishing journalists for reporting on factory farm and corporate environmental abuses; and violence-tinged rhetoric against “Mexican rapists,” using MS-13 as a rhetorical proxy for Hispanics, and saying Black NFL players hate/disrespect our flag and country, among other things.

And by accusing the other side of what they, themselves are doing, these new authoritarians deflect attention from their own very intentional strategy. Just google the words “Trump attacks liberals” without the quotation marks to see page after page of over-the-top snowflake-like examples of conservative media and politicians complaining that liberals are “unfairly attacking” Trump and the GOP.

5. Scapegoat Minority Groups to Rile Up a Mob Mentality.

Sadly, one of the psychological legacies we share with other predatory mammals is the ability to instinctually form “packs” and drop into pack-like behavior, particularly against those who are weak or wounded. Although we have an intellect that should protect us from such behavior, the instincts wired into our DNA will always beat our thought processes, at least over the short term.

Fascists and authoritarians use this core mammalian instinct, paraphrasing Sinclair Lewis, to “rouse up the rubes.”

While this was a common feature of American politics in the century following the Declaration of Independence when it was directed by white politicians and police authorities against Native Americans and slaves, and popped up in the 1880s against Chinese immigrants, the modern Trump Party has resurrected it to use against immigrant children, women, religious and racial minorities, and the LGBTQ community.

Not to mention provoking violence against “libtards” like Heather Heyer, whom Trump’s “very fine people” murdered last year in Charlottesville, Virginia. (I don’t want to include links in this article to neo-Nazi sites, but just google “libtard heather heyer” without the quotes; you’ll be shocked.)

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/9-ways-trumps-authoritarianism-taking-hold

cont'd...

Trump is not responsible for the Pittsburgh shooting or the alleged bombing plot. That would mean that crazy Bernie Sanders is responsible for the softball practice shooting. And Obama is responsible for the Dallas police shootings.

Trump is a filthy racist.

3/15/18 - From AlterNet

"The Trump Administration Is a Government of Billionaires and Their Sycophants.

The GOP lackeys are eager to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money."

By Thom Hartmann:

A few years back, former President Jimmy Carter told me that, because of Citizens United and its predecessors (like the Buckley decision in 1976), we’re no longer a democracy, but instead, “an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery.”

For proof that Carter was right, one need look no further than Mike Pompeo taking Rex Tillerson’s job, stepping into Thomas Jefferson’s shoes as Secretary of State.

While Pompeo has an impressive resume on paper, something endlessly mentioned on cable news and other corporate media, the one skill-set that has truly enabled his rise to power, first in Congress and now in the Executive Branch, is his fine-tuned ability to suck up to #MorbidlyRich billionaires.

Prior to Trump arriving, Pompeo was one of Congress’s single largest beneficiaries of money from the Koch brothers and groups associated with them. Forget Pompeo’s army service and Harvard law degree; you don’t get to be the favorite son of the morbidly rich if you don’t know how to suck up to them.

Billionaire Trump, like so many others of America’s billionaire oligarchs, doesn’t take kindly to people who have their own minds. He wants fealty and sycophancy, not brilliance or competence.

For example, Rex Tillerson, actually looking at facts and political realities, made the mistake of pointing out to Trump that tearing up the Iran no-nukes deal at the same time you’re trying to negotiate a brand-new no-nukes deal with North Korea was contradictory messaging. What country, after all, would want to cut a deal with a partner who kills agreements unilaterally without contractual justification?

Tillerson, of course, was right. But he wasn’t sucking up to Trump in the way the oligarch wanted (and apparently, needed). Tillerson even occasionally put our nation’s security ahead of his subservience to Trump. Big mistake.

Many members of today’s billionaire class think of themselves as “self-made,” and so have a sneering disregard for the working people of America who “merely” aspire to the American Dream of being in the middle class with a safe job, good benefits, and a secure retirement. These oligarchs are more concerned with their profits than with the impact of their products or services on our country.

And they only want people around them who share their vision of their own greatness; who, in other words, are pathetic suck-ups. Pompeo has developed this to an art form.

After years of sucking at the Koch teat, Pompeo apparently realized that Trump, too, wanted only to surround himself with people who eagerly agreed with him. Probably Trump is even needier than the Kochs, and so would only elevate people who tell him daily how brilliant and strong and noble he is.

Thus, Pompeo apparently saw a career opportunity to ingratiate himself with another billionaire oligarch.

To make it happen, Pompeo changed the normal daily routine by which the president is briefed by the CIA. Instead of it being done with clear, cold precision by a career intelligence officer, henceforth, Pompeo decreed, the Director of the CIA himself (Pompeo) would take hours out of his day to make the daily trek to the White House to hang out with Trump and give him a pleasant daily tongue-bath.

Trump loved it.

Just like when he was a shill for the Kochs, Pompeo is more than willing to take any position—regardless of how badly it may hurt America or risk war or environmental destruction—that’s being pushed by his new billionaire overlord.

One imagines Pompeo as a loyal dog, constantly eager to please his master.

On its surface, this seems like an indictment of Pompeo himself, but it’s really not. It’s an indictment of the entire political system in the United States, as it has been re-invented by a “conservative” Supreme Court that created a brand-new legal structure around the notion that “corporations are persons” and using money to buy politicians is First Amendment-protected “free speech.”

No legislature or president had ever advocated those radical, anti-democratic positions, and neither had any American political party other than the Libertarians. The 1974 campaign finance reforms after the Nixon scandals, struck down by SCOTUS in 1976 with the Buckley case, were scrupulously bipartisan.

But Lewis Powell reached out to the oligarchs who often hired his legal services, and in 1971 his infamous “Powell Memo” charted how corporations and billionaires should take over virtually all the institutions of America, from Congress and the courts to our schools and local governments.

Later that year, Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he dutifully made the Buckley case happen in 1976, throwing open the door to corruption of our political system by American oligarchs. Citizens United, in 2010, took it even further, allowing foreign governments and non-U.S. oligarchs to take a simple step through a U.S. corporation (like, for example, the NRA) to, themselves, own American politicians.

In a breathtaking power seizure not authorized by the Constitution, the Supreme Court singlehandedly created an entire new body of law, and thus began the process of turning America from a representative democracy into an oligarchy.

And now, predictably, we have a billionaire oligarch as president, multiple billionaire oligarchs in his Cabinet, and the billionaire oligarch Kochs committing hundreds of millions of dollars to oligarch-friendly Republicans in every election cycle.

In an oligarchic nation, there is one singular skill for political success: one must willingly, ably, and enthusiastically suck up to the rich and powerful, subordinating one’s ethics, reason, and even humanity.

This is a tragedy for both the USA and for democracies all over the world that emulate us.

Oligarchy (and its companion, strong-man pseudo-populism) is spreading rapidly, subsuming former liberal democracies like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary while nibbling away at other democratic countries. China is holding oligarchy up as the new model for the world.

We must reverse these disastrous Supreme Court decisions with a Constitutional Amendment, explicitly stating that corporations are not people and that money is not speech; otherwise, our rapid march to total oligarchy will continue to gather speed and power.

And suck-up politicians like Pompeo will continue to rise to the top, eager and willing to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money, prestige and power.

ttps://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-administration-syncophant-billionaires

Among cable news networks FNC has bested its competition for 202 consecutive months in primetime total viewers, beating CNN, MSNBC and HLN combined; in total day, FNC outpaced CNN and MSNBC combined.

FNC’s primetime 2.829M viewers, ran a lap ahead of MSNBC’s 1.575M and CNN’s 931K. In the news demo, FNC’s 540K topped CNN’s 290K and MSNBC’s 281K.

FNC’s 1.685M total viewers in total day trounced MSNBC’s 909K and CNN’s 689K. In the key 25-54 year old age bracket, FNC’s 332K edged out CNN’s 201K and MSNBC’s 161K.

Part of the reason the ratings are so high is the midterms. Will these numbers translate to votes? We will soon know.

https://americanlookout.com/october-ratings-fox-news-beats-cnn-and-msnbc-combined/

HotCoffee, I was aware of that non-lethal weapon. It has been around for quite awhile and I am surprised it is not deployed on a regular basis. I Would love to see it built into the wall as a permanent fixture.

You will find this interesting,

"Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh Turns Down $600,000 Raised in GoFundMe Campaign"

I find this to be very classy but expected. Kavanaugh will be on the bench for a very long time and he will have plenty of time to pee in the democrat party Wheaties hundreds of times over his long tenure. If the Republicans hold the Senate, look for Thomas to pull the plug and RBG to throw her hands up and say enough.

The manufactured democrat outrage over Kavanaugh seems like a very long time ago. They just jump form one crisis to another.

Whatever the outcome next week I wish the leftie/socialists a better outcome next week as I really don't think many of them can handle the stress of a major loss. It must be very sad to live their lives in a state of continual unhappiness and despair. What a depressing lot they have become.

Speaking of that, it looks like coalage3, you and I have forced the little resident pissant here to be tethered to his/her/alphabets computer 24/7, perhaps knitting little pink hats between cutting and pasting nothingburgers. Wow, what a life.

Another good day to you and yours.

Feed the birds.