OpEdNews - 7/6/2017 - From Smirking Chimp

"Is America Past the Point of No Return?"

By Thom Hartmann:

Have corporate/billionaire control of our republic reached such a point that it's no longer reversible? Have we passed the tipping point where democracy dies?

A few years back, on my radio show, President Jimmy Carter said that America, in large part because of Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, has become "just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery."

He's right. It's the elephant in the room that everybody, particularly our corporate media, completely ignores.

While Republicans are doing the will of their oligarch owners, replacing real scientists with industry lobbyists and shills everywhere from the White House to congressional science committees to the EPA, the media stubbornly refuses to report in depth on it, preferring instead to following the Worldwide Wrestling moves of our tweeter-in-chief.

"Red-shift" election fraud (called red because it helps only Republicans) has been flagrantly on display across the country since the privatization of our vote by GOP-leaning voter-machine companies in the 2000-2004 period.

GOP voter suppression in nearly 30 states has now been institutionalized with Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck scam (now a presidential "commission"). Pre-poll and exit-poll results "flipped" in Georgia's 6th district in a way that caused us to decry similar vote-rigging in the Ukraine (the result, like in Georgia's 6th, was measurably off from the exit polls).

Yet in the face of all this, enough to provoke revolution in countries like Egypt and Ukraine, our press instead focuses on the oligarchs' unproven and well-debunked claim that "illegals" are voting to help Democrats.

While climate change is ravaging the world, the administration of billionaire oligarch Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate change agreement and is rolling back climate-protecting rules on behalf other oligarchs in the oil, coal and gas business so they can continue to use our atmosphere as a sewer.

While billionaire-owned Republicans frantically work to roll back the 3.8% tax on investment income (for families with over $250,000 in investment income/year) their oligarch owners so despise, cutting millions of Americans off any hope of affordable healthcare access, the television media usually plays this tax-cut story as if it were about healthcare.

From trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which has returned to consumers billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from our country's banksters), to gutting environmental laws, to preventing students from even declaring bankruptcy when their efforts to join the middle class by going to college don't work out, the oligarchs who now largely run America are solidifying their power and their wealth.

This is rule by the rich. It's here. It's now.

As Vice President Henry Wallace predicted in a prescient New York Times op-ed in 1944:

"They [the super-wealthy] claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.

"Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Have they finally reached that goal which, in Wallace's day, they could only hunger for?

In 1944, the dream of the oligarchs to once again control America the way they did during the Gilded Age of the 1880-'90s was just that, a dream. Wallace's president, FDR, had called them out, repeatedly, calling them "economic royalists" and damning their efforts to corrupt American democracy.

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America," Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed in 1936. "What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."

But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"

FDR kept them in check, as did Truman and Eisenhower. The latter, a Republican president who ran for office on the 1952 platform of ending the Korean War ("Vote for peace, vote for Eisenhower" said the TV ads), even wrote to his right-wing brother, Edgar Eisenhower, about the very wealthy oil oligarchs who wanted to end the American experiment of a strong middle class:

"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."

That was back when Eisenhower/Nixon ran for re-election in 1956 on a platform of having expanded Social Security, increased union membership, raised taxes on rich people, and built thousands of miles of freeway, hundreds of schools and hospitals, and radically increased funding for public education.

It all changed in the 1970s. As I outline in detail in my book The Crash of 2016, the modern oligarchic takeover of America began in a serious way in 1971 when Lewis Powell outlined in a memo how the very, very wealthy and corporate America should launch a massive, well-funded program to take over American media, take over our schools and colleges, take over our courts, take over our economy, and ultimately take over every branch of our government.

In 1976, Powell had his chance to put it all in motion in a big way. From 1776 until 1976, giving money to politicians in exchange for political favors had been considered a behavior (and often considered a corrupt behavior) that could be regulated by government.

But in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision, Powell, who had been put on the court by Richard Nixon in 1972, wrote that giving money to politicians wasn't a "behavior" subject to regulation, but, instead, was merely an "exercise in free speech." Free speech protected by the First Amendment.

This major rewrite of American law, sweeping in its breadth and reach, has echoed forward into our time with Citizens United and McCutcheon, among others. The result is that today right-wing billionaires not only own Fox and much of the rest of our media, but they are also largely determining the result of our elections.

In the 2016 election cycle, just the Koch network pledged over $800 million to elect billionaire-friendly Republicans. They succeeded, taking the House and the Senate, and with the efforts of their pliant shill Mitch McConnell, in blocking President Obama's middle-of-the-road SCOTUS nominee, Merrick Garland, from ever taking his rightful seat on the court. It's reported that they're planning to "invest" $400 billion, more or less, over the next 16 months.

Neil Gorsuch is more hostile to the interest of working-class Americans, minorities and traditional American egalitarian values than any member of the Court since the Lochner era. Billionaire-funded right-wing judicial groups like the Federalist Society are salivating at the chance to replace Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, cementing their control of the Court for as much as the next two generations.

This is the greatest crisis for democracy since Henry Wallace's era during World War II. Similar assaults against democracy are taking place all over the world, from Poland to Hungary to the Phillippines.

Will America see its way back to the expressed values of this country's founding? Having used those values as a guidepost, we've ended slavery, enfranchised women and created a social safety net that, at least until the era of Reagan, was still capable of offering life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to working American citizens.

Now, instead, we're seeing the values expressed by the dark underbelly of the American Revolution -- the oligarchs who owned plantations in the South -- ascendant.

Violent policing, more people in prison than any other country on earth, and the destruction of competition and entrepreneurial opportunity by monopoly are all the new normal. Corporate power is now being used not just to advocate for corporate interests, but to prop up faux populists like Trump and Scott Walker.

The effort, launched in the wake of the Brown v Board decision in 1954 (as so brilliantly documented by Nancy MacLean in her new book Democracy in Chains), to take over the institutions of American governance has been largely successful. And to solidify their gains, some among the very, very wealthy are aggressively supporting Republican efforts to gerrymander and vote-suppress the Democratic Party into oblivion.

In Crash, I pointed out how each of our nation's major reboots (each leading to a huge progressive leap forward) happened after an economic crisis. The economic crisis of 1772 (which led to the Tea Act, and then the American Revolution), the Great Crash of 1856-'57 (which even wiped out Abraham Lincoln and led to the Civil War), and what was then referred to as the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s (which led to World War II) all led to major changes in America.

Will it take another Great Crash to bring about a reformation of our government? Or have our oligarchs so deeply embedded themselves and their shills into our institutions of government that it's no longer possible for us to pull back from our headlong rush into neo-feudalism/neo-fascism?

The answer to both questions will probably become evident in the next three years.

But if America is to truly become the land of the free and the home of the brave, a place where any person can make it, a land clean and protected from corporate predation, it's going to take a massive mobilization of people who currently aren't even bothering to vote or run for office.

The Republican Party's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

In 1932, the pain from GOP policies was so great that Americans turned out in huge numbers for FDR. Disgust with the Republican embrace of America's robber barons was so thorough that, outside of 1947-'48, Republicans didn't hold majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1933 to 1995.

Today, even the phrases "robber barons" or "economic royalists" are likely to produce a "Huh?" response, particularly among those who watch oligarch billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox News or listen to right-wing hate radio.

Americans are in crisis. From opiates to student loan debt to underemployment, oligarchs representing monopolistic Big Pharma, Big Banks, and Big Retail/Fast Food are devastating us. Our courts are largely taken over by shills loyal to billionaire wealth and corporate power, as have the majority of our state governments. And our land and food supplies are poisoned daily by frakkers, polluters, and agricultural chemical companies.

And our ascendant political party, the GOP, is working as hard as it can to transfer trillions more dollars of wealth from working people to its patrons in the top 1%.

As Eldridge Cleaver said, "There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem."

It's truer today than ever before. And it's not like we weren't warned.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Is-America-Past-the-Point-by-Thom-Hartmann-America-Freedom-To-Fascism_American-History_Billionaires_Economic-170706-141.html

ZEIG HEIL!

OpEdNews - 9/16/2017 - From Thom Hartmann Website

"Berniecare finally arrives."

By Thom Hartmann:

Conservatives hate bureaucracy.

So when will they get behind Bernie Sanders' single-payer plan, which would do away with the paper-pushing waste in our healthcare system once and for all?

Berniecare is finally here.

On Wednesday afternoon Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders officially unveiled his plan for single payer healthcare, saying it was the start of a long fight to end the international shame that is our current healthcare system.

"Today, we begin the long and difficult struggle to end the international disgrace of the United States, our great nation, being the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all of our people. As proud Americans, our job is to lead the world on health care, not to be woefully behind every other major country."

Bernie's plan -- the so-called Medicare for All Act of 2017 -- would gradually phase every single American into the existing Medicare program over a four year period.

From that point onwards, healthcare would be free -- I repeat, free! -- for everyone.

The would be virtually no co-pays -- no premiums -- no deductibles -- no nothing.

Oh yeah -- and unlike Obamacare -- Berniecare would cover going to the dentist and the eye doctor.

It would also repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortions.

Isn't this real choice?

Single-payer gives people the ability to go to whatever doctor they want whenever they want without worrying about whether they'll go bankrupt.

Conservatives are all about repealing Obamacare.

So, let's do it and replace it with Medicare for all!

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Berniecare-finally-arrives-by-Thom-Hartmann-Conservatives_Healthcare_Medicare_Single-payer-170916-906.html

OpEdNews - 8/30/2017 - From Alternet

"The Media Is Creating a Left-Wing "Threat" to Balance Out the Awful Racist Right-Wing Hordes Who Threaten Civil Society.

We have to be vigilant about the coming smear project against Antifa."

By Thom Hartmann:

In these dark days, an intergenerational warning is in order: Antifa folks -- be wary. They are coming for you.

Some of us have seen this movie before. In my generation, when I was a teenage member of MSU's SDS in the late 1960s, I remember the guy who was always yelling, "Kill the pigs," and encouraging us to burn down the ROTC building on campus. In later years, I heard from old SDS colleagues that when they sued the police, they learned that the outspoken guy was a police officer and his friends were informants.

For my dad's generation, the right-wing takeover of a protest movement happened in Germany generations ago, so most Americans don't even recognize Marinus van der Lubbe's name.

But the Germans remember well that fateful day 81 years ago -- February 27, 1933. And many of them are looking at the confrontations in our streets and worrying.

It started when the government, struggling with questions of its own legitimacy and the instability of its leader, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. Historians are still debating whether the "terrorist" was a mentally incompetent young man maneuvered into place to take the fall for the crime, or was an actual communist ideologue (of limited intellectual means and probably schizophrenic; that seems to be one thing most agree on).

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the people claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.

He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.

His coarse use of language -- reflecting his background of hanging out with disreputable sorts -- and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media.

He desperately wanted to be appreciated and loved by the "old money" crowd, but he also hated them because they had never accepted him and, deep down inside, he knew they never would.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike, and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," Hitler proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out German Parliament building, surrounded by national media.

"This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion -- "a sign from God," he called it -- to declare an "all-out war on terrorism" and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

And, he said, their fellow travelers -- "communists" like the man who'd set the Reichstag on fire -- needed to be tracked down and utterly destroyed.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianburg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation -- in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it -- that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.

Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants and peek around without homeowners know it, if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a four-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Just like with America's recent PATRIOT Act, the first version of which had sunset provisions, legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader who was so newsworthy.

Citizens who protested the leader in public -- and there were many -- quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was constantly talking up the threat of these "other people" among the German people, while armed gangs terrorized minorities and smashed windows in Jewish-owned businesses.)

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political adviser, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage.

He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his white countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will."

As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.

Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't put Germany First was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of the United Kingdom.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was supported by the power brokers of the most fervent of Germany's Christian sects. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" -- God Is With Us -- and most of them fervently believed it was true.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly the troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals."

He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the Homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader. He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the Homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at our disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection, as his central security office began advertising a "See Something, Say Something" program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors.

Those denounced often included opposition politicians and celebrities who dared speak out -- a favorite target of his regime. He began a campaign to discredit the press -- he called them the Lugenpresse, or "Lying Press" ("fake news" in today's vernacular). The phrase was repeated endlessly until all the free press was shut down in 1934. By 1935, all the radio stations and newspapers were owned by wealthy, hard-right friends of his regime.

To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the "leftist terrorists" lurking within the Homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas.

He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by liberals or Jews. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.

But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, and away from questions of his illegitimate rise to power.

To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will.

In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself.

The majority -- the "silent majority" -- of good Germans hated the leftists, Hitler and his friends in the right-wing press repeatedly told the people.

Those questioning him were labeled "communists," "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the police and army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.

He spoke openly of his "love" for police and the military, and they, in turn, embraced him with fervor, redoubling the violence they wrought against peaceful protestors.

Hitler's rise to power was largely on the backs of the labor and communist movements. They were his "enemies" first and foremost (although anti-Semitism had been part of his shtick from the beginning: his main attack was that the labor and communist movements were filled with Jews). And he largely destroyed them when he successfully sold the German people on the idea that "the left" were responsible for burning down the Parliament building, the 9/11 event of that day.

There's little doubt in my mind -- having lived through the era of COINTELPRO and the PATRIOT Act -- that somewhere out there is a person who's planning to commit an act of terrorism. It may be a dedicated but deluded left-winger, or, more likely, it's a right-winger hoping to stir things up by pretending to be a left-winger. And Trump and his friendly "news" outlets are ready to use it.

Perhaps apocryphally, Mark Twain once noted that, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

There's no shortage of examples of that rhyme, and given all the "mainstream" press now being thrown at the Antifa movement, it's a sure thing that they're going to be the Administration's and the media's next big boogeyman.

Somewhere out there is the next Marinus van der Lubbe, and Trump and his press are ready.

Look out.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/The-Media-Is-Creating-a-Le-by-Thom-Hartmann-Antifa_Civil-Rights-Violations_Media-Bias_Media-Complicity-170830-246.html

FYI............

https://www.acf.hhs.gov/orr/resources

'ALL HAIL 'DEAR LEADER'

OpEdNews - 10/3/2017 - From Alternet

"So Few Americans Understand What the Second Amendment Is Really About -- or Its Dark History.

The Second Amendment is an anachronism that's no longer relevant today."

By Thom hartmann:

With the crazed assault in Las Vegas that killed over 50 and wounded hundreds as only the most recent example, America's gun violence problem has reached a breaking point. While we can talk all we want about assault weapons bans, universal background checks and terror watch lists, there's only one real solution to this problem: We need to repeal the Second Amendment.

This, of course, is completely unacceptable to Republicans, but that's because they don't know the real history of the Second Amendment, and the real history of the Second Amendment is as ugly as it gets.

Thanks to corporate media's unquestioning regurgitation of right-wing talking points, most Americans think that Second Amendment is in the Constitution to protect the rights of individual gun owners from the government.

But that's not even remotely true.

The "Second Amendment" as we know it today is a legal fiction invented by the gun industry and their buddies on the Supreme Court and sold to Americans by an expensive multi-decade-long PR campaign.

Despite what you might hear on Fox So-Called news, there actually was no "individual right to own a gun" until 2008, when the Supreme Court said there was in its decision in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller.

That decision, which struck down Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban, was the culmination of a decades-long push by the gun industry to twist the Second Amendment into something that would help it sell more weapons, and it had zero basis in real Constitutional history.

It's what former Chief Justice Warren Burger called a "fraud on the American public," and it's a fraud that now makes it very, very hard to put in place sensible gun control laws.

So, if the Second Amendment wasn't originally about protecting gun rights, why is it in the U.S. Constitution? What were the Founders thinking?

Well, the first and most obvious answer, and the one accepted by most historians, is that they were trying to prevent the existence of a standing army during times of peace.

were scholars of classical history, and they knew that history teaches that when given too much power, armies, repeatedly and throughout history, would overthrow democracy and put in place a military dictatorship. There's even a phrase to describe it: a military coup.

As James Madison told the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787,

"'A standing military force' will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

"With this situation in mind, the Founders wrote the Second Amendment, which says that, 'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'"

The key word here is "Militia."

At the time the Bill of Rights was written, America had no real professional army, and what military it did have was in the form of 13 separate state militias.

The Founders saw these militias as the best check against the rise of the standing army, and so they wrote the Second Amendment to make sure that they were always protected. But that's only part of the story.

By protecting the militias, the Founders weren't just preventing or trying to prevent the rise of mischief by a standing army; they were also protecting the institution of slavery that was the key to the southern economy. In states like Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas, militias were also known as slave patrols.

And after the Constitution was written, southern slave-owners, led by Patrick Henry (Virginia's biggest slave owner) started freaking out that their slaves could be constitutionally freed and then drafted by the federal government, which was given the power under Article 1, Section 8 to raise a national militia.

The slave-owners worried that this national militia would eventually be used by Northern anti-slavery types to destroy the slave patrols and maybe even the institution of slavery itself. So what did those slave-owners do?

They had the Founders write into the Second Amendment specific protections for slave patrols.

These protections aren't obvious, but they're there, and we know this because of the difference between James Madison's original draft of the Second Amendment and the final version included in the Bill of Rights. Madison's original version of the Second Amendment reads as follows:

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."

This version of the Second Amendment didn't fit well with slave-owners because it included words like "country," words they felt could be used to justify the creation of a national militia that would include freed slaves -- a backdoor way for a Northern president to free Southern slaves. And so Patrick Henry lobbied James Madison to rewrite the Second Amendment into the version we know today.

He spoke passionately at the Virginia Ratifying Convention:

"If the country be invaded, a state may go to war," Henry said, "but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress ... Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."

He added:

"In this state [of Virginia], there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States ... May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free."

As Michael R. Burch wrote, "Henry was obviously convinced that the power granted the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave control militias. He anticipated exactly what Abraham Lincoln would end up doing:

"'They will search that paper [the Constitution],' Henry said, 'and see if they have power of manumission. And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery?

"'May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it. This [slavery] is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress.'"

To satisfy Henry, James Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state," a change Patrick Henry demanded to make it explicitly clear that the Constitution protected the state militia (aka slave patrol) in Virginia.

The big picture here isn't a pretty one: The Second Amendment, which is now used by the weapons industry to justify selling weapons of war to civilians, was originally created, at least in part, to help preserve slavery in the South. You really couldn't ask for a better metaphor for everything that's challenging about America and its history.

But here's the thing: we don't need to be trapped by that history.

Ever since it was ratified, Americans have repeatedly changed parts of the Constitution that don't match up with the times. We've changed electoral rules so that the person who comes in second place in a presidential race no longer becomes vice president, we've given women the right to vote; we've given black people full citizenship; we made alcohol illegal, and then re-amended the Constitution to make it legal. These are just a few examples of ways in which we've broken with our past and moved toward a better future.

It's time we did the same with the Second Amendment.

At its best, the Second Amendment is an anachronism that's no longer relevant in an era in which the United States has a standing army but remains a democracy. At its worst, it's a tool for slave-owners that's now being used by the weapons industry to prevent any and all sensible gun laws.

There's only one way out of this mess: it's time to repeal the Second Amendment.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/3/So-Few-Americans-Understan-by-Thom-Hartmann-Constitutional-Amendments_History_Second-Amendment_Slavery-171003-733.html

LOL ....not me I was one in real life....silly me!

I think I'll go as a cat.

http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=107089

Good morning DianeR,

My laugh of the day is watching all the clips of Harry Reid, The Clintons, Obama all talking about why we need to stop the flow of immigration. Were they lying then or are they lying now?

The bummer in Ca. is we don't even have a Republican to vote for in the Senate.... 2 Democrats running. Thats how Di Fi has stayed in office for so long.

Hope your day is full of treats...no tricks. enjoy and watch out for the ghouls!

OpEdNews - 10/10/2017 - From Alternet

"What the Corporate News Industry Won't Ever Tell Its Audience.

Only people power can defeat the oligarchy that's seized our nation."

By Thom Hartmann:

We were watching the TV at the airline departure area.

"Is it a terrorist incident?" Wolf Blitzer asked. Nobody knows, was the apparent answer.

"Something's happened to the news," a woman around my age at the DC airport, said to Louise and me. "I don't know what it is, but we used to actually know a lot of detail about a lot of things going on, 30 years ago, and now it seems like all the media does is focus on one or two stories all day long and I feel like I'm uninformed."

"Like eating junk food?" I said.

"Yeah, exactly. Empty calories. Why doesn't the news give me the news?"

Louise and I were sitting in front of a TV watching CNN, which was doing hour-long (perhaps day-long?) coverage of a possible terrorist incident in London (turned out it was a traffic accident). Louise shook her head. "Now you've got him started," she said.

The woman, an employee of the airline, looked interested.

"Used to be," I said, "that radio and TV stations had to deliver actual news in order to retain their over-the-air broadcast license. It was called 'the fairness doctrine,' and Reagan stopped enforcing it in '87 and the Obama administration's FCC removed it altogether. Then the media consolidated like crazy, in part because Reagan had stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and no president since Jimmy Carter broke up AT&T has been willing to put it back into effect, and in part because of the media deregulation that Clinton signed in 1996."

"So?" she asked. "Why does that mean that all we get now is nonstop hype and opinion-drivel?"

"It used to be that the metric news organizations used to determine if they were 'doing their job' was how well the American public was informed. That was actually a serious metric, pre-1987, because your station's license depended on it. The public could -- and did -- complain that they weren't being well-informed, and stations jumped when those FCC complaints came in. But now, the only metric the 'news' business uses is how many viewers they have and, thus, how profitable they are for advertisers."

"But why does that mean all we get are the disasters and the dramas of Donald Trump and other crap like that?" She'd expanded her universe of media complaints.

I remembered a lesson that Bob Brakeman, the news director at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, where I used to work in the 1970s as a beat reporter and studio news presenter, taught me.

"When you're choosing what goes into your newscast, remember that there are three buckets of news," Bob, one of the best news guys I ever worked for, said (as best I can remember). "First, there are the facts: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Second is drama: who is hurt or hurting, who is angry, who is happy, who is trying to do what to whom. And the third is sports: who is winning and who is losing."

"Got that," I said. "So how do I determine what goes into a story?"

"The facts are the most important," Bob said. "The drama and sports, unless they're at the core of the story itself, just add to the interest appeal of the story. The drama could be interviewing a family who just lost their home to a tornado, or the sports could be who's expected to win or lose an election. But both should always be subordinate to the facts."

I explained this to our new friend in her airline uniform. "Okay," she said. "What happened to the facts?"

"Advertising," I said. "I remember driving down the autobahn in Germany in 1987 listening to American Forces Radio when the reporter announced that, because of Reagan's change in the Fairness Doctrine, CBS had moved their news division under the supervision of their entertainment division, and the other networks were expected to soon follow. So, now, networks don't give a damn at all about 'the facts' or 'what Americans need to know' to be informed and active citizens. They only care about what's going to get the most eyeballs. And that will always first be drama and sports."

"This is why we have Trump," Louise added. "As a reality TV-show star, he's an expert at delivering what Bob called 'drama' and 'sports' to the TV news networks. Who's in, who's out; who's ahead, who's behind. The media loved it, and gave him $2 billion in free TV time, while making billions themselves in advertising because he increased their ratings. Les Moonves, the head of CBS, actually bragged about how much money they were making by hyper-covering Trump in a stockholder phone call."

"The average American has no meaningful understanding of what's happening anywhere else in the world," I said, "nor do they realize what's being done right now in front of us by the EPA, Interior, and other government agencies that are taking apart over 70 years of work to clean up our world and build a middle class."

"I've noticed this on NPR," the airline woman said. "I used to love listening to their in-depth reporting, and particularly their investigative reporting. But now I'm hearing more and more spin from think-tanks, and less and less about the details of legislation and news."

"In 1996, NPR busted Archer Daniels Midland for a huge fraud," I said. "But the Republicans have now cut their funding so badly that today, with only 7 percent of their budget coming from the government, that they no longer take on corporate malfeasance, but instead beg for corporate money with great enthusiasm. They even publish lists of who's paying, some would say, to influence their broadcasting."

"Same as corporate news?"

"Pretty much. Seen or heard ads for oil and natural gas companies? Defense contractors? You want to buy an oil well or a F-35? Unlikely. But they want that money delivered to the networks, so they won't do any sort of investigative reporting on the fossil fuel or defense industries. Or pharma. Everybody's metric nowadays is clicks or viewers that can be delivered to advertisers for money. Nobody much cares about whether the American people are informed enough to make an intelligent vote."

"So, where do we get real news?" our new friend asked.

"My answer a few weeks ago would have been to look on the internet, but Google and Facebook have so locked down what news sources are allowed to get through their search/sort algorithms that it's hard to get anything that's not 'corporate-friendly news.'"

"I thought the internet was neutral," she said.

"In 1996, NPR busted Archer Daniels Midland for a huge fraud," I said. "But the Republicans have now cut their funding so badly that today, with only 7 percent of their budget coming from the government, that they no longer take on corporate malfeasance, but instead beg for corporate money with great enthusiasm. They even publish lists of who's paying, some would say, to influence their broadcasting."

"Same as corporate news?"

"Pretty much. Seen or heard ads for oil and natural gas companies? Defense contractors? You want to buy an oil well or a F-35? Unlikely. But they want that money delivered to the networks, so they won't do any sort of investigative reporting on the fossil fuel or defense industries. Or pharma. Everybody's metric nowadays is clicks or viewers that can be delivered to advertisers for money. Nobody much cares about whether the American people are informed enough to make an intelligent vote."

"So, where do we get real news?" our new friend asked.

"My answer a few weeks ago would have been to look on the internet, but Google and Facebook have so locked down what news sources are allowed to get through their search/sort algorithms that it's hard to get anything that's not 'corporate-friendly news.'"

"I thought the internet was neutral," she said.

"The internet isn't neutral any more," I said, "because of these corporate behemoths. And it's going to get a lot worse when Ajit Pai and his FCC decide that your internet service provider -- the company that brings internet into your home -- can decide to block or slow down sites they don't agree with...and all of today's successful ISPs are large, politically active, 'conservative' corporations."

I added: "When the only metric is profit, everything can be explained by profit. And profit doesn't give a damn about morality or democracy or you or me or even the future of our nation or world. It's essentially a sociopathic business model, which works out really well for sociopathic politicians and the sociopathic polluters who own them -- and the media they lavish billions onto."

"What do we do?" she said.

"End Reaganism," I said. "Start enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, break up the big media, put back into place local media ownership rules, and have Congress say explicitly that the Net Neutrality that's the law in every other civilized country on earth should also be the law here."

"And how do we do that?" she aske.

"Get politically active. Only people power can defeat the oligarchy that's seized our nation."

She shook her head skeptically. "I've gotta get back to work."

We left to board our flight.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/What-the-Corporate-News-In-by-Thom-Hartmann-Advertising_Corporate-Media_Corporate-takeovers-buyouts_Internet-171010-99.html

and...

PCC PRESS RELEASE
8 October 2018

Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of .5ºC approved by governments

INCHEON, Republic of Korea, 8 Oct - Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC would require rapid, farreaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, the IPCC said in a new assessment. With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday.

The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC was approved by the IPCC on Saturday in Incheon, Republic of Korea. It will be a key scientific input into the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December, when governments review the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.

“With more than 6,000 scientific references cited and the dedicated contribution of thousands of expert and government reviewers worldwide, this important report testifies to the breadth and policy relevance of the IPCC,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC.

Ninety-one authors and review editors from 40 countries prepared the IPCC report in response to an invitation from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) when it adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015.

The report’s full name is Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

“One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes,” said Panmao Zhai, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I.

The report highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5ºC compared to 2ºC, or more. For instance, by 2100, global sea level rise would be 10 cm lower with global warming of 1.5°C compared with 2°C. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century with global warming of 1.5°C, compared with at least once per decade with 2°C. Coral reefs would decline by 70-90 percent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (> 99 percent) would be lost with 2ºC.

“Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5ºC or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems,” saidHans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.

Limiting global warming would also give people and ecosystems more room to adapt and remain below relevant risk thresholds, added Pörtner. The report also examines pathways available to limit warming to 1.5ºC, what it would take to achieve them and what the consequences could be.

“The good news is that some of the kinds of actions that would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5ºC are already underway around the world, but they would need to accelerate,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Co-Chair of Working Group I.

The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.

“Limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes,” said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.

Allowing the global temperature to temporarily exceed or ‘overshoot’ 1.5ºC would mean a greater reliance on techniques that remove CO2 from the air to return global temperature to below 1.5ºC by 2100. The effectiveness of such techniques are unproven at large scale and some may carry significant risks for sustainable development, the report notes.

“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared with 2°C would reduce challenging impacts on ecosystems, human health and well-being, making it easier to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,” said Priyardarshi Shukla, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III.

The decisions we make today are critical in ensuring a safe and sustainable world for everyone, both now and in the future, said Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.

“This report gives policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people’s needs. The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” she said.

The IPCC is the leading world body for assessing the science related to climate change, its impacts and potential future risks, and possible response options.

The report was prepared under the scientific leadership of all three IPCC working groups. Working Group I assesses the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II addresses impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III deals with the mitigation of climate change.

The Paris Agreement adopted by 195 nations at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in December 2015 included the aim of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change by “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

As part of the decision to adopt the Paris Agreement, the IPCC was invited to produce, in 2018, a Special Report on global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. The IPCC accepted the invitation, adding that the Special Report would look at these issues in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

Global Warming of 1.5ºC is the first in a series of Special Reports to be produced in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Cycle. Next year the IPCC will release the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, and Climate Change and Land, which looks at how climate change affects land use.

The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) presents the key findings of the Special Report, based on the assessment of the available scientific, technical and socio-economic literature relevant to global warming of 1.5°C.

The Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC (SR15) is available at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ or www.ipcc.ch.

Key statistics of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC

91 authors from 44 citizenships and 40 countries of residence
- 14 Coordinating Lead Authors (CLAs)
- 60 Lead authors (LAs)
- 17 Review Editors (REs)

133 Contributing authors (CAs)
Over 6,000 cited references
A total of 42,001 expert and government review comments
(First Order Draft 12,895; Second Order Draft 25,476; Final Government Draft: 3,630)

For more information, contact:
IPCC Press Office, Email: ipcc-media@wmo.int
Werani Zabula +41 79 108 3157 or Nina Peeva +41 79 516 7068

(Follow IPCC on Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn and Instagram)

Notes for editors

The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC , known as SR15, is being prepared in response to an invitation from the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015, when they reached the Paris Agreement, and will inform the Talanoa Dialogue at the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24). The Talanoa Dialogue will take stock of the collective efforts of Parties in relation to progress towards the longterm goal of the Paris Agreement, and to inform the preparation of nationally determined contributions. Details of the report, including the approved outline, can be found on the report page. The report was prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups, with support from the Working Group I Technical Support Unit.

What is the IPCC?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. It has 195 member states.

IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency.

The IPCC assesses the thousands of scientific papers published each year to tell policymakers what we know and don't know about the risks related to climate change. The IPCC identifies where there is agreement in the scientific community, where there are differences of opinion, and where further research is needed. It does not conduct its own research.

To produce its reports, the IPCC mobilizes hundreds of scientists. These scientists and officials are drawn from diverse backgrounds. Only a dozen permanent staff work in the IPCC's Secretariat.

The IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I, dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II, dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III, dealing with the mitigation of climate change. It also has a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals.

IPCC Assessment Reports consist of contributions from each of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. Special Reports undertake an assessment of cross-disciplinary issues that span more than one working group and are shorter and more focused than the main assessments.

Sixth Assessment Cycle

At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015, it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle. At its 43rd Session in April 2016, it decided to produce three Special Reports, a Methodology Report and AR6.

The Methodology Report to refine the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories will be delivered in 2019. Besides Global Warming of 1.5ºC, the IPCC will finalize two further special reports in 2019: the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate and Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. The AR6 Synthesis Report will be finalized in the first half of 2022, following the three working group contributions to AR6 in 2021.

For more information, including links to the IPCC reports, go to: www.ipcc.ch

cont'd (2 of 2)...

OpEdNews - 7/30/2017 - From Alternet

"The Past 5 GOP Presidents Have Used Fraud and Treason to Steer Themselves to Electoral Victory.

The deception started long before Donald Trump."

By Thom Hartmann:

After Reagan -- Bush senior was elected -- but like Gerry Ford -- Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan.

If the October Surprise hadn't hoodwinked voters in 1980 -- you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That's four illegitimate Republican presidents.

And that brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency -- Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

"The counting of votes ... does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election."

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida, did not constitute "irreparable harm" to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn't important that Scalia's son worked for the law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (thus no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn't important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife worked on the Bush transition team and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida...which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)

And more than a year after the election -- a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount in Florida -- manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year -- and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won."

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story on purpose so that it would attract as little attention as possible around the nation.

Why? because the 9/11 attacks had just happened -- and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation that was already in crisis.

And none of that even considered that Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state's rolls just before the election.

So for the third time in four decades -- Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one.

And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.

Most recently, in 2016, Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters -- most people of color -- from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Millions of otherwise valid American voters were denied their right to vote because they didn't own the requisite ID -- a modern-day poll-tax that's spread across every Republican state with any consequential black, elderly, urban, or college-student population (all groups less likely to have a passport or drivers' license).

Donald Trump still lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power through an electoral college designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.

You can only wonder how much better off America would be if six Republican Presidents hadn't stolen or inherited a stolen White House.

In fact -- the last legitimate Republican President -- Dwight Eisenhower -- was unlike any other Republican president since.

He ran for the White House on a platform of peace -- that he would end the Korean War.

This from one of his TV campaign ads:

"The nation, haunted by the stalemate in Korea, looks to Eisenhower. Eisenhower knows how to deal with the Russians. He has met Europe leaders, has got them working with us. Elect the number one man for the number one job of our time. November 4th vote for peace. Vote for Eisenhower."

Two of his campaign slogans were "I like Ike" and "Vote For Peace, Vote For Eisenhower."

Ike was a moderate Republican who stood up for working people -- who kept tax rates on the rich at 91 percent -- and made sure that the middle class in America was protected by FDR's New Deal policies.

As he told his brother Edgar in 1954 in a letter:

"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."

And Eisenhower was right -- the only way Republicans have been able to win the presidency since he left office in 1961 has been by outright treason, a criminal fraud involving conflicted members of the Supreme Court, or by being vice-president under an already-illegitimate president.

And that's where we are today, dealing with the aftermath of all these Republican crimes and six illegitimate Republican presidents stacking the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.

And this doesn't even begin to tell the story of how the Republican majority in the senate represents 36 million fewer Americans than do the Democrats. Or how in most elections in past decades, Democrats have gotten more votes for the House of Representatives, but Republicans have controlled it because of gerrymandering.

This raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the modern Republican Party itself.

They work hand-in-glove with a group of right-wing billionaires and billionaire-owned or dominated media outlets like Fox and "conservative" TV and radio outlets across the nation, along with a very well-funded network of rightwing websites.

The Koch Network's various groups, for example, have more money, more offices, and more staff than the Republican Party itself. Three times more employees and twice the budget, in fact. Which raises the question: which is the dog, and which is the tail?

And, as we've seen so vividly in the "debate" about healthcare this year, the Republicans, like Richard Nixon, are not encumbered by the need to tell the truth.

Whether it's ending trade deals, bringing home jobs, protecting Social Security and Medicaid, or saving our public lands and environment -- virtually every promise that Trump ran and won on is being broken. Meanwhile, the oligarchs continue to pressure Republican senators to vote their way.

Meanwhile, a public trust that has taken 240 years to build is being destroyed, as public lands, regulatory agencies, and our courts are handed off to oligarchs and transnational corporations to exploit or destroy.

The Trump and Republican campaign of 2016, Americans are now discovering, was nearly all lies, well-supported by a vast right-wing media machine and a timid, profit-obsessed "mainstream" corporate media. Meanwhile, it seemed that all the Democrats could say was, "The children are watching!"

Fraud, treason, and lies have worked well for the GOP for half a century.

Thus, the Democrats are right to now fine-tune their message to the people. But in addition to "A Better Deal," they may want to consider adding to their agenda a solid RICO investigation into the GOP and the oligarchs who fund it.

It's way past time to stop the now-routine Republican practice of using treason, lies, and crime to gain and hold political power.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/3/The-Past-5-GOP-Presidents-by-Thom-Hartmann-Corporate_Electoral-Politics_Fraud_Gerrymandering-170730-156.html