Chris Hedges Delivers the Ultimate Trump Takedown--Excellent talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLaoJrg80JQ

Hawaii Judge Extends Order Blocking Trump ‘Travel Ban’

Comment: Of course, worried about SCOTUS reversing so many many USDC rulings hard as it is to fathom.

The fact that they would not even give President Obama the respect to have an up or down vote on the very very eminent SCOTUS pick of Merritt Garland is DISGUSTING! Gorsuch will be voted in by the Senate. I am hoping beyond hope he is in the Justice Kennedy mold, often fair and NOT rightwingnut ideological.

Yet again, Democrats get cheated out of positions of power. If the shoe were on the other foot Republicans would be explosive! IF Obama did 1/2 of the unethical -- strike that 1/8th of the unethical -- things Trump and his team have done there would be a Vesuvian eruption and Republican heads would explode!

Obviously what is good for the goose is not good for the gander. The nepotism, emoluments clause violations and corruption of Trump are staggering. He MUST NOT be allowed to get away with these unethical, unconstitutional and potentially criminal acts! RESIST!

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hawaii-judge-extends-order-blocking-trump-travel-ban-n740396

Glenn Greenwald's article from The Intercept is entitled.

"Trump’s War on Terror Has Quickly Become as Barbaric and Savage as He Promised." I link it below


My Comment: My yardstick for the morality in war has always been the Holocaust. More than the oft counted innocent Jewish dead of 6 million the more probable number was 10 million shot, tortured, medical experimented on, "living" in appalling conditions, diseased, starved and worked to death or sent to gas chambers -- men, women and children alike. The number is so large that either six or ten does not matter. What matters is the morality of either number. If one counts the dead in the entire theater of World War II a number more on the order of 50 million is fact. Add to that terrible number the destruction of history's once most beautiful geographical landscapes and the cost becomes incalculable. Man's inhumanity to other men knows no boundaries.

The most important question for me is what did WWII teach us if anything. The massive incalculable loss must have meaning or all those deaths are in vain. It taught me that there is an obligation for each of us to say no to those acts or orders that are so barbaric and so cruel where the powerful target the innocent powerless simply because they can. This must be eschewed and for me, has universal applicability whether the life is Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, Iraqi or anyone else. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography "I know it when I see it" so in war or in any human interaction I know immoral barbaric acts when I see them.

The film "Judgement at Nuremberg" focused on prosecuting the Nazi hierarchy for the atrocities they committed. The film of those atrocities was actual footage taken from the concentration camps and shown to the courtroom. A most poignant scene occurred outside of the courtroom, however, when one American judge excused the German perpetrators with the I-was-just-following-orders excuse. Richard Widmark, the Allied prosecutor of these crimes, said to him what I thought was the essence of the film and the gravitational force which should guide us all. He answered: "Just what was this war about anyway, just what was it the hell about?"

I know immorality when I see it indeed!



https://theintercept.com/2017/03/26/trumps-war-on-terror-has-quickly-become-as-barbaric-and-savage-as-he-promised/

Evil

Watch Rachel Maddow again tonight. She is on numbers of times tonight but also online at the Rachel Maddow show. The revelations of utter corruption of this administration collusion with Russia are eye popping and she, as usual, is brilliant. The question becomes can this nation survive this evil man Trump as Representative Lieu characterized him? He and his entire administration are utterly and irredemptively corrupt. Trump is just plain awful.

He should be impeached, convicted and then tried for treason. He could be brought up on impeachment charges seven ways to Sunday. When is Congress going to save a nation which is under assault and losing around the world day by day. Take a look at what this nation is doing in the Middle East, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan. The US is breaking the laws of war every day, killing civilians by the carload. Because of this insipid, incompetent and pure evil man Trump expect a new wave of ISIS attacks. I hope not but I fear it will happen. It is STUNNING! The nation should be in revolt against this fool Trump 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

The world is not the world of our forefathers who did not know the power and threats of nuclear armed nation states. This is the first time in my life that I am truly afraid.

RESIST before there is no nation for which to resist!

A Speech Revisited

I revisit MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech often. It is one of the greatest speeches in American history equal, in my opinion, to "Lincoln's Gettysburg Address." I cry when I hear it and post it today for justice. Justice is what progressives seek; not prize possessions nor great wealth and the privilege it engenders. My ire surrounds justice. It is not fair for now a congressional majority Party, the Republican Party, to encourage Jim Crow-like voter suppression for persons of color and not encourage voter inclusion for all. It is not fair for the leadership of that Party to encourage hacking of Democratic computers to, in essence, try to sway an election for one candidate and not the other. It is not right nor just to seek collusion with a totalitarian state and its authoritarian leader responsible for murders of his opposition. Justice is what I seek. Justice which should be a part of a nation whose Constitutional premise is: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice ..."

Listen to MLK's speech and make his plea all of our pleas. It is as Dr. King states the "fierce urgency of now" which commands the arc of freedom bend toward justice and not away from it. Listen, if need be again, to Dr. King's speech and if that speech does not motivate you to work in any way you can for justice then nothing I could ever say would.

It is a speech revisited because my goal is empathy for all human beings who sit in sunlight's shade; who through an accident of birth exist in poverty and the darkness of war. We can do better; we must do better and dare I say we will do better if man wants to exist and wants this planet to survive.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm



Martin Luther King, Jr: I Have a Dream Speech
Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech text and audio
americanrhetoric.com

EMERGENCY

THE SAVING OF OBAMACARE WAS WONDERFUL BUT WE KNOW THERE ARE SOME FIXES TO IT NEEDED. WE REALLY NEED TO ADVOCATE FOR SINGLE PAYER HEALTHCARE LIKE EVERY MODERN NATION HAS BUT SHORT OF REPUBLICANS HAVING THEIR BRAIN SHORT CIRCUIT THE ACA NEEDS SOME TWEAKS. ANY OTHER NORMAL REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT WHO DOES NOT WANT TO SEE PEOPLE DIE WOULD HELP WITH DEMOCRATS MAKE THOSE CORRECTIONS NEEDED BUT, OF COURSE, CRUEL, SICK, VICIOUS TRUMP WILL NOT DO THAT. HE WILL, AS HE HAS SAID, LET OBAMACARE DIE ON ITS OWN ALLOWING MILLIONS BACK INTO THE POOL OF THE UNINSURED TO DROWN. HE COULD IF HE WANTED HELP FIX WHAT IS BROKEN AND SAVE HEALTHCARE. BUT THIS MEAN, CRUEL, DESTROYER OF LIVES WILL NOT DO A THING AND DERIVE GLEE FROM THE SUFFERING IT WILL CREATE OR HE WILL NOT CARE ONE WIT ABOUT IT.

WE MUST, THEREFORE, STAY VIGILANT AND HOLD HIS FEET TO THE FIRE. WE MUST MONITOR HIS EVERY MOVE. LIE NUMBER (WHO KNOWS I LOST COUNT) DEMOCRATS DID NOT DEFEAT HIS UTTERLY INFERIOR HEALTHCARE BILL. HE DID. AS USUAL HE BLAMES SOMEBODY ELSE BUT NEVER HIMSELF.

IN THE END HE LOVES TWO THINGS ONLY: WINNING AND REVENGE. ABSENT A WIN ON TRUMPCARE HE WILL NOW CONCENTRATE ON REVENGE CAUSING THE MOST SADISTIC PAIN HE CAN BY NOT FIXING OBAMACARE WHEN IT NEEDS IT THEREBY LEAVING MILLIONS UNABLE TO GET THE LIFE SAVING MEDICAL TREATMENT THEY NEED SO THEY WILL SUFFER AND EVEN DIE. HE WILL BLAME THE DEMOCRATS FOR THAT.

TRUMP WILL BE ABLE TO EXACT REVENGE ON THE NATION AND THEN BLAME DEMOCRATS FOR NOT HAVING VOTED FOR HIS INFERIOR BILL. THAT BILL WOULD HAVE KICKED 24 MILLION OFF HEALTHCARE AND MADE OTHER OUTRAGEOUS CHANGES RETURNING THIS NATION TO AN EVEN MORE DRACONIAN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM THEN THEY HAD BEFORE OBAMACARE. DO NOT LET HIM DO THAT. STAY VIGILANT, TELL THE TRUTH AND RESIST!!

A National Nightmare

I fear and I am afraid. I know so many -- even the majority -- loathe Trump as much as I do. The damage to this nation this unfit-for-the-presidency monster and his merry men have inflicted upon this nation is so huge I simply hope Democrats, some normal Republicans and our national security forces can keep this nation together.

I am afraid that Trump is leaving this nation vulnerable alienating ALL those who keep us safe, alienating our long-time allies in NATO and alienating other friends who have spent blood to help us overseas. Trump now is making us ripe sowing division for an adversary to hurt us.

I pray the normal ones in Defense with our CIA, NSA and FBI are keeping us safe while this Manchurian monster president, his team with help from the money of the 1% are trying to kill us, usurp the spoils leaving nothing for the rest of us while Russia emerges as balance-of-power top dog taking this nation down. This is a national nightmare. I am hoping that I will wake up, it will not be true and there is sanity in the White House, Congress and the Courts again.

Neil Gorsuch does not belong on the Supreme Court--Elizabeth Warren -- Sup. Ct. impending disaster

My Comment: Senator Warren's March 20 Globe editorial says all I need to know that Judge Gorsuch does NOT belong on the highest court in the land. It came as no surprise to me. I hope Senator Warren can persuade by her immense intellect those Republicans who will otherwise give him a vote and ultimately confirm him.

In reality since Democrats do not control the Senate I have little hope Judge Gorsuch will not be confirmed. I can dream though that senators as brilliant as Elizabeth Warren is could work some magic. To use Trump's word: The Trump presidency is a disaster. Please do not make the Supreme Court another disaster too!

Please read her well crafted Globe opinion on Judge Gorsuch linked below:

 https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/03/19/neil-gorsuch-does-not-belong-supreme-court/elq2QqQBdJW5Fh0s2isXhJ/story.html

TRUMP'S VERY BAD DAY--WELL WORTH LISTENING TO THE VIDEO

ADAM SCHIFF OPENING STATEMENT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE -- SETTING OUT THE FACTS THAT WILL DOOM TRUMP!

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Adam+Schiff+intelligence+committe+opening+statement+youtube&t=hb&ia=videos&iax=1&iai=cPeHywajNjs

Comey Confirms F.B.I. Inquiry on Russia; Sees No Evidence of Wiretapping by Obama

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/comey-disclosures-leave-trump-alone-island-conspiracy-theories-n736101

Denny Heck FABULOUS Speech on the Intelligence Committee

In case you missed the end of intelligence hearing, very sobering and eloquent!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-luMIpmjZlo


Sent from my iPad

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Rep. Denny Heck at House Intelligence Committee hearing

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Rep. Denny Heck at House Intelligence Committee hearing

Tom Price: “It’s Better For Our Budget If Cancer Patients Die More Quickly”

Comment: Do you think when and if he or his wife or his children get cancer that is what he will say? Die it's easier on the health care budget if you do. These are the beasts a minority in this nation put into power in this nation. At least he is honest as to where Republicans are now. SHAMEFUL and even more so that anyone especially the middle class and the poor would be so non compis mentis to vote Republican.

Tom Price: “It’s Better For Our Budget If Cancer Patients Die More Quickly”


Brian Kline is the type of person who voted for President Donald Trump in November. He’s a working-class man whose job is in retail, scoring him $11.66/hour. Thanks to Medicaid he’s being treated for cancer. During the CNN town hall with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Kline explained his situation and his struggles. “My question is pretty straightforward,” Kline told Price. “Why do you want to take away my Medicaid expansion?” Price’s dispassionate answer seemed to fall flat on the audience. “I took care of a lot of patients with cancer,” Price explained about his 20 years as an orthopedic surgeon. “We don’t want to take care away from anybody. What we want to make certain, though, is that every single American has access to the kind of coverage and care that they want for themselves.”

“But, what if there are people out there who are going to die more quickly because of what you’re doing here, because you’re essentially taking medical care away from people who need it the most?” Kline wouldn’t back down. “Are you saying you actually want people to be okay with that?” Price thought for a second, then replied: “Look, I understand how all of this sounds right now, but you know, there comes a time in everyone’s life when they just have to stop talking B.S. and be practical. As of right now, the fact to the matter is, our national budget is hemorrhaging money because of Obamacare. And believe me – I get how insensitive that sounds, but at the end of the day, we have to stop ignoring the facts here.”

He continued, “I understand that this is not something anyone wants to hear, especially people who’ve got worse problems to deal with than the state of the national budget, but this is one of those situations where the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. When President Trump assumed office, he was appalled at the state of the national budget and our finances. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Barack Obama was to blame, since he’s the one who left the hot potato behind for us to deal with. Now, I’m not going to go into whether or not he did that on purpose, but at the end of the day, all I can say is, we have to fix the problem or else we’re looking at nationwide riots and another economic recession.”

“Put simply, we have to plug some holes – of which, by the way, there are plenty – and we kind of have to start with the biggest ones,” the orthopedic surgeon added. “Unfortunately for millions of people across the country, Obamacare seems to be the biggest one by far. Besides, there are more ways than one to look at this picture. I know it’s not pretty, but at the end of the day, even people who are able to fight off cancer – I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, Brian – they can’t lead 100 percent normal lives, ever again. What kind of an existence is that, to have to survive instead of live?”

“At the risk of sounding insensitive, we’ve pretty much got two choices here: we either repeal Obamacare, or we take out more loans from countries like China. And nobody wants to be in debt to the Chinese. At the end of the day, it’s better for our national budget if cancer patients pass away more quickly, it’s a lousy way to live anyway, and I’m sorry to say it out loud, but it’s the truth,” Price concluded./politicops

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS OR ILLUMINATIONS:  THIS I AM TOLD IS SATIRE.  AT LEAST I TRY TO BE HONEST MUCH MORE THAN THIS VILE ADMINISTRATION DOES!

Notes on Scandals

I listened to Rachel Maddow's narration expertise about the flood of scandals covering the Trump administration like a opaque burka covers women in Afghanistan.  I simply do not have the ability nor the gargantuan time it would take to comment on all of it.  The number of investigations taking up eons of time and spending millions of taxpayer dollars that could be spent housing the poor, feeding the hungry, helping the homeless and publicly educating our sadly neglected students is mountainous. Yet these, allegedly bipartisan investigations are, perhaps, the most important occurrences in our nation's history short of the gravity and seriousness of a declaration of war.  I hope they will be done completely, with bipartisan translucence and veracity.

There may be no other time in the history of this nation where the connection between a president and his administration to an adversarial foreign power, Russia, and its involvement in this nation's electoral process that is more threatening to our democracy than that which eventually led to the election as president of Donald J. Trump.  Russia interfered with our most sacred democratic procedure that gives this nation its identity as a democracy the glories of which we have spread with American blood all over the world. 

Trump's love affair with Putin may be explained and Trump's willingness to criticize our greatest allies and friends but not ever criticize Russia may become clear.  The knowledge that Trump may have been allegedly complicit in the 2016 electoral hijacking by Russia is, in my opinion, the most heinous and unimaginable highest crime of treason and betrayal of one's country.

The eternal question of what did the president know and when did he know it hovers over our nation like its shroud.  I am hoping for translucent investigations of potentially one of the highest acts of alleged illegality ever perpetrated with the full knowledge and instruction of a president and/or his presidential campaign.  I am linking below the Rachel Maddow broadcast of last evening for those who may not have seen it.  It explains much more than I have the capacity to do.

If you care about your country you will listen to the Maddow broadcast and on Monday, March 20, the House Intelligence Committee will hold its first public hearing into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.   FBI Director James Comey, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates have been asked to testify about potentially the greatest con ever sold.  It is up to you to evaluate whether their statements taken under oath are true.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

Pay particular attention to "Trump scandals overshadow Navy's biggest corruption case" and more playlists on the side of the blog.

Tillerson Talks: The U.S. secretary of state said a freeze of North Korea's nuclear program was not enough and warned of pre-emptive action

This story entitled above appeared in the NYT today (linked below.) Finally, Rex Tillerson talked. What he said, though, surely is not comforting. He ruled out negotiations with the N. Koreans or even China, N. Korea's only ally, to prod North Korea into freezing its nuclear program. N. Korea has tested numbers of missiles recently.

Does he truly think N. Korea is going to stop testing their weapons because of bellicose threats of pre-emptive war from the US? I doubt it.

The recent budget put forth by our non-presidential president has a sharp increase in military spending and nuclear weapons enhancement at the expense of humanitarian programs and wise State Department negotiation policy. It even has proposed cutting the State Department budget 28%. How will that stop N. Korea, not known for a rational thought dictator, from testing more weapons with nuclear capacity? It won't. What it may do is ensure N. Korea develop more quickly a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the US.

China, Japan and other eastern countries that have an existential interest just may be a smidgen worried. I am and all of us should be. This administration with its preemptive war talk threats just may get us all killed.

RESIST and do it now!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/world/asia/rex-tillerson-north-korea-nuclear.html?emc=edit_na_20170317&nl=breaking-news&nlid=75028030&ref=headline

Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Latest Travel Ban Nationwide--yeeeehaaaaa!!!!

TAKE THAT YOU RACIST KNOW NOTHING PRESIDENT.   THE NATION IS BETTER THAN YOU ARE AND EVERYTHING YOU WANT AND EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR IS GOING DOWN AND NOT SOON ENOUGH FOR ME.  YES, GOD BLESS OUR PROGRESSIVE, HUMANE, DECENT AND EMPATHETIC AMERICA!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/us/politics/trump-travel-ban.html?emc=edit_na_20170315&nl=breaking-news&nlid=75028030&ref=headline&_r=0

TRUMPED BY TRUMP?

Rachel Maddow's expose of Trump's 2005 tax return was, perhaps, disappointing. It did not tell us a lot except it told us what Trump made for the tax year 2005 only and that he paid $38 million in taxes but that was all. It left out REAMS and REAMS of information vitally important to most everyone and that is WHAT are the SOURCES of his wealth?

I believe Trump himself sent those measly two pages of a 2005 tax return to David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winner, who wrote "The Making of Trump" and studied Trump for 30 years. He brought it to Rachel. It put Trump in a rather positive light but not much more was revealed that needs to be revealed. Perhaps, it will prompt someone to expose what the American public most importantly has to know. We MUST know if our national security is compromised through his association with Russia, China and other adversarial and even non adversarial nations. We MUST know the SOURCES of his wealth and to which banks such as Deutche Bank fined $10 billion for money laundering, the Bank of China which lent Trump massive money, and the troubled Bank of Cyprus with which Wilbur Ross, Trump's Commerce secretary had to cut ties. There is, of course much much more.

Rachel and her staff are NOT stupid. She knows what she is doing and would not be bamboozled by Trump or anyone else. Either she has more OR she ramped this tax part up hoping it will now be a bulls-eye concentration on everything else about which we the people have a right to know prompting other and more important things to see the light of day.

Rachel already has reported on the potential alleged Russian criminal sources of his wealth -- through money laundering of Russian oligarchs, mafia types and kleptocrats as well as his own HUGE conflicts of money making interests illegally making money through his winning the presidency. Rachel has made these complex subjects as clear as she possibly could given the sparse information that one can get about Trump's tax returns. She has made some things transparent but we need to know the details of it all. We need to know SOURCES.

Stay tuned to the myriad of investigations that will be held. In truth, only a special prosecutor can tell the nation what is so necessary for our survival to know. This is serious. We cannot allow us to be trumped by the sleaze of Trump lest this crackpot president steal our national soul laughing all the way to the bank -- Deutche or otherwise!

What's to Fear?

A Facebook blogger says: "What gets me are evangelical Christians backing Trump--the man who bragged about violating all the seven deadly sins. To me, it shows that they are a political group, not a religious one"

MY COMMENTS: It is ridiculous for those Evangelical and fundamentalist churches to get a tax exemption when they spew their political waste from their pulpits. I cannot believe I am living in the same nation I did just a year ago. That ride down the Trump Tower escalator by Trump to announce his candidacy for president with his paid cheering section above was the kiss of death for our nation unless those who support this mendacious monster grow a brain.

His supporters do not care that he is unethical, that he has, I allege, committed the highest of crimes and misdemeanors including treason for which he should be impeached and convicted because at the core of their love for him is that he has made a place for white supremacist racists who love rounding up brown people and throwing them out of the country. No other candidate would ruin the lives of so many innocents tearing men, women, the sick and the elderly from their children. Even some Republican candidates would not have constructed a religious Muslim ban of entry into this nation or want to eradicate social safety nets and healthcare knowing millions will die. Wingnuts do not care because there is a violence in the soul of the right wing and the extremist loves satisfying his/her hideous mental monstrosity.

What happened to 1/3 of our country? Where does that cruelty come from? Trumpistas would love to send African Americans back to Africa, Hispanics back to where they came from and Muslims back to anywhere but here and Trump gives them a racist forum to do it. No minority is safe -- not blacks, not Hispanics, not Muslims, not Jews, not LGBT people, not the elderly and not the poor. That is why nothing Trump does that is so egregiously unethical and even illegal matters to them. They do not care if people suffer. In fact, I believe, they love it.

I wonder how they will feel when their own children and grandchildren succumb to climate change fossil fuel pollution realities. The preponderance of the right wing is cruel, they are violent and they love guns. Trump is all those things as well or at least pays lip service to them. Why people are what they are is for psychiatrists to analyze the nature and nurture of it all. The bully no matter how much he is analyzed still bullies. What's to fear? Answer: EVERYTHING!

Calling 007

Flynn was a foreign agent when he was in National Security meetings with Trump. Trump has a BIG problem and it is in the link below:

http://www.businessinsider.com/links-between-turkey-and-isis-are-now-undeniable-2015-7

An Addendum + a Diagram I suggest you read

I post below the link to Rachel Maddow's show last evening which starts to draw the connection between the Trump campaign and Russia beginning first with the change in the Republican platform at the convention and witnesses who state unequivocally that the softening of the position with respect to Russia and Ukraine was done at the behest of Trump himself.

In addition to that Rachel interviewed Representative Swalwell who sits on the House Intelligence Committee.  He has drawn incredibly precise diagrams of all the Trump complex connections to Russia making a case for a the mandate of a Special Prosecutor to investigate these matters.  I link his site "Protect Our Democracy" below.

I suggest it would behoove you to listen to Rachel's show and to find also the segment of Representative Swalwell's interview with his informative diagram of the Trump ties to Russia.  It is a mind blowing matter (I paste one diagram below but there is more to say that Swalwell posts) that begs insistently for a Special Prosecutor to illuminate the allegedly utter immoral, unpatriotic, treasonous ties Trump has with Vladimir Putin to enter our nation to shape policy Putin wants. 

This is an attack upon our country by a president who says he puts America first when we know he puts himself first. Trump's loyalty is not to this nation but to his own big con and all the riches he thinks will come his way as he pulls it off while pulling the wool over his supporters' eyes.  HRC said it best:  DEPLORABLE!

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

https://swalwell.house.gov/russia

A Mountain of Lies -- Times 10

The lies, upon lies, upon lies, upon lies within the highest echelons of the Trump administration about its connection to Russia are legion. They reach the summit of the mountain of Everest. If this sordid Russian mega scandalous mess and involvement of the Trump administration as deep as the deepest ocean with an unfriendly nation, Russia, does not require -- no, does not mandate -- a special prosecutor than neither did Watergate because THIS is worse -- much worse -- than Watergate. This is Watergate on steroids. Watergate did NOT involve potential treason and Russian interference in a US presidential election with the Trump campaign's knowledge, even encouragement of and acquiescence to it. It is nearly crystal clear that Trump and his administration were connected to Russia in ways few could imagine until Trump from the stage during the campaign begged Russia to hack into the Democrats' email. They did and I allege Trump knew they would. Why would a presidential candidate at the time ask for interference in a US national presidential election by Russia when Russia for decades has been a US adversarial nation unless Trump knew the Russian interference would help get Trump elected and defeat Hillary Clinton. Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, knew he could not get what he wanted -- more power -- unless Trump won. Putin hated Hillary Clinton whom he knew would not allow him permission to add to Russia's European geography and political control which Russia once held but lost when Communism fell. As I have said often Putin wants Russia's empire back, wants the adulation of his population for it and Trump, the useful idiot, would comply IF Trump won the presidency.

Moreover, Trump knew, although he claimed he did not, that the Platform Committee at the Republican National Convention changed a small paragraph in its platform about US/Russia relations. It called for an improving relationship with Russia heretofore unknown within Republican ideological circles and against US policy for decades. The question is why. The answer for Trump is usually money. The conflicts of business interests of Trump about which he once bragged spread deeply into Russia and among its oligarchs. Putin knows this is potential blackmail he could use against Trump.

According to Politico "Citing anonymous intelligence officials, the Times report named Flynn, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, onetime campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page and Trump confidant Roger Stone as the aides whose communications the FBI had probed for possible contacts with Russia." We know Manafort and Flynn have resigned. Attorney General Sessions should resign also since he lied at his cabinet Congressional hearing. He did, in fact, meet with the Russian ambassador and did so three times!

If the scandal is not investigated in its entirely, with transparency and without partisan bias to illuminate, I believe, this Manchurian presidency operating inside the White House at the highest echelons then Republicans most assuredly will face obliteration in the 2018 midterms and they know it. The treasonous scandal SHOULD be made transparent and involve an unbiased Special Prosecutor. 

Since Republicans control the congressional investigations one can be assured the verdict will be skewed away from Trump. This cannot stand and I hope it will not. The American people now know, at least most of them do, that the connection with Russia reaches high into the halls of power. The polling data shows a wide preponderance of the nation think a special prosecutor is a necessity and so do I times 10!

Donald Trump's Worst Deal

The link below is yet another story in Trump's war chest of conflict-of-interest business deals around the globe. It is written by Adam Davidson in "The New Yorker." Trump's conflicts of interest we know are legion and he refuses to divest himself of any them placing them in his children's sighted "blind trust" control which is not a blind trust at all. He will never reveal his income tax filings (as all other modern day presidents have) lest we find proof of exactly what he owns, how interest conflicted his properties are and perhaps even find out the many impeachable offenses -- not the least of which are his well known ties to an adversarial power, Russia. This transaction, however, one among so many others, could be the worst of them all. It involves as Adam Davidson states the fact that "Trump helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran's Revolutionary Guard." That money is used by the Revolutionary Guard of Iran for the funding of terrorist activity all over the world.

Not only is this alleged transaction illegal but it would be, in fact, treason if proven true. I do not use that term in this instance lightly. I take a small bow as I put up the facts of this very illegal Trump transaction in a link on my Facebook page hours before Rachel instructed on it as part of her primary story last evening. She, of course, sets it up much more perfectly than I ever could. I post along with this sordid story by Mr. Davidson Rachel's link below which she entitles "Sketchy Trump deal eyed for potential corruption, ties to Iran" explaining it in understandable almost poetic prose as she details why this is Trump's worst deal and interviews the author of "The New Yorker" article as well. Rachel, in my opinion, is a national treasure.


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal?mbid=nl_170306_daily&CNDID=49376133&spMailingID=10564635&spUserID=MTg2NjYxMjY4NTY3S0&spJobID=1120497988&spReportId=MTEyMDQ5Nzk4OAS2

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

Dystopian Devolution

“The Camp of the Saints” "tells a grotesque tale about a migrant invasion to destroy Western civilization."

MY COMMENT:

Steve Bannon, is one of Trump's most trusted advisors. This chilling sociopath, Bannon, sits in a seat on the National Security Counsel and has the president's ear 24/7. Linda Chavez is a supporter of the Trump economic policy said "Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”

How did we get this bastardization of the Democratic Republic our Founders so carefully tried to construct to avoid a demagogue when Drumpf received 3 million less votes than Hillary Clinton? The book entitled above, "The Camp of the Saints," is Steve Bannon's Bible and occupies a high place in the goodreads section of Alt Right wingnut thought. It sits next to other genocidal instructionals, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and William Luther Pierce (pen name Andrew Macdonald) "The Turner Diaries." The Turner Diaries was the motivation for Timothy McVeigh, the violent anti government right wing extremist and his bombing in 1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (pic below) killing 168 human beings including children and injuring countless others. This is what the Alt Right supporters of not-my-president, Donald J. Trump, are capable:




"This Stunningly Racist French Novel is How Steve Bannon Explains the World"

By Paul Blumenthal , JM Rieger

"Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelersfrom seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history."

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. ... I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.

“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”

The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”

Upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Linda Chavez, a Republican commentator who has worked for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush but opposed Trump’s election, also reviewed the book back then. Forty years later, she hasn’t forgotten it.

“It is really shockingly racist,” Chavez told The Huffington Post, “and to have the counselor to the president see this as one of his touchstones, I think, says volumes about his attitude.” The cover of this English translation of The Camp of the Saints calls it “a chilling novel about the end of the white world.”
 
The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named “the turd-eater” because he literally eats shit, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an “armada” of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.


The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere and overthrow white Western society.


The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.


Calgues, the obvious Raspail stand-in, is one of those taking up arms against the migrants and their culturally “cuckolded” white supporters. Just before killing a radical hippie, Calgues compares his own actions to past heroic, sometimes mythical defenses of European Christendom. He harkens back to famous battles that fit the clash-of-civilizations narrative — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Constantinople to the same — and glorifies colonial wars of conquest and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.


Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings “thousands of wretched creatures” whose very bodies arouse disgust: “Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms.” Poor brown children are spoiled fruit “starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”


The ship’s inhabitants are also sexual deviants who turn the voyage into a grotesque orgy. “Everywhere, rivers of sperm,” Raspail writes. “Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”


The white Christian world is on the brink of destruction, the novel suggests, because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost that necessary belief in its own cultural and racial superiority. As he talks to the hippie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: “That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”


The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. “The Fall of Constantinople,” Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, “is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.”
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images Protesters rally against President Donald Trump’s travel ban at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 28, 2017, in New York City.


Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1972 and 1973, after a stay at his aunt’s house near Cannes on the southern coast of France. Looking out across the Mediterranean, he had an epiphany: “And what if they came?” he thought to himself. “This ‘they’ was not clearly defined at first,” he told the conservative publication Le Point in 2015. “Then I imagined that the Third World would rush into this blessed country that is France.”


Raspail’s novel has been published in the U.S. several times, each time with the backing of the anti-immigration movement.


The U.S. publishing house Scribner was the first to translate the book into English in 1975, but it failed to reach a wide audience amid withering reviews by critics. A rare favorable take appeared in National Review. “Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” then-Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote in 1975. “Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex.” Hart added that “a great fuss” was being made over “Raspail’s supposed racism,” but that the “liberal rote anathema on ‘racism’ is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.”


The book received a second life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon fortune and sister to right-wing benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, funded its republication and distribution. This time it gained a cult following among immigration opponents.


May’s money has also been instrumental in funding the efforts of John Tanton, the godfather of the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. Tanton, who began as an environmentalist and population control proponent, founded a host of groups focused on restricting immigration, including the Federation of American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and U.S. English. May’s fortune has fueled these groups with tens of millions of dollars in contributions over the years.


Linda Chavez was recruited in 1987 to head U.S. English, which advocates for English to be designated the country’s official language. But then a series of disturbing stories painted Tanton’s motives in a racial light. Among other issues, Chavez said she learned that his funding came from the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and from May, who Chavez knew had helped publish The Camp of the Saints. Chavez recalled seeing Tanton’s staffers carrying the book around their offices. She quit the group.


Tanton, who insists his opposition to immigration is not connected to race at all, told The Washington Post in 2006 that his mind “became focused” on the issue after reading The Camp of the Saints. In 1995, his small publishing house, Social Contract Press, brought the book back into print for a third time in the U.S., again with funding from May. Historians Paul Kennedy and Matt Connelly tied the book to then-current concerns about global demographic trends in a cover story for The Atlantic.


“Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience,” Tanton wrote in 1994. “It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes.”


In 2001, the book was republished one more time, again by Tanton, and again gained a cult following among opponents of immigration like the border-patrolling Minutemen and eventually the online “alt-right.”
Kirk Irwin/Getty Images for SiriusXM On his Breitbart News radio show, Stephen Bannon repeatedly used The Camp of the Saints as a metaphor for migrants and refugees.


Bannon’s alt-right-loving Breitbart has run multiple articles over the past three years referencing the novel. When Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in September 2015, Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, now an aide to Bannon in the White House, compared his admonition to Raspail’s liberal Latin American pontiff. And the novel’s thesis that migration is invasion in disguise is often reflected in Bannon’s public comments.


The refugee crisis “didn’t just happen by happenstance,” Bannon said in an April 2016 radio interview with Sebastian Gorka, who now works for the National Security Council. “These are not war refugees. It’s something much more insidious going on.”


Bannon has also echoed the novel’s theory that secular liberals who favor immigration and diversity weaken the West.


“Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West to actually win this war?” he asked Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), now the attorney general, in June 2016.


“I’m worried about that. … They’re eroding, regularly it seems to me, classical American values that are so critical to our success,” Sessions replied.


Like Raspail, Bannon has reveled in the past victories of Christendom over Islamic forces.


“If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing,” he said in a 2014 speech broadcast to a conference at the Vatican. “I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna [the Battle of Vienna in 1683], or Tours [the Battle of Tours in 732], or other places. … They were able to stave this off, and they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.”

Now Bannon sits at the right hand of the U.S. president, working to beat back what Bannon calls “this Muslim invasion.” And Trump is all in on the project. During the campaign, he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country. His Jan. 28 executive order, since blocked in the courts, turned this campaign idea into executive policy.

Trump has continued to defend the executive order as a life-or-death national security issue. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America,” he said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.

Five days earlier, Trump had called his immigration enforcement efforts a “military operation.”

Although Department of Homeland Security officials walked back that statement, the president’s conflation of immigration with warfare did not go unnoticed.

“They see this as a war,” Chavez said.

Chavez, who supports some of Trump’s economic policy proposals, called the direction the White House is taking on immigration and race “extremely dangerous.” She said Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”

A Trumpian Malignant Mendacious MESS -- Checkmate

The Trump Papers are WORSE -- MUCH worse -- than Watergate. There is no comparison. What idot runs for the presidency with as much financial baggage and potential nefarious activity as a Donald J. Trump? It is why he is so bad at everything he touches. He is a DOPE. Everyone let's him get away with everything -- his wives, his children, the woman he allegedly raped who signed the court dismissal with a confidentiality clause. I am wondering for how much. How about all those Gloria Allred women he is alleged to have abused? How about his friend Epstein who spent years in jail for sex with young girls. Trump said Epstein was a lotta fun and that he stayed at his place. Oh I bet Epstein was a lotta fun -- the rumors swirled. Why were they not chased down? This man wanted to occupy a holy place after all. Only Billy Bush paid for the Access Hollywood tape that was not Billy's fault. Billy should have kept his job and Trump should have been FIRED!

The monstrosity Trump is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on taxpayer dime because some people had their brains tied to their posterior. Why the American electorate who voted for him could be that stupid I will never know. Why was all that was sleazy about this nasty dude dropped? What about all ALL his business conflicts all over the world that just went away into thin air? What about the post office near the White House turned into a Trump hotel where he is still making illegal money. Why when he went to Cuba illegally was that was dropped. He has his baby chicks control his business assets as if they will not say a peep to him. It's ALL unethical if not illegal as the money he allegedly laundered for Russian oligarchs is in the mix. It's ALL coming out. He and his corrupt, evil, sickening minions are going down as he is in DEEP trouble. It is simply NOT too bright to alienate the CIA, Department of Defense, the National Security Agency not to mention the press. It's not smart to alienate the deep state by overturning decades of balance of power politics to deep kiss Putin's ugly mug. This will NOT be let go no matter how much he whines or that he is president of the United States. He is in TOO deep now and big surprise, Donald, this is NOT a corporation (although it sometimes acts like one) and you are not a king!

The question is knowing what he must know about himself so he would not release his tax returns why would he attempt the presidency where the spotlight is on a candidate constantly and will be on him with a 24/7 magnifying glass if he gets the job. Read David K. Johnston who studied Trump for 30 years and knows so much about him and it's not pretty. His book "The Making of Trump" is excellent. All one had to do is read it to know a vote for Trump is a vote for a mephistophelean monster. According to Johnston yesterday Trump has been doing business with the Russians for 30 years!

Republican legislators care about the 1% and their own bank accounts. They care nothing for most everyone else. Why would anyone white, brown, black, yellow, blue collar, white collar, man or woman ever vote for this Cretan when they figured out his CON and that Mitt Romney was right? He put a score of billionaires in his cabinet -- that should say it all not to mention the racists in his administration occupying a seat of political blasphemy in the people's house. The White House today should be painted with the word SHAME AND SHAME ON ANY WHO VOTED FOR THIS MALIGNANT MENDACIOUS MESS. CHECKMATE!

Humpty Dumpty -- the Folly of the Bull Market

In the midst of our political Trumpian chaos do not take as a tranquilizer or be fooled by the skyrocketing Wall Street market. Non-existent regulations led to the 1929 Great Depression. Those New Deal regulations that were supposed to ensure the Depression never happen again were repealed and ultimately led to the credit rating mortgage security monsoon. The Great Recession of 2007 was born. Too-Big-to-Fail Banks were given the much loathed bailouts and Obama's Dodd-Frank regulation was passed. Recent Republican and Trumpian removal of those regulations yet again is music to Wall Street's ears. Trump is talking trillion buck infrastructure and tax cuts for the rich. What's for Wall Street and the 1% not to like? Answer: Nothing. What's for us, the plebeians, not to like? Answer: EVERYTHING. You who voted for the ignoramus Trump or were duped by his "charisma" will feel the ultimate crush when Wall Street comes tumbling down and there is no will to bail banks out again. Can you spell Depression both economic and emotional?

Trump and his tax plan stupidity with his planned infrastructure spending will produce HUMONGOUS national deficits. How much of a ready-to-burst-bubble do you think is there waiting for the right time to explode? A Wall Street gone wild with no oversight will ensure a bust will happen again. Deregulation is poison for the middle class and their 401K's. It is exactly why Social Security/Medicare is so necessary. Ayan Randian unrestrained capitalism gone wild is hazardous to our health and has been proven to be so throughout our nation's history. Even decades long Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan the philosophical devotee of Ayn Rand, admitted he got it wrong when the economy was on the brink of collapse in 2007! Americans with their notoriously bad memory forget. The bull market is great for the 1% but temporary for the rest of us. An unregulated market WILL burst just like it has in so many eras before when Wall Street regulations are relaxed or non-existent. When the market goes wild and unrestrained it ensures an ultimate panic as it goes down. The plummeting millions of dollars will ensure millions of depositors will try in futility to take their money out of failing banks. It will not be such a George Bailey wonderful life!

Children do not know how to stop playing with things that could kill them. An anarchy of greed rules this nation and it is NOT good no matter how much Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" fame says it is. Like Humpty Dumpty Wall Street WILL come crashing down yet again but no one will have the will this time to put Humpty Dumpty together again. All one has to do is just wait!