Ignore The Fake Election Cliffhanger Bullshit- The Republicans Will Still Rule The House Of Representatives

As of this writing, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) has won 215 House districts, the Democrats 206. That leaves 14 districts where the votes are still being counted. There are 435 House seats. 218 constitutes a majority. So the Republicans just need to win just 3 of the remaining 14 districts to retain their control of the House.

This is over.
 
Given that the Republican Party now is a cult with a Leader, Trump, who has virtually total domination of the party, the U.S. government as of January will be in Trump's hands. The Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Republican Judiciary. Even when he was out of office, that Judiciary bent over backwards to shield him from prosecution for his crimes. His hand-picked Federal District Judge, the lawless Aileen Cannon, had control over the criminal case arising from his theft of a large quantity of classified documents. This criminal judge delayed the case for years, then suddenly this year dismissed the charges on the spurious grounds that the special prosecutor was illegally appointed. (A completely ridiculous assertion with no basis in law or precedent.) This meant that there would be no trial (assuming the prosecutor got the charges reinstated in the Trump-aligned judiciary). Federal Judges at the Appeals Court level and the Supreme Court dragged their feet on ruling on appeals (spurious ones by Trump's lawyers, meritorious ones by special prosecutor Jack Smith) and threw up roadblock after roadblock to bringing the criminal Trump to justice.

The Republican Supreme Court even issued a gratuitous and shocking ruling, out of the blue, that presidents are IMMUNE FROM PROSECUTION for ANYTHING they do in office "in their official capacity." A meaningless qualifier, since all presidents always claim that everything they do is part of their official duties.

Some people, both establishment types and some aspiring to be establishment types, not unreasonably fretted that a president could order a Navy SEAL team to murder a political opponent and be immune. But that sort of thing already happens. It just happens to people that "respectable" bourgeois types don't care about. Trump sent a U.S. Marshall's death squad to murder Michael Reinoehl, an Antifa activist who shot and killed a fascist stormtrooper type. [1]

 
And under Obama the government murdered journalist Michael Hastings in California and Black Lives Matter commentator Sandra Bland in Texas. Obama ordered weekly murders of "terrorists," and we are supposed to believe all were overseas. Many were by no reasonable definition "terrorists." such as farmers, peasants, and children.

Obama gifted Trump and all future presidents with the power to imprison American citizens in the Guantanamo Bay torture center or any secret site without charges and with no legal recourse. He did this by attaching a new legal authority to the "Defense" budget one year. Some leading dissidents brought a lawsuit, which they won in a Federal district court. The Obama regime filed an "emergency" appeal the same or next day and got the Federal Appellate court in New York  City to throw out the case entirely, claiming the dissidents didn't have "standing," - because they hadn't yet been rendered to a secret torture center! (Of course once they are, they'll be helpless to communicate with the outside world. How's THAT for a Catch-22?)

Obama fatuously reassured the public not to worry about this new anti-human law, because HE wasn't going to use it. What about future presidents, asshole? What a loathsome jackass. 

1]  Trump was very briefly asked about this assassination by a reporter, and Trump said something like "You had to do it," kill Reinoehl. That answer was considered the end of the matter by the murderous corporate propaganda system.

Republican Supreme Court Rules "Death To Workers!"

  Very predictably, the Republican Supreme Court denied the Biden regime permission to have OSHA [1] require companies employing 100 or more workers to require their employees to  be vaccinated against Covid-19 OR wear masks and get tested weekly. Hardly an onerous requirement, and no one is being forced to get vaccinated. You could see this one coming a mile away. HOWEVER The Supremes aren't taking any chances with their OWN health! They gave the executive branch a permission slip to allow Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to require all health care workers at institutions that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to be vaccinated, unless they get a medical or religious exemption.

After all, one of THEM might wind up in a hospital or clinic or doctor's office sometime!

The vote to emasculate OSHA was 6 to 3. The 6 Republican apparatchiks voted as a bloc. Disingenuously they said it was up to Congress to empower OSHA to mandate this, knowing full well that such a thing is impossible in the U.S. Senate as currently constituted. This is a ploy these cynics have pulled before, for example when they screwed Ledbetter out of a lifetime of stolen wages with an absurd decision. (That time Congress did act, unlike when the Republican Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights act in two decisions and erased the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law from the books, opening the way to the stranglehold that reactionary billionaires currently have over U.S. electoral politics.)

The 3 Democratic appointed justices don't matter, despite media propagandists pretending they do, pretending there's some mystery about how the reactionary bloc will decide issues. The power establishment's propaganda system has made strenuous efforts to maintain the absurd fiction that this court is some kind of neutral judicial body when it is patently purely political, very partisan, and with an extreme rightwing ideology. The 6 reactionaries are mislabeled as "conservatives." The ACTUAL conservatives, that is, those who want to preserve the status quo, are the 3 mislabeled as "liberals."

The U.S. Supreme Court has been a Republican court since the regime of Richard Nixon (1969-1974). Nixon filled four of the nine seats on the court with reactionaries. Reagan in 1986 gave us the extreme reactionary Antonin Scalia, with 100% approval from the Democrats. The Senate voted to confirm Scalia 98-0! I was sick to my stomach when he was nominated, just reading The New York Times whitewashing version of how reactionary he was. (Ironically, then-Senator Al Gore voted to confirm Scalia, who later repaid the favor by cheating Gore out of the presidency in 2000 with four GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) accomplices on the high court. (Reagan had previously put Scalia on the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the most important appeals court in the Federal system. That was 1982, again with no obstruction from Democrats.)

After Reagan, Bush the Elder gifted us with sex offender Clarence Thomas, a black man with the mind of a white bigot. Here again the Democrats made sure to confirm this bitter right-wing fanatic to a lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful posts in the U.S. government. The Democrats controlled the Senate, and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee was none other than Senator Joe Biden (the same Joe Biden who is now president of the U.S.). Thomas used to sexually harass the women working for him. (Bush had made him head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for the purpose of sabotaging government anti-racial discrimination efforts- perversely, Thomas despises affirmative action even though he is black.) One of his victims, Anita Hill, testified to this, only to be savagely smeared in hearings by the Republicans, which Chairman Biden allowed. Privately Biden told the Senate Democrats not to believe Hill, and he blocked a number of corroborating witnesses from appearing. This is told in damning detail in the book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, by Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer. They were reporters at the Wall Street Journal at the time, and later climbed higher up the media hierarchy ladder. Mayer became a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and Abramson the first female top editor at The New York Times, both publications being at the pinnacle of U.S. media prestige and influence.  Abramson then discovered she was being paid less than her predecessors and confronted her boss, publisher and scion of the Sulzberger family (that owns controlling interest in the corporation) Arthur Ochs "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., about this, it peeved him, so he fired her and trashed her after that.

One other side note: Thomas' video porn viewing habits were revealed during his confirmation process by the simply expedient of getting his video store rental records. This prompted Congress to rush through a law protecting the privacy of such records. Congress can act when it's an emergency!

Then we come to the Obama rollover. In the last year of his presidency, a vacancy occurred on the court. The Senate boss at the time, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (the Gang Of Plunderers held the Senate then) refused to allow confirmation hearings to even occur for Obama's nominee. This went on for eleven months. Then Trump was "elected." (Hillary Clinton beat him by 2.9 million votes total, but the Electoral College, the real electorate, elected Trump. Democracy as practiced only in America. That was the FIFTH time in U.S. history that the winner lost and the loser won.(The previous time was 2000, when the Republican Supreme Court robbed Al Gore of victory.) So the Democrats proceeded to blame Vladimir Putin for the outcome.)

What did Obama and the Democrats do during this outrageous subversion of the Constitutional duty of the president to fill court vacancies? Nothing much. Did you hear any outrage? Imagine if Democrats blocked a Republican president from filling a vacancy! They'd be threatening civil war- or starting one! It wasn't even a campaign issue in that year's presidential election (2020). So much for making sure the Supreme Court doesn't abolish the right to abortion! (Not to mention dozens of other ways the Supreme Court messes with people's lives.)

"Uhhh, you really thought I cared about YOU?"

Next we got the sociopathic, narcissistic con man Trump getting to fill FOUR seats on the court. He openly proclaimed that he would appoint people to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Yet during Senate confirmation hearings for these far-right-wing extremist ghouls, Democratic Senators went along with the pretense that this wasn't necessarily so. And in another example of a Democrat protecting a sex offender nominee, rightwing California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein hid from her colleagues the fact that nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape a teenage girl (as well as having committed sexual offenses in college). His Federalist Society-approved picks included a fundamentalist religious fanatic, Amy Coney Barrett.

"Baby, it's back to coat hanger abortions for YOU!"

So we've got Scalia/Thomas/Kavanaugh/the Obama Rollover, and all the other reactionaries the Federal judiciary has been crammed with on all three levels (District, which try cases, Appeals, and the Supreme Court, which rejects 90% of attempted appeals, agreeing to review only a small number of cases a year so as not to interfere with the four months they're on vacation). You've probably noticed a pattern here. For at least the past 30 years or so, the Democrats have been accomplices to the Republicans in creating an arch-reactionary Supreme Court, indeed a revanchist one that is driving the U.S. back to a 19th century legal regime. Why does the "liberal" Democratic Party keep aiding and abetting the Republican packing of the virtually all-powerful Supreme Court with reactionaries? The fact that they are doing it is undeniable on the evidence. Their motives are two:

First, just as the awful reactionaries the Republicans run for president provide convenient bogeymen for the Democrats to run against, forcing many people to vote for the Democrats while holding their noses  (political extortion), so the specter of the Supreme Court overturning the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973 which finally granted women a limited right to terminate pregnancies, has been a perennial fright campaign the Democrats trot out at every election. I've received years of fund-raising letters from the Democrats, such as from Nancy Pelosi, and their various committees, telling me how the Supreme Court "hangs in the balance" and thus so does "a woman's right to choose"- maybe if they weren't allergic to the word "abortion," the procedure wouldn't still be so stigmatized that most women still refuse to stand up and defend it. But now it looks like the Democrats cut it too close, as the high court they have helped create is about to strip women of the right to control their own bodies. NOW what, Democrats? Fucking assholes!

Second, and more fundamentally, the Democratic Party IS a right-wing party. It is just as imperialist as the Republicans, and just as dedicated to the perpetuation of corporate oligarchy as is the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). It is not "better" than the GOP. It is merely somewhat less awful. Having a rightwing court is a useful backstop for when the Democratic politicians feel compelled to give in to pressure from their voters and actually pass some progressive legislation. They can rely on the reactionary Supreme Court to cancel the legislation by declaring it "Unconstitutional." There is always a slew of corporate and billionaire-funded reactionary dogs to bring legal challenges to such laws. So reactionary rich people pay reactionary anti-social freaks to sue and reactionary judges do the rest. It's a neat system. Reactionaries working hand in hand, in an organized system of repression and economic rapine. Works for the ultra-rich and their neo-fascist attack dogs. For the rest of us, not so much.

"We're one big happy SUPREME court!'

1] OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Agency, part of the Department of Labor. OSHA is a mostly toothless regulatory agency that is deliberately extremely underfunded and understaffed by Congress so it is unable to do its putative task of regulating all the workplaces in the U.S. for health and safety violations. Typically, when it happens to discover a violation (it only discovers a tiny percentage of them, we can safely assume, since it can rarely inspect most workplaces) the company is merely told to correct the violation. Sometimes a small fine is "proposed," which the company typically challenges and gets reduced. If a worker or workers are killed on the job, things are taken a bit more seriously, but the companies and their managers and executives still get away with what in many cases is murder. (For example, criminally negligent homicide, and depraved indifference homicide charges would apply in many cases.)

The sorry history of how U.S. companies are allowed to get away with maiming, killing, and sickening workers has been well documented in numerous books and articles, including in outlets like Mother Jones and The Nation magazines, and even in the rare major media story about a particular company.

Speaking of vicious businessmen, some years back there was a case in New York City, the Pymm Thermometer company. It made glass thermometers which are filled with mercury. It knowingly exposed its uneducated and naive workers to mercury vapors without respiratory protection. The result was a number of them were permanently maimed with holes in their brains. The local district attorney in Brooklyn brought criminal charges against I believe the company owner, and the jury convicted. The trial judge immediately threw out the convictions, and the criminals got away with it. This in "liberal " New York City, where the Democratic Party appoints its party hacks and  wired insiders as judges. (There is a charade of democracy in that the judges are on the ballot in elections but they never have any opposition candidates so like in China or the Soviet Union or Iraq under Saddam Hussein there is only one "choice.") 

The story was reported in The Village Voice weekly newspaper, a publication that reported what the "mainstream" media systematically hid, and it was gradually destroyed. But that's a long story. An internet search on "Pymm Thermometer" turned up a civil suit filed on behalf of Pymm's crippled working class victims, who can no longer earn a living and are reliant on the crumbs that poor unemployed people can squeeze from the government. The victims lost, and their case was dismissed, as the so-called "Workers Compensation" law barred them from suing. The NY state courts ruled that what Pymm did was NOT an "intentional tort"- BULLSHIT!- therefore the victims could only collect crumbs from Workers Comp. Thus do capitalist courts protect criminal businesspeople, in the U.S. version of capitalism.

Mistress of Torture Scales Summit Of CIA, An Event That Will Go Down In The Annals Of Feminism

At least, that's what the CIA propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by various media organs and stooges, would have us believe.

It's not every day that a CIA torturer is hailed as a feminist Icon.

Mistress of Torture Gina Haspel, Feminist Flag-Bearer? Really?

I don't think so. But that's one line of propaganda that was used to promote her as CIA Director to replace Michael "Death to Edward Snowden!" Pompeo, and is being echoed still after her successful promotion.

Oh, the quibbling and denials that would be hurled in reaction to "CIA torturer," if there was an actual political opposition in this country that was allowed to be heard in "official" forums, and in the "official" media. First of all, they refuse to call it torture. They prefer the Gestapo terminology, "enhanced interrogation techniques." Literally, that is the English translation from the Gestapo torture manual, and the CIA didn't just borrow the euphemism, they borrowed some of the "techniques" too. Sometimes "reporters" and "commentators" use the phrase "brutal interrogation techniques," I guess to show how daring and independent they are. Occasionally one is so bold as to say "torture," then quickly retreat back into the euphemisms.

When they stop using the euphemisms "law enforcement" and "intelligence agencies" for secret police, and "defense" for aggression, then I'll sit up and take notice.

The CIA quibblers and their enablers and protectors  would also seize on the technicality that the aforementioned CIA secret police officer, Gina Haspel, was merely in charge of a "black site" in Thailand, that is, a CIA torture center. She didn't do the dirty work with her own hands. For some reason, the CIA was squeamish about torturing people inside the U.S. Maybe they didn't want to rely solely on the permission slip written for them by Bush regime apparatchik John Yoo, a type of lawyer reminiscent of Third Reich lawyers who wrote the various genocidal Nazi laws and the legal "philosophy" that put an intellectual patina on Nazi ideology. Yoo has been rewarded for his Service To The Nation with a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School, an alleged bastion of liberalism. And by the way, "the" media has whitewashed most of the torture used. It was a lot more than waterboarding, as they are now presenting it, and the other "techniques" which they have tossed down the memory hole have been well documented.

Saying Haspel didn't torture anyone is like saying Adolf Hitler didn't kill any Jews. He didn't, actually. Not by his own hand, that we know of. Heinrich Himmler never tortured anyone either. In fact, the one time he ever witnessed people being executed, he vomited. Such a delicate soul.
The point is, it's completely disingenuous and dishonest for the CIA to deny Haspel's command responsibility for torture.

But no matter. As I expected, the U.S. Senate confirmed Haspel as the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, chief of the CIA global Gestapo.

So the "glass ceiling" of secret police chief has finally yielded to a female. What a glad day.
Like the day a "black" man was elected president. You remember him. The guy who protected torturers, and imprisoned the only CIA officer who publicly denounced torture, John Kiriakou. The president who perfected the secret police total  surveillance state that the Bush regime began under the name "total information awareness." (A form of total population control.)

The "black" president who took Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act and ran with it, going after all manner of whistleblowers and journalists. Oh, what a "historic" presidency that was! A real advance for "black people." (That's why blacks stopped being imprisoned in vastly disproportionate numbers, and police stopped murdering blacks. Oops, those things didn't happen. But blacks got richer under Obama. Oh wait, they got poorer. A LOT poorer, especially since his banker buddies scammed so many of them out of their homes with mortgage chicanery. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...)

Before the whole sorry saga of the campaign to elevate Mistress of Torture Haspel is permanently consigned to the memory hole by the power establishment, let's take a stroll down memory lane and review some of the criminal media complicity with the CIA and its Torture Mistress. Come with me now back to the day Trump announced the nomination of Haspel to replace the loathsome billionaire Koch brothers toady Pompeo, who was picked to replace Rex Tillerson, unceremoniously bumped from his seat as Secretary of State by Trump, who announced his firing on Twitter without telling Tillerson, in order to publicly humiliate him.

 It was March 13, 2018.  At 8 am East Coast time, the alternative program Democracy Now!, a self-styled "progressive" show, came on the air and announced Trump's choice as new CIA director, and that she ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand where kidnapped prisoners were tortured and interrogated in secret.

Democracy Now! may have been aghast, but the reaction of the establishment media was celebratory. And they were apparently briefed in advance by the CIA on what line to push, unless they all just coincidentally think exactly alike.

For example, one of the main local New York City "news" radio stations, WCBS, a cog in the CBS/Viacom media empire, at 8:59 am hailed as historic the first woman to head the CIA. No mention of that key part of her resume, overseeing a secret torture prison and ordering the destruction of videotapes of the interrogations, evidence of her crimes.

Later that day, the U.S. government-created national radio "public" propaganda network, NPR, on their  4 PM "news" show, the propaganda reader Laksmi Singh falsely asserted that Haspel will likely face "tough questioning" over black sites at confirmation. Which was obvious bullshit, as turned out to be the case.

The British government's propaganda arm, the BBC, predictably made itself a handmaiden to the CIA propaganda campaign. The BBC "News"Hour show, that afternoon, promoted the "advance for women" line. As they so often do, they hauled on a U.S. imperialist apparatchik to spew propaganda without being challenged. This creep, a former chair of the House "intelligence" committee, a Congressional body under the control of the secret police, pushed the CIA line, asserting that Haspel "broke the glass ceiling."  He insisted that "no law was broken" by kidnapping, torture, and murder of prisoners. The mealy-mouthed Gestapo cheerleader gushed, "Not a blemish on her record to any degree...Trust me on this," she'll be great, he insisted.

In the ensuing months, establishment propaganda coverage continued to push the CIA's ersatz "feminism" line, minimized the torture (reducing it to just waterboarding) while usually substituting the aforementioned euphemisms for "torture," rarely mentioning the destruction of evidence (and never the deaths of prisoners in CIA captivity), and mostly focusing on wondering whether Haspel would be confirmed, making a drama out of what was really a foregone conclusion given the reactionary, imperialist majority in the Senate, all the while pretending that the Senate "confirmation process" isn't just a show, or that there was any doubt about her confirmation. There was a small moment of semi-drama when the dying Senator John McCain (he has an incurable brain cancer) urged his colleagues to reject Haspel. McCain was shot down while bombing northern Vietnam and tortured in captivity, which taught him that torture was evil. Unfortunately that's the only lesson he learned, as he is going to his death still a fanatical believer in U.S. imperialism, aggression, militarism, and war against small and weak targets. A Trump aide counseled that McCain could be ignored since he would be "dead soon." This comment was duly leaked and then ginned up into a political soap opera pseudo-scandal for days on end by the establishment media and Democratic Party hacks, who demanded an apology or even firing of the offender.

But I actually don't think Haspel is any more egregious as a CIA head than predecessors like Pompeo, or Hayden, or Panetta, or Tenet (who delivered "faulty," i.e. mendacious, "intelligence" to prompt the invasion of Iraq in 2003), or Colby (who before he was DCI headed the Phoenix torture and mass murder program in Vietnam, which created over 50,000 corpses), or Helms, responsible for the CIA coup in Chile in 1973, or the fascist Allen Dulles, who organized the assassination of president Kennedy in 1963 (after he was out of office, but not out of power) and innumerable other crimes.

The CIA is responsible for millions of deaths, most of which they instigated by getting fascist militaries and secret police agencies to kill people whose names were mostly supplied BY the CIA. In Indonesia in 1965 they instigated the murder of a million "communists" by the military, and greased the skids for the awful dictator Suharto to take power as a U.S. client.(The horrible propagandist Fareed Zakaria, is to this day pushing the CIA disinformation story that what happened in Indonesia was an attempted "Communist coup" that was thwarted by the Indonesian military, an absurd story on its face given the million unarmed civilians who were murdered.) Under Allen Dulles, there were the fascist coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) which destroyed democracies in those nations and ultimately resulted in a quarter million state murders in each of those countries. These "operations" were done on the orders of president Eisenhower, who most of the American left only remembers fondly for a couple of throwaway sentences in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, where he says "we must guard against the undue influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military industrial complex." The complex that HE did so much to build up! And MOST of the speech was devoted to defending that complex, and denouncing the Communist Menace. He also uttered the standard guff about the U.S.' "peaceful" intentions and methods! But apparently leftists so crave "respectability" that they'll seize on an establishment icon, even the man who ordered the two most notorious coups in CIA and U.S. history, to "legitimize" their criticisms of an evil, anti-human power structure they think can be talked into reforming itself! Good luck with that! (Most leftists are fatally compromised by their compromises with the system and collaboration with it. Oh, and there's money too, if you trim your political sails.)

And speaking of torture, the CIA has been torturing people since its inception, and training fascists around the world in torture. One of the reasons the CIA scientist Frank Olson was murdered by the CIA was his disillusionment with the agency after he discovered it ran a torture/murder center in West Germany, with "ex"-Nazis, to interrogate defectors from the Soviet bloc who were suspected of being enemy agents. [1] JFK created the so-called "Alliance of Progress," to counter the revolutionary influence of Fidel Castro and Cuba in Latin America. One of its branches was the diabolically misnamed "Office of Public Safety," which sent CIA torture tutors to train fascist secret policemen and military interrogators. One of these monsters was a guy named Dan Mitrione, sent down to Uruguay to do his evil work. According to former CIA officer John Stockwell, Mitrione would have a homeless person kidnapped to demonstrate torture techniques on for his "students," after which the victim would be murdered. Human life to these monsters has no more value than an insect's. But on the all too rare occasions when one of them gets what's coming to them, oh the HOWLS of outrage, and the bathetic beating of breasts in melodramatic media-ready grief! Mitrione was captured and ultimately put to death by the Tupumaro guerrilla group, a rare instance of justice in the U.S. empire. Mitrione is regarded as a heroic martyr by the CIA. (Reminds me of how the Nazis took the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the number two man in the S.S., a much more important cog in a machinery of evil than Mitrione was.)

So Gina Haspel will have to commit some much more major crimes to really make her bones. Torturing a few Muslim "terrorists" is small change in the annals of CIA crimes against humanity.

Does Secret Police Chief + Vagina = Feminism?

1]  There are a number of documentaries about the Frank Olson case. See for example "CIA Documentary - Biological Weapons & Experimentation on Humans (Frank Olson)."

Good News About Trump: Foreign View of U.S. Now More Realistic

A recent Pew poll of citizens of non-U.S.nations finds a precipitous decline in the "favorable" view of the U.S. under president Donald "Huge Narcissist" Trump. Only about a quarter of people polled outside the U.S. have a "favorable" opinion of the U.S. under Trump.

This is good news. Under Obama, millions, maybe billions, of credulous idiots around the world were taken in by the clever, dangerous con man Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama and had a "favorable" view of the violently imperialist, destructive U.S. The Trump results contrast with an unbelievable 60% who thought well of the U.S. during the Obama regime. Europeans in particular are stubborn fans of the criminal Obama, a sneaky, evil man who greatly strengthened the secret police state here, among numerous other crimes against humanity. He was also a brutal repressor of dissent, which is of a piece with perfecting a secret police state.

Of course, since the U.S. is mostly (but not entirely) a force for evil in the world, it is more realistic to have an "unfavorable" view of the U.S. Unfortunately international public opinion is totally subjective and swings like a weathervane according to the subjective impression of the likeability of whoever happens to be the Chief Imperialist of the U.S. at the moment.

Going against the trend, Russians had a more favorable opinion of the U.S. under Trump. This has yet to be justified by real changes in U.S. policy towards Russia. Trump has not eased sanctions against Russia, imposed to punish Russia for daring to resist the U.S.-bloc's political annexation of Ukraine. In Syria there is real conflict between the U.S. and Russia, with Russia supporting the murderous Assad regime with combat aircraft, and the U.S. fighting ISIS and other Islamist groups (while assiduous avoiding fighting the Assad regime). The U.S. just shot down an Assad regime warplane that was attacking or threatening U.S.-allied forces and their U.S. helpers on the ground. Russia responded by announcing that henceforth U.S. planes over Syria would be "targets." (An ambiguous term which implies they might be fired upon.) And Russia has ended communications with the U.S. military over Syria, which had been used to avoid aerial conflict by the two nations' warplanes over Syria as they bomb their chosen targets- the Russians to help Assad, the U.S. targeting ISIS etc. However, Trump conspicuously did not carry on the hostile anti-Russian tone of the Obama regime. Trump's reluctance to get with the anti-Russian program of U.S. elites is the main reason he is under relentless attack by an unholy alliance of the Democratic, Party, the corporate media, and the main secret police agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA).

The BBC also just announced the results of their own poll of 36,000 people in various countries. Only a third thought the U.S. was a force for good. (Amazing that a third of the world's people STILL don't get it!) Canada came out on tops as a Good Guy nation. Britain ranked down with the U.S. That should be no surprise, since the British ruling class has tied their nation tightly to the U.S. ever since World War II, like Odysseus bound to the mast of his ship to enjoy the sweet singing of the Sirens without hurling himself to his own doomed, lured by their irresistible voices. The British similarly were lured by the self-deception that the U.S. would serve their imperialist interests, and not vice versa as it turned out. Their innate snobbery caused them to underestimate the savvy of the American imperialists.

Now Israel, on the other hand, has the U.S. wrapped around its little finger! And that's almost entirely down to the power of organized Jews in the U.S. The Anglophile WASP elite of the U.S. didn't deliver for "Great" Britain what some Jews in the U.S. have done!

An oddity of history: a small nation dominating a much larger, much more powerful one. May be unique in the annals of nations.

Good News About Trump: Foreign View of U.S. Now More Realistic

A new Pew poll of citizens of non-U.S.nations finds a precipitous decline in the "favorable" view of the U.S. under president Donald "Huge Narcissist" Trump. Only about a quarter of people polled outside the U.S. have a "favorable" opinion of the U.S. under Trump.

This is good news. Under Obama, millions, maybe billions, of credulous idiots around the world were taken in by the clever, dangerous con man Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama and had a "favorable" view of the violently imperialist, destructive U.S. The Trump results contrast with an unbelievable 60% who thought well of the U.S. during the Obama regime. Europeans in particular are stubborn fans of the criminal Obama, a sneaky, evil man who greatly strengthened the secret police state here, among numerous other crimes against humanity. He was also a brutal repressor of dissent, which is of a piece with perfecting a secret police state.

Of course, since the U.S. is mostly (but not entirely) a force for evil in the world, it is more realistic to have an "unfavorable" view of the U.S. Unfortunately international public opinion is totally subjective and swings like a weather vane according to the subjective impression of the likeability of whoever happens to be the Chief Imperialist of the U.S. at the moment.

Going against the trend, Russians had a more favorable opinion of the U.S. under Trump. This has yet to be justified by real changes in U.S. policy towards Russia. Trump has not eased sanctions against Russia, imposed to punish Russia for daring to resist the U.S.-bloc's political annexation of Ukraine. In Syria there is real conflict between the U.S. and Russia, with Russia supporting the murderous Assad regime with combat aircraft, and the U.S. fighting ISIS and other Islamist groups (while assiduous avoiding fighting the Assad regime). The U.S. just shot down an Assad regime warplane that was attacking or threatening U.S.-allied forces and their U.S. helpers on the ground. Russia responded by announcing that henceforth U.S. planes over Syria would be "targets." (An ambiguous term which implies they might be fired upon.) And Russia has ended communications with the U.S. military over Syria, which had been used to avoid aerial conflict by the two nations' warplanes over Syria as they bomb their chosen targets- the Russians to help Assad, the U.S. targeting ISIS etc. However, Trump conspicuously did not carry on the hostile anti-Russian tone of the Obama regime. Trump's reluctance to get with the anti-Russian program of U.S. elites is the main reason he is under relentless attack by an unholy alliance of the Democratic, Party, the corporate media, and the main secret police agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA).

The BBC also just announced the results of their own poll of 36,000 people in various countries. Only a third thought the U.S. was a force for good. (Amazing that a third of the world's people STILL don't get it!) Canada came out on tops as a Good Guy nation. Britain ranked down with the U.S. That should be no surprise, since the British ruling class has tied their nation tightly to the U.S. ever since World War II, like Odysseus bound to the mast of his ship to enjoy the sweet singing of the Sirens without hurling himself to his own doomed, lured by their irresistible voices. The British similarly were lured by the self-deception that the U.S. would serve their imperialist interests, and not vice versa as it turned out. Their innate snobbery caused them to underestimate the savvy of the American imperialists.

Now Israel, on the other hand, has the U.S. wrapped around its little finger! And that's almost entirely down to the power of organized Jews in the U.S. The Anglophile WASP elite of the U.S. didn't deliver for "Great" Britain what some Jews in the U.S. have done!

An oddity of history: a small nation dominating a much larger, much more powerful one. May be unique in the annals of nations.

Trump Gets Credit/Blame For Military Actions Obama Set In Train

The Big Bomb dropped on ISIS caves in Afghanistan has made a big splash in the media. Peaceniks are horrified, for some reason.

The GPU-43 is a 22,000 pound bomb, the largest conventional explosive in the U.S. arsenal. The U.S. military nicknamed it MOAB, for Mother Of All Bombs. (Ooh, such a puckish sense of humor Our Brave Warriors have!) The idea of dropping it on the cave complex was to kill the people inside by shock wave and oxygen deprivation, thus avoiding having to take casualties. 

Various claims on the results. The U.S. military had no enemy KIA (Killed In Action) figure to report.

Somehow, the Afghan Defense Ministry immediately knew how many dead enemy were in the caves and tunnels: 36. The Washington Post played naive, stating "It was unclear why the Afghan government released casualty figures but U.S. forces did not." Actually it's VERY clear. The Afghans just MADE IT UP. [1]

ISIS, through their "news" agency, gave a casualty figure of zero. Sure thing, ISIS. 

Establishment media in the U.S. (and the British government propaganda network BBC) reported zero casualties. Democracy Now! cited a local Afghan politician who claimed a teacher and his son were killed.

The Big Bomb was in fact sent to Afghanistan by Obama in the waning days of his regime.

Similarly, the recent Navy SEAL raid in Yemen in January which one whole SEAL was killed and several dozen women and children were slain was planned under Obama, who hadn't yet given the final go-ahead. Yet another member of Anwar al-Awlaki's family was disposed of in that attack, an 8-year-old girl. ("U.S.A.! U.S.A.!")

Democrats are shy about taking a share of the credit.

1] "Some in Afghanistan question U.S. choice to use 22,000-pound bomb against ISIS," Washington Post, April 14, 2017.

Trump, Imitating U.S. "Intelligence" Agency Method, Claims Secret Knowledge Refuting Russian "Election Hacking" Charges

Oh, the irony!

One of the long-standing modus operandi of U.S. secret police agencies (euphemistically referred to as "intelligence" or "law enforcement" outfits) is the claim to secret information, which means if you knew what they know, you'd see that their propaganda and ideological assertions were true! Of course, they can't tell you what the alleged information is, because it's "classified," that is, "secret," and revealing it would risk exposing their "sources and methods," and even RISK PEOPLE'S LIVES!, but you should just trust these righteously upstanding, loyal and True-Blue Patriots. (The same "patriots" who daily urinate on the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, systematically violating the alleged "rights" of Americans they don't like, as they have done since their inception. Of course their have to break U.S. law by persecuting people whose beliefs or activities they don't like, to "protect our freedoms." How's that for an Orwellian mind-bender!)

This tawdry, dishonest trick of bluffing was analyzed decades ago in a book co-authored by a former CIA officer and a former State Department official, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. [1]

Well, it turns out that others can play the same mystique of intelligence game.

Namely Donald Trump.

Starting months ago with anonymous secret policemen whispering in the ears of their media enablers, there has been a propaganda campaign (and the propaganda could be partially or wholly true, keep in mind- propaganda sometimes is) tarring Russia for allegedly sneaking into email accounts of Democratic Party apparatchiks, including that of John Podesta, a sort of eminense grise behind the Clintons. These communications then surfaced on WikiLeaks, the hated information-exposing operation headed by Julian Assange. (The U.S. government has had WikiLeaks and Assange under siege for over five years now, trying mightily to destroy the organization. The first WikiLeaks "crime" that sparked U.S. outrage was the online publication of "classified" U.S. State Department cables and military reports and, most notoriously, the infamous collateral murder video showing the murderers' eyes view from a U.S. Army helicopter in Iraq murdering journalists and civilians on the ground in Baghdad, and attempting to murder children in a van. U.S. Army Specialist Chelsea- formerly Bradley- Manning was persecuted for sending this data to WikiLeaks.) [2]

The emails from Podesta and Democratic National Committee apparatchiks revealed a concerted campaign to destroy the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton rival Senator Bernie Sanders, including various nasty subterfuges. Pulling up this rock also gave a general view of the smarmy interior of the Democratic Party, usually kept carefully hidden from public view. (If they'd wanted to, the establishment media could have revealed the truth about the Democratic Party decades ago, but the two-party political cartel of the Democrats and the Republican Party, aka the GOP- Gang Of Plunderers, is a key pillar of corporate oligarchy, and "the" media is fundamentally the mouthpiece of that oligarchic power structure. The two-party political cartel and the corporate media are pillars of the power structure and are fundamentally allied, no matter their conflicts and disagreements which lie on a more superficial level.)

We also got to see the text of the Secret Speech that Hillary Clinton was paid a cool quarter million dollars to read to a Goldman Sachs audience, those wizards of financial chicanery, which confirmed what should have already been obvious- that the Clintons are handmaidens of the top echelons of U.S. capital, and Clinton's campaign rhetoric to the contrary was just the standard Democratic Party mendacity. (Her rhetoric was pulled to the "left" by the competition from Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.)

By and by, government officials were forced to reveal their faces to sell the "Russia Hacking Sacred U.S. Democracy" story. So first we got James "Pinocchio" Clapper, he of the false Senate Intelligence Commitee testimony, Obama's "Director of National Intelligence," pointing the finger at Russia. Then came the CIA, an agency of professional liars and deceivers, avowing that Russia Was Guilty. The FBI hedged a bit, apparently to allow it to wiggle out later if the whole thing was exposed as false.

Finally Obama demanded conclusionary reports from the CIA and FBI by the time he finally exits the White House on January 20. Congresspeople of both parties waxed wroth at the Russian "interference" in "our election" and "subversion of our democracy." Obama then imposed sanctions on Russia as punishment, expelling 35 Russian diplomats and closing two Russian facilities in the U.S., announcing more attacks on Russian assets, and threatening unspecified covert acts of retaliation. (Putin cleverly parried Obama's hostile attack by refusing to retaliate in kind, even inviting the children of U.S. diplomats in Russia to attend Kremlin Christmas and New Year's celebrations! Stuffed, Obama!)

Trump has adamantly refused to conform to this campaign, despite daily brickbats hurled at him by numerous branches of the media (including the "comedy" show "Saturday Night Live" on NBC, which portrayed Trump as a "Manchurian Candidate" of Putin [3]).

Then Trump played the "I know things you don't know" card, the card the secret police habitually play. Trump said he knew “things that other people don’t know” that would be revealed “on Tuesday or Wednesday.” (Don't hold your breath.)

A few salient points about the bad faith and fraudulence of this entire "Russia Tried To Damage Our Democracy" propaganda campaign, which U.S. media mostly refuse to breathe a word about:

-Clinton got 2.9 million more votes than Trump. She "lost" because of the idiotic, archaic Electoral College, a political straitjacket that the Democrats refuse to blame, much less reform or abolish, even though the same thing happened to them in 2000. They prefer to be slaves to the dead hand of the past, apparently. Thus do U.S. "Founding Fathers," in their graves for two centuries, impose their will on the present. Sick. [4]

-Clinton led Trump in polls by 14% until FBI secret police chief James Comey reignited the issue of her private server State Department emails just before the election, causing her lead to vanish.

-We have the right to the information provided by WikiLeaks, allegedly via Russia. (Assange denies it came from Russia.)

-The feckless, cowardly Democrats habitually scapegoat others for their losses, instead of making an honest accounting and taking positive, constructive action. In 2000 Ralph Nader was their designated scapegoat. Today it's Russia.  They are cowardly punks who never challenge GOP election stealing, in 2000, 2004 (Ohio stolen), and this year, with massive voter disenfranchisement and invalidation of valid ballots. (See Greg Palast's work.)

-Finally, and most importantly, just how hypocritical can the U.S. get with all this screeching about "foreign interference"? No nation on earth has done more interfering in other countries than the U.S.! From massive CIA intervention in European politics after World War II (funding politicians, parties, newspapers, paying gangsters to beat up leftists, etc.) to COMPLETELY DESTROYING DEMOCRACIES in places like Iran (1953) Guatemala (1954) Brazil (1965) Chile (1973), and various other military coups. The U.S. INVADED the Dominican Republic in 1965 when it didn't like who won an election there.

So now U.S. elites are screeching about Russia letting the American public in on some Democratic Party poohbahs' dirty secrets? BOO-HOO! Get over it.

"I got special secret information stored right in here! I'll gladly tell you about it tomorrow if you'll give me a headline today."

1] The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, 1974. But nothing changed, the populace remains ignorant and willfully naive, and the same old tricks of mass manipulation work. With the cooperation of a venal media, of course, without which the secret police couldn't get over with their shit.

Marchetti was a CIA officer and assistant to the CIA deputy director,  Marks a former Foreign Service Officer.

2] "Collateral Murder" videos on youtube.com. You must watch this if you never have yet.

3]  Posted on youtube.com by "Saturday Night Live" [NBC]. "Donald Trump Christmas Cold Open - SNL," published December 18, 2016. The SNL opening skit was crude and obvious, apparently to make sure that even the politically unsophisticated would get the message. I found it funny anyway, and grossly distorted. But then, satire is based on exaggeration. "Rex Tillerson" (Trump's designated Secretary of State who just resigned as head of ExxonMobil) also appeared in the skit.

A "Manchurian Candidate," which comes from a novel by that name, refers to a programmed assassin whose mind is under external control. That's beyond being a stooge, beyond being a puppet. It's being a hypnotized zombie.

4] The Democrats won't even back the movement among states to agree to give their Electoral College votes to whoever wins the "popular" vote. The plan is that when states with a total number of Electoral Votes equalling a majority of Electoral College votes (270 or more ) agree to join, the plan becomes effective. So far state legislatures controlling around 160 Electoral College votes have passed the necessary legislation.

For details on the Electoral College, and how the U.S. has historically been anti-democratic, see "In the Self-Proclaimed 'World's Greatest Democracy,' the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost," November 14, 2016.

American Propagandist: The Unbearable Sanctimony of Barack Hussein Obama

And hypocrisy, too.

On December 29, 2016, Obama delivered a verbal tongue-lashing to Russia over what the U.S. government and media claim is proven fact- that Russia "stole" emails from Democratic Party apparatchiks and funneled them to WikiLeaks. (This in turn prompted an establishment conspiracy theory claiming that WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange are Russian agents, conveniently ignoring the fact that WikiLeaks is set up for receiving anonymous uploads of data. But then, these are the same people who claim Edward Snowden is a "traitor" and "Russian agent" who "fled to Russia," ignoring the fact that they trapped Snowden in Moscow's airport, where he sat for six weeks, by canceling his passport while he was in transit to Latin America. Dishonestly ignoring facts in order to promulgate lies- euphemistically called "false narratives," is habitual behavior with most of the U.S. political/media elite.)

Obama said on the 29th, in announcing his initial punishment of Russia: "“The United States and friends and allies around the world must work together to oppose Russia’s efforts to undermine established international norms of behavior."

Apparently, using computer malware to sabotage Iran's centrifuges, and having your NSA spy on the personal communications of heads of state of allied nations, and engaging in economic espionage against foreign corporations, and spying on the communications of European parliamentarians en masse, and trying to steal every phone call, email, text message, Internet search, fax and everything in the whole world, is within "established international norms of behavior."

But ferreting out emails from one of the two U.S. political cartel parties, and sharing it with the world, (something that U.S. officials also do anonymously, in "leaks," actually plants, in the media), THAT is outside "established international norms of behavior."

The "norms" that the U.S. dictates, which boil down to: The U.S. Can Do Whatever It Wants, And The Rest Of You Have To Do What The U.S. Says.

Gall, nerve, chutzpah, brass- call it that. Imperialist arrogance is more to the point, however.

The only question about Obama is- to what degree is he self-brainwashed with his own guff, which makes him a hypocrite, versus his awareness of how cynical he's being. Where does Obama fall onthe hypocrisy-cynicism spectrum? Ultimately it's a minor question.

If Russia indeed revealed that useful information about the inner machinations of the venal Democratic Party and its sleazy con artists, and Hillary Clinton's "secret" speech to Goldman Sachs, more power to them. We the people who inhabit this planet, are entitled to that information. Our rulers are NOT entitled to deceive us, as they endeavor to do every single day. A side effect of the conflict between rival national regimes with an insatiable hunger for power is that occasionally things are revealed as they battle each other for tactical and strategic advantage. That's all to the good. Don't look a gifthorse in the mouth just because it's Russian.

Long Live WikiLeaks and freedom of information.

Obama tries to intimidate Putin in Stare-Down. Hangzhou, China, September 2016.

China Snatches U.S. Navy Spy Apparatus; U.S. Demands Its Return

An underwater, unmanned "drone" operated by the U.S. Navy was seized by the Chinese Navy. China claims it was in Chinese waters, the U.S. claims it was in international waters. [It was in the South China Sea, which China now claims as a virtual Chinese lake. Hence the disagreement.] The U.S. has demanded that China give its drone back, and China said okay, it'll give it back- (when it's good and ready, no doubt). (A curve ball was thrown into the play by president-to-be Donald Trump, who said China should keep the drone. Don't ask me why. I suppose he just always has to grab the spotlight, and that often requires saying something outlandish, in order to stand out. He is a narcissist, an exhibitionist, and an egomaniac, remember. In fact, I'm sure he won't let you forget that for the coming four years, at least.)

The U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network, NPR, absurdly claimed that this spy device was engaged in "scientific" research- as if the U.S. Navy is a scientific research organization.

The Pentagon propaganda office issued a statement under the name of its chief mouthpiece Peter Cook asserting that the underwater spy vehicle was gathering "military oceanographic data...." [My emphasis.] I guess the propagandists at the Pentagon and at NPR didn't get their stories straight. But NPR regards it as one of its missions to always protect the U.S. government, so that could account for the misrepresentation of the drone's mission.  [1]
 
China will doubtless disassemble and study and copy their booty. They did this sort of thing before, when a U.S. spy plane was forced to land on Chinese territory after a Chinese fighter jet clipped and damaged it in flight. (The hot-dogging Chinese pilot was killed in his reckless act, which infuriated the Chinese towards the U.S. But since the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, after the CIA gave its location to NATO, supposedly in ignorance that it was the Chinese embassy, the Chinese are I think predisposed to blame the U.S. for their losses in confrontations with the U.S. By the way, that embassy bombing is NEVER mentioned in the U.S. Amnesia handicaps ones ability to deal realistically with the world and its other inhabitants.)

This incident is another small step in China's nibbling away at the edge of U.S. power in the Pacific. A much bigger milestone is Philippines death squad president Rodrigo Duterte telling the U.S. to kiss-off, and openly embracing China. The Obama regime has responded like a deer in the headlights, seemingly frozen. When Duterte called Obama a "son of a whore" and publicly cursed him, the U.S. barely reacted to this effrontery. Then the Philippines won a court case against China for China appropriating islands in the South China Sea. The U.S. reacted to that by talking like a mediator, instead of clearly siding with the winner, the Philippines. This signaled weakness. Obviously the U.S. wishes to avoid confrontation with China- but that means the U.S. must retreat in the face of growing Chinese power and "assertiveness."

The Philippines then abandoned its claim and started cozying up to China, under Duterte.

Duterte brags of personally murdering "criminals." No doubt the mild verbal remonstrances the U.S. has to make over his "human rights record," in order to maintain its image as the beacon of freedom and democracy and human rights, irked Duterte, even though the criticisms were strictly pro forma. Duterte is a crude thug, unsophisticated to play the game with winks and nods and understand that some things are just political theater, not to be taken seriously. (The U.S. "objecting" to relentless Israeli colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is a long-running, very tired political play.) A murderous goon like Duterte is temperamentally more comfortable with the tyrants of Beijing than with the two-stepping hypocrites of Washington.

A bit of background: The Philippines was a U.S. colony until after World War II, when it became a neocolony and client dictatorship. It was a Spanish colony until the U.S. seized it as war booty during the Spanish-American war of 1898, when the U.S. also gained control of Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and carved Panama out of Colombia for its own uses. The Filipinos had the crazy idea that they should be independent, so several hundred thousand of them had to be killed to convince them to stop resisting U.S. conquest. President Theodore Roosevelt, an iconic figure in U.S. pseudo-history (quasi-mythology) sent hearty congratulations to the U.S. military commander of the invasion and occupation force for his fine work in suppressing Filipino resistance.

During World War II, the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Their brutality alienated the Filipinos, just as Japanese barbarism alienated the other victims in their "Co-Prosperity Sphere," such as the Koreans and Chinese. In this, they made exactly the same strategic blunder as the Nazis. Their ideology of racial "superiority," hyper-militarism and fascism proved too much for the colonized to bear, unlike other imperialisms which are tolerated by the conquered for longer time-spans.

Two giant U.S. military bases, the Subic Bay naval base and Clark airfield, were long occupied by the U.S. Some years after U.S.-backed dictator Marcos was overthrown, the U.S. was asked to vacate those bases. The U.S. has been angling to get those or other bases in the Philippines back ever since.

For a number of years now, U.S. "special forces" have been semi-covertly helping the Filipino military hunt and kill Islamofascist rebels in the Philippines. Duterte now says he wants the U.S. military out, and the U.S. can keep its money too.

 

                       EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT! DUTERTE DUMPS DIRT ON U.S.!


Instead of the U.S. successfully constructing a coalition of nations to contain China, things seem to be going the other way, first with the U.S. gratuitously picking a fight with Russia over the Ukraine, which the U.S. gleefully destabilized, and driving Russia into China's arms (witness a recent multi-billion dollar economic deal and joint naval maneuvers between Russia and China), friendlier ties between India and China, and now the Philippines rushing to embrace China and spurning its long-time dominant political spouse the U.S.

The U.S. is so powerful that it has gotten away with some major blunders (the Indochina War, siding with jihadists against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and fecklessly allowing Pakistan to become a nuclear weapons power, for example), but with China's rise, the stakes may be higher than ever. In the two World Wars, other nations did the heavy fighting and dying, and the U.S. picked up the chips at the end of the games. But all-out war with nuclear-armed China is out of the question, as obviously a land invasion is!

China is ruled by a patient one-party dictatorship that has less pressure from domestic public opinion when it comes to how it conducts foreign affairs than in the U.S. case. It also has a much more unified ruling class, whereas in the U.S. the Republican Party seems determined to destroy the Democratic Party and monopolize political power. No matter what a Democratic president does, even if it is identical with Republican policies, he is attacked by the Republicans. That won't be a problem for the next four to eight years, with a Republican president and Congress, and the Democrats inclined to bark but never bite. But U.S. politicians are still remarkably short-sighted, and this is reflected in its conduct of foreign affairs. Part of this is due to their need to get reelected (every two years in the case of House Representatives). Part is due to Americans' temperamental impatience. And part is a disinterest in history, which to Americans is like intellectual broccoli, something off-putting.

But ironically, it may be the mercurial, notoriously short-attention-spanned Donald Trump who makes some changes. [2]

1]  Here is the Pentagon's statement. The title links to globalsecurity.org, which reproduced the Pentagon statement. If you want to have the Pentagon record you computer ID so they can track you, put you in the NSA database, and maybe plant spyware/malware on your computer, I have also provided the Pentagon's URL for the statement, from global security, below the statement. Note that the type of data the Pentagon admits the drone was collecting is pertinent to anti-sub warfare, especially "sound speed." To destroy subs, one has to track them by listening for them. Sound travels through water at different speeds depending on salinity and temperature, for example. So this drone is not so innocent, to quote a song.

"Statement by Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on Incident in South China Sea, Release No. NR-448-16," December 16, 2016.

Using appropriate government-to-government channels, the Department of Defense has called upon China to immediately return an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) that China unlawfully seized on Dec. 15 in the South China Sea while it was being recovered by a U.S. Navy oceanographic survey ship. The USNS Bowditch (T-AGS 62) and the UUV -- an unclassified "ocean glider" system used around the world to gather military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature, and sound speed - were conducting routine [sic!]operations in accordance with international law about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay, Philippines, when a Chinese Navy PRC DALANG III-Class ship (ASR-510) launched a small boat and retrieved the UUV. Bowditch made contact with the PRC Navy ship via bridge-to-bridge radio to request the return of the UUV. The radio contact was acknowledged by the PRC Navy ship, but the request was ignored. The UUV is a sovereign immune vessel of the United States. We call upon China to return our UUV immediately, and to comply with all of its obligations under international law.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1032611/

2] See "Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations 'Realist'?," December 16, 2016.

Trump Is Destabilizing the U.S.- Should Progressives Worry?

Donald Trump is aggravating the fissures in U.S. society. A narcissist running a demagogic campaign for president of the U.S., his aim is his own self-aggrandizement.

He is rabble-rousing elements of the broad, discontented, white working class and anxious "middle" classes which the establishment power system seeks to keep passive as the system of corporate oligarchy slowly and relentlessly grinds them down economically. In classic fascist/reactionary fashion, he diverts attention from understanding the actual structure and nature of society and instead scapegoats "outsiders," in his case "illegal" immigrants and would-be refugees seeking asylum from war zones. He has also identified the various trade treaties as a cause of the economic squeeze on workers, which is valid as a factor.

Trump has made a frontal assault on these so-called "free trade" deals, violating an establishment ideological taboo observed by Democrats and other Republicans alike. Trump has done more to incite opposition to these treaties than labor unions, which supposedly represent the interests of workers, and certainly more than the Democratic Party, whose dominant figures largely support these corporate-power-enhancing treaties.

And while pressing the same hot button "culture war" issues that "respectable" "conservatives" do, being a political vulgarian he doesn't do it in a muted fashion as standard-issue reactionary Republicans do but does it very sharply, as was on display in the third and last "presidential debate" last night between him and Hillary Clinton, the Democrat. (This sort of crudeness is referred to by Republican operatives themselves as tossing "red meat" to "the base." Apparently GOP voters are like pet ocelots. Trump threatens to take them off their leashes.) These issues are guns, abortion, and immigrants. (The immigrant issue of course is tied to the economic insecurity felt by millions, with racism and xenophobia in the mix.)

Trump laid down his marker on immigrants early on when he branded virtually all Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers- a trope others have picked up, some implying that all murders in the U.S. are the work of illegal immigrants, an absurdity that goes unchallenged. Instead we get from Democrats and "liberals" heartstring-plucking stories of hardworking immigrant families (it always has to be families) and children caught in a legal bind not of their own making. Which is fine, but insufficient, as it leaves the murderer-immigrant theme unrefuted.

Trump lately has also been destabilizing the legitimacy of U.S. elections by claiming they are "rigged," to cheat him of his victory. He continued this tact last night. This is very cynical on his part, as he is doing it because he is apparently going to lose. [1]

But the irony is, U.S. elections ARE corrupt, only not in the ways Trump means. [2] For example, the last two times a Republican "won" the presidency, it was by stealing it. Bush  the Younger stole Florida in  2000, aided and abetted by his brother Jeb, the then-governor of Florida, Jeb's GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) minions there who disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters, and most importantly by five Republican Supreme Court justices, who illegally blocked a recount in Florida. In 2004 Ohio was stolen, with the connivance of GOP officials there, led by Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.  Since 2000, the Republican-owned corporations that make the crooked voting machines have connived to steal numerous elections by programming them to switch votes from Democrats to Republicans. (The Democrats refuse to make an issue out of any of this. As for 2000, they blame it all on Ralph Nader. Talk about scapegoating!)

But the Republicans (or elements of the secret police state acting on their behalf) are more ruthless than that.
Both Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan were murdered by plane sabotage to help the GOP control the U.S. Senate. And a devout Christian computer programmer, who helped the Republicans steal elections, had an attack of conscience and spoke out. While flying to testify in a civil case against Karl Rove, the top Republican electoral operative, his plane too was downed, and the evidence he was carrying to the trial was removed from the crash site, never to be seen again.

We can add mass disenfranchisement by various chicanery of Democratic voters, which the Democratic Party barely objected to until very recently.

Nor does it help that the Republicans who constituted a majority on the Supreme Court before the death of arch-reactionary Antonin Scalia last year gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to even more ruthless disenfranchisement of "black" citizens in the erstwhile Confederacy.

Trump has even damaged the Republican Party, which he has hijacked for his ego trip. Contrary to universal handwringing by the establishment blatherariat, this is a good thing. It is to be fervently desired to see that evil, noxious weed break up into two or more parties. (That would also have the salutary effect of weakening the extortionist power of the Democratic Party to force people to vote for them as "the lesser of two evils" to avoid a Republican victory.)

You would think that progressives would welcome things that weakens the stability of the current oppressive, imperialist, and incorrigible U.S. structure. That assumes that they understand the problems they complain about are structural in nature and deeply rooted in the nature of U.S. society. Many apparently don't understand that, but they should.

But instead, as happens every time there is the one-day-every-two-years when some actual democracy has to be allowed- democracy to the very limited extent that some people (not millions of disenfranchised people, mostly blacks) are allowed to vote from a menu of two choices presented to them- Democratic Party politicians or Republican Party politicians- what progressives and special interest "leftists"* virtually all do is line up like obedient ducklings behind the Democrats. [3] Because "the Republicans are worse." They are exhorted by Democratic Party political auxiliaries like Robert Reich (a Bill Clinton cabinet member) that "now is not the time" to seek an alternative, not even a Senator Bernard Sanders, who ran as a Democrat for president against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries and then supported her when he was blocked from victory. But there will never be a "right time" as long as the Republican Party exists.

Preserving the faux "unity" of the American populace under the current political and economic power structure is precisely what those in power want! Why would anyone who struggles against this system want to help do that?

The media created Donald Trump, making news stories out of even his random idiotic tweets. Now they are trying desperately to destroy his drive to the White House with sex scandalizing. To be sure, he is loathsome, and a probable rapist, as I will explain in a separate essay. (Bill Clinton is a confirmed rapist- cf. Juanita Broaddrick- and that IS relevant because he will have immense power if/when his wife achieve her goal of the presidency, her compensation for setting aside her own ambitions in Arkansas and when her husband got to be president. It's a family affair, you see.  Now it's her turn. The other relevance is that Hillary was a driving force in the character assassinations of her husband's various paramours. And it went into actual terrorism. When Kathleen Willey reported a rebuffed sexual advance on her by Bill C. in the White House, her cat was killed, after which a man jogged up to her outside when she was along and mentioned the dead cat. A scary threat indeed, the implication being that he could kill her right then and there.)

Here's a good reason to look forward to the end of the election: the media obsession with Donald Trump will abate. (If we're very lucky, it will even end.) But the barbaric soul of the Republican Party has had its genteel veil torn off by Donald Trump.


1] Trump also has broken new ground, at least in the past century, by openly attacking the legitimacy of his two-party opponent. Trump at the previous debate said he would jail Hillary Clinton if elected. Last night he said she shouldn't even be allowed to run because of her "many crimes." If he had meant crimes against humanity, he would have been onto something. He just meant her private email server, destroying 30,000 emails, an allegedly lying to the FBI.

This attack on the legitimacy of the official opposition can be seen as rooted in the GOP attacks on Obama's legitimacy, including the claims that he was born in Kenya and thus Constitutionally ineligible to be president. The GOP didn't overtly push that line, but its auxiliaries in "talk" radio promoted it. Trump took that "issue" and ran with it in the years when he was preparing the ground for his attempt to grab the presidency.
Nor are fraudulent claims of election-stealing by the Democrats new. The myth has long been nurtured that JFK stole the 1960 election from Nixon by stealing Illinois. That myth is easily refuted by simple arithmetic. Just subtract the Illinois electoral votes from Kennedy's total and add them to Nixon's. Kennedy still wins. But as Reagan said, "facts are stupid things."

In fact, the Republican Party, by pushing relentlessly to the right (with the help of almost the entire U.S. media) over the last almost 50 years, a campaign of reaction and rollback that was a response to the upsurges of the 1960s, has really opened the door to a demagogue like Trump. The years of rightwing extremism have validated the derangement and inculcated the rightwing segment of the populace in irrational beliefs an animosities.

2] Trump claims illegal immigrants are voting, "dead people" are voting, illegal immigrants are not just voting once, but "fifteen times," etc. etc. This is of a piece with his general cynical demagoguery designed to rabble-rouse the racists and xenophobes, who number in the millions.

3] I use "leftists" for want of a better single word, and also because that is how the power structure thinks of them, especially the secret police agencies, "talk" radio, hard-rightwing media, and rightists generally, even though that is a stupid way to think of them. I am referring to single-issue people such as those categorized as environmentalists, gay rights activists, "civil" i.e. black rights people, and so on, dozens of such splinter groups with no unity, each applying a modicum of pressure on the system to achieve its own ends within the current system without changing its basic imperialist, corporate oligarchic nature one whit.

The truth is, the vast majority of progressives are frightened of pulling down the temple of power. That's why their distress at Trump's refusal to validate the fairness of the election has them in a tizzy as much as it has the establishment media the the Democrats. Even as I'm writing this, one Kristen Clarke is talking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (the first segment of the day's show) and prattling on about U.S. "democracy" being the "model for the world" and how "distressing" it is that Trump would question the legitimacy of a U,S. election. Then she segued into a total non sequitur about voter suppression against blacks! Which would seem to undercut her boilerplate propaganda about legitimacy and a Model for the World. She keeps referring to "conspiracy theories," and brushes aside a question about Gore v. Bush in 2000 ("We're not going to relitigate [that]" i.e. not going to discuss, remember, or learn from) and denies U.S. elections can possibly be rigged. "Rigged elections, pure mythology, pure fiction..."! [What, 2000 wasn't? 2004 wasn't?]

Clarke is also bent out of shape that Obama's nominee for the "broken" Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, a conservative former prosecutor, hasn't been given a Senate confirmation hearing. "A Constitutional Crisis" she calls it. "I am deeply concerned about this era of political obstruction we are in," she says, parroting Democratic Party rhetoric.

Clarke is President and Executive Director of the "Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law," founded in 1963 at the request of president John F. Kennedy. That political pedigree maybe tells you all you need to know about where Clarke is coming from.

U.S. Clears Throat After Saudi Clients Bomb Funeral, Slaughtering 140 Yemenis

The latest Saudi Arabian war crime in Yemen, the aerial bombing of a funeral which killed as of this writing 140 people and wounded hundreds more, has forced to U.S. to wag its finger at the Saudis. The Obama regime has greased the skids for the sale of billions of dollars of advanced U.S. armaments to the Saudis- warplanes and ordnance, including cluster bombs and white phosphorus- which the Saudis and their Gulf State lackeys have used to pummel Yemen, ostensibly to counter Iranian influence, and to restore to power a puppet Yemeni "president" who was overthrown by Houthi tribesmen.

U.S. arms sales to foreign powers are by U.S. law supposed to be used only in "self-defense." Naturally, this law has long been ignored in practice (see Israel, for example, which actually gets free weapons- the U.S. gives Israel the money to buy U.S. weapons). Saudi Arabia has been bombarding Yemen for over a year, and sent in ground forces as well. (It also sent military forces into Bahrain, to help crush protests there by the Shiite majority against the tyrannical Sunni "royal" rulers.) As usual, the U.S. is the Arrnorer of Reaction, a role it has filled with gusto since 1945.

The Obama regime's reaction to this latest Saudi outrage is to aver that it might cut back a bit on arms sales to the Saudis.

The Saudis have been systematically targeting civilian targets for over a year, including markets, homes, mosques, and hospital and clinics. This has been mostly ignored by the U.S. media, which prefers to focus on the crimes of enemy states- currently Russia's bombing campaign in Syria, marked by Saudi-style targeting of hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure necessary for life, (Of course the Russians have had plenty of practice in devastation of civilians, such as their razing of Grozny, in order to crush a Chechen insurrection.)

The U.S. has been providing critical cooperation in the Saudi war against the Yemeni populace. It's aerial refueling tankers aid and abet the war crimes. Its military officers sit next to the Saudis and provide targeting information for the warplanes the U.S. sold the Saudis. And of course it provides political cover and a diplomatic shield for the criminal Saudi regime. Aiding and abetting crime is a crime.

So after all that, the Obama regime hints that maybe it'll dawdle and selling more arms to the Saudis! That's a pure p.r. ploy, vintage Obama, one of the world's great con artists.

Obama has proven in many ways to be a very militaristic president. He has micromanaged a "war on terror" in seven countries, exceeding even Lyndon Johnson's obsession with the Vietnam war in this regard. (Johnson merely selected bombing targets; Obama picks actual individuals to kill.) He has put in motion a nuclear weapons buildup projected to cost one TRILLION dollars. He just gifted Israel an unprecedented 10-year gift of $38 billion in free weaponry to use in their periodic slaughters of Palestinians and Lebanese. And he has presided over the ever-increasing U.S. military budget. (The increases are smaller than originally desired, so these increases are called "cuts." What a gang of liars our rulers, especially the media accomplices, are!)

And yet, there are still idiots who cling to the illusion that Obama is "progressive."

I spotted him as a con man in 2004, when he burst onto the national stage with that phony, Mario Cuomoesque speech at that year's Democratic Party convention. Nor was I ever tricked into voting for him, as so many fools, entranced by this great Pied Piper, were.

It's amazing how long the Democratic Party has gotten away with this con of being a "progressive" party. It only pulls it off because it compares itself to the arch-reactionary Republicans, the Gang Of Plunderers.

But I digress....

Sharing a laugh, maybe over the impotence of human rights whiners.

Best of Friends!

That Trade Treaty Negotiation "Queue" that Obama Sent Britain To the Back Of, Just Got Shorter

Remember that threat Obama made before the UK vote on leaving the EU, the so-called "Brexit"? He said he'd sent Britain to the "back of the queue" (the line in U.S. English- guess Obama was Going Native when he spoke) for negotiating a trade treaty with the U.S. and vowed it would take ten years to reach an agreement. His threat wasn't scary enough to win the day for the global elites opposed to a renewal of British national independence and self-determination (portrayed as racism and xenophobia by the corporate propaganda systems of the UK and U.S.- and they're still at it! [1]).

Well, it looks like Britain just moved up two places in the "queue."

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations have been declared a failure by top figures in the German and French governments.

As for Obama's secret Trans Pacific Partnership, it is hanging in limbo. Congress will not ratify it before Obama is finally out of the White House this coming January, and the two candidates the two-party dictatorship are offering us as his replacement, Donald "The Narcissist" Trump and Hillary "The Conniver" Clinton, claim to be against it. Trump of course is completely untrustworthy, as is Clinton, and Clinton had to do a complete reversal of her previous support for the malign deal. (All these "free trade" treaties are in fact global corporate hegemony treaties. They are all written to give supremacy of corporations over national governments and supercede national laws. They leave the populations of the countries sold out by their politicians at the mercy of pollutors, labor exploiters, etc.) [2]

Whatever happens, there will at least need to be some renegotiating to disguise the double-cross and betrayal of the campaign promise by the next president.

The Man With The Golden Tongue: The Magic Has Just About Worn Off. At Last.

1]  The Brexit referendum was on June 23, and here it is, over two months later, and the U.S. media are still running anti-Brexit propaganda, such as this op-ed by some limey (no American is named "Sebastian") in the Los Angeles Times, "Britain’s post-Brexit warning for Americans seduced by Trump," September 1, 2016.

2]  For a concise critique from a European Green of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which applies equally to the TPP and NAFTA, the notorious North American Free Trade Agreement foisted on people by Hillary's husband and partner in political crime, Bill Clinton, see
"To Free, Or Not To Free," The European, November 26, 2013.

Taboo Ironies In Clinton's VP Choice

Hillary Clinton bestowed the Democratic Party's vice presidential nomination on Tim Kaine, a Democratic U.S. Senator from Virginia. This political product launch had three themes, which campaign operatives put on their communications transmission belt to "the" media in the form of talking points. These were duly pointed out to the public by said media. The themes were Kaine's alleged devotion to what in the U.S. are called "civil rights," meaning equal "rights" for citizens designated as "black;" his "missionary" work in Honduras in 1980 (less than a year), and the fact that he speaks fluent Spanish. (All Hispanics must now vote for him, I suppose.)

I say "black" because I don't like classifying people by color. People aren't jellybeans or M & M's.

I say "the" media, because it is not the one-and-only media, nor is it this objective thing, like the earth or sun, that just exists and has immutable properties. It is a particular media. In the U.S. that media called "the" media are the megaphones and mouthpieces of a corporate oligarchy that indoctrinates the populace with the values and ideology of corporate capitalism (misleadingly called "free enterprise"). It is completely a bourgeois class interest (although it masquerades in some instances as working class or "middle" class, the better to gain the trust of and to dupe "target audiences," a very telling term in itself).

Now, as to Kaine being presented as some great civil rights activist years ago. Of course he never was. But that is a good distraction from Hillary's anti-civil rights activities at the same time. She was a Goldwater Girl in college, head of the campus GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) students' group at Wesleyan University. Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, was an ardent foe of civil rights, opposed legislation to allow blacks to vote in the South, and so on.

Then there's that "missionary work" by Kaine in Honduras. Honduras. The country where a U.S.-backed coup destroyed democracy and has instituted a regime of chaotic death-squads, murdering hundreds of activists. Clinton boasted in her most recent book, a sort of autohagiography, about how she protected and legitimized the coup, running interference against objections by other nations.

The third Honduran grassroots environmental activist opposing a hydroelectric project murdered in the last few months, Lesbia Janeth Urquia, was savagely hacked to death with a machete at the beginning of August. She was a 49-year old mother of three.

Another mother, Berta Cáceres, the first of those victims, avowed that Clinton and the U.S. bore responsibility for the existence of the current Honduran state terrorist regime, The regime has cynically tried to pin the murders on family members and fellow activists.

The three activists, extremely brave, poor people, were all members of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, indicating a systematic, murderous targeting of the group.

This is the regime, and policy of gangster-style repression, that Obama-Clinton-Democratic Party imposes on Honduras.

"Lesser evil" my ass.

Kaine, apparently a very clever politician, uses the scant nine months he spent in Honduras 36 years
ago as a three-way political bank shot. In the words of The Nation magazine, "Kaine, who has been talking about his time in Honduras at least since the early 2000s, when he was mayor of Richmond, uses his nine-month stay as a kind of platitudinous catch-all, to prove he is a true Christian to Virginia conservatives, to court the Latino vote, and, now, to convince rank-and-file Democrats he’s a progressive." [1]

Religious "missionaries" have for centuries been the pilot fish and advance guard of European and U.S. Imperialists. Starting with the Spanish empire, and right through to the current use of religious front men and women by the CIA, the missionary is the recon scout of imperialism.

As it turns out, the Selfless Missionary Timothy Michael Kaine, a Good Catholic, isn't as pure as the driven snow. When he was Governor of the state of Virginia, he took a number of bribes (called "gifts" in U.S. political parlance) from corporations in return for his official acts on their behalf. But in yet another example of the extremely arbitrary and capricious nature of U.S. "justice," he hasn't been prosecuted, while other politicians have been prosecuted and even convicted in much more attenuated cases of alleged bribery (U.S. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who is being prosecuted for vacationing with a longtime friend he helped out, and whose case is currently in process; and former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell and his wife, whose convictions were just overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the actions McDonnell took in return for gifts were not official acts and thus did not come under bribery laws- why his wife got convicted in the first place is a mystery- as an accessory?) or outright frame-ups, like the case of former Democratic Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, outrageously railroaded by the local GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) power establishment and sentenced to a draconian seven years in prison, for appointing a contributor to a ballot initiative to an unpaid post on some planning board. (So why isn't every U.S. president guilty of bribery for appointing their campaign contributors to plum ambassadorships, which are paid, prestigious jobs and should go to experience State Department veterans? [2]

And Kaine speaks Spanish. He speaks Spanish. He proved it in his convention speech. Kaine speaks Spanish.

He speaks Spanish.

The Kaines were happy in Honduras. Too bad Hondurans can't be.

Berta Cáceres

Lesbia Janeth Urquia

Just two more victims (of millions) of U.S. "policies."

The perfect VP pick: Doglike Kaine trots closely behind his political master.

1]  "Eat, Pray, Starve: What Tim Kaine Didn’t Learn During His Time in Honduras," The Nation, July 27, 2016. A must-read article summarizing the situation Kaine was immersed in in Honduras, with an overview of the Reagan-Bush atrocities in the region. Although keep in mind that their predecessor Carter initiated the "policy" of multi-state terrorism, and their successor Clinton transferred it to Colombia.

The Nation is the left boundary of Establishment media. It's the border between being part of the system and resistance/opposition to the power structure. The Nation is reformist, but not too reformist. Its idea of reform is jawboning the Democratic Party to do things that Party has proven it will never do. And every four years, the magazine puts on its cowboy hats and rounds up progressives to herd them into the Democratic Party corral. Their assaults on Ralph Nader for daring to run for president (and "stealing" Democratic votes) was relentless, nasty, and revealing of the bankruptcy of their politics. Anyone who really wants pro-human change has to realize that the two-party corporate capitalist imperialist dictatorship is the enemy, Instead The Nation and its ilk aids and abets the Democratic Party's politics of extortion, forcing people to vote for the allegedly "lesser evil." 

Which has brought us to our current state of greater repression and greater grotesque concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority (euphemised as "inequality,") with institutionalized global assassinations and a Perfect Surveillance State brought to you by Barack Obama, Democrat.

Expect more of the same poison under a second Clinton reign.

2]  "As Pick for No. 2, Tim Kaine Sees Gifts Come Under Scrutiny," New York Times, July 24, 2016.

On Don Siegelman, a concise summary of the outrageous facts of the case is at "Why Obama Should Pardon Don Siegelman," New Yorker, January 14, 2015, by former Federal prosecutor and Edward Snowden hater Jeffrey Toobin. (Even reactionary establishment barnacle George Will thinks Siegelman got a raw deal.)

In another example of what a coward Barack Obama is, that even after over 100 former state attorneys general [!] sent a letter to Obama seeking a pardon for Siegelman, Obama ignored them. 

["Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman seeks pardon from President Obama," Alabama Media Group website of Alabama newspapers, April 13, 2016.]

In fact, after the Washington Post quoted Siegelman in an article on the Supreme Court exoneration of Bob McDonnell, Obama's Bureau of Prisons transferred Siegelman to solitary confinement in a Louisiana Federal prison, obviously to silence him and as punishment. It's the second time Siegelman has been thrown into the hole after giving a media interview. ["Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman sent to solitary confinement," Washington Post, April 29, 2016.]

To be "fair" and "balanced," I'll mention that the Bureau of Prisons denied that they threw Siegelman into solitary as a punishment. (I hear solitary is actually great fun.) The 70-year-old Siegelman, a Kung Fu Master and trained ninja, has escaped from some of the world's most escape-proof prisons, and thus is a high-security-risk prisoner.... Um, well, that's partly true. He is 70.

This is a Democratic president doing this to a framed-up Democrat. What kind of amoral creeps are Democrats that they accept this kind of party "leadership"? 

The big puzzle is why even the Democrats in the power structure are insistent on heaping injustice upon Siegelman. The Federal appeals court has upheld his conviction, and the Supreme Court refused to even allow him a hearing, completely blowing off a brief signed by 116 former attorneys general in support of Siegelman's exoneration.. ["More than 100 former attorneys general ask US Supreme Court to review Siegelman sentence," Alabama Media Group website of Alabama newspapers, October 22, 2015.

(One of Obama's Supreme Court appointees, Elena Kagan, was Obama's solicitor general, in which role she participated in the persecution of Siegelman. ["Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman seeks pardon from President Obama," Alabama Media Group, op cit.])

The Obama regime has been playing a shell game with Siegelman, moving him from prison to prison in states far away from his family and friends,such as Oklahoma, to try and isolate him, break his spirit, and punish his supporters by stealing their time and money when they attempt to visit him in prison. Obama has repeatedly demonstrated his streak of cruelty, as in the murder of 16 year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his teenage cousin, and five other civilians while they were dining, blown up by an Obama drone; arranging the breaking of Medea Benjamin's arm by Egyptian secret police goons to punish her for heckling him during one of his unctuous, oleaginous, sanctimonious, speeches; and the persecution of whistleblowers, activists and dissidents under his rule. A coward and a bully- not an attractive combination. One thing you can say about the likes of Putin and Erdogan: they're bullies but no cowards. Somehow that makes them less contemptible than Obama.

The treatment of Siegelman reminds one that the U.S. power establishment is a dangerous nest of vipers, a collection of scorpions that are even dangerous to one another, not just to all the rest of us on this planet. There is no guarantee of personal security as a member of a criminal gang.

Of course, Siegelman got off easy compared to two of the Kennedys.