Friday, November 2, 2018

Trump Asserts Dictatorial Power To Change U.S. Constitution By Fiat, U.S. Media Response Lame

Right before elections for the House of Representatives and a third of the U.S. Senate, Trump is trying to whip up his "base" of white racists and xenophobes. He's doing it in at least two ways. With a week to go until the November 6 election, he is claiming the right to invalidate the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by issuing an executive order abolishing it. The 14th Amendment states that anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a U.S. citizen. (About 30 other countries also do this, contrary to Trump's lie, repeated regularly over the years and again now, that the U.S. is the only country that does this. Oh, and it's "ridiculous" and it "has to stop" He portrays all such people as leeches.) Reactionaries call this "birthright citizenship," as if it is somehow different from citizenship of babies born in the U.S. whose parents are U.S. citizens. They also push a lie called "anchor babies," which the corporate media NEVER call them on. The idea is that citizen babies somehow make it impossible to deport their parents. A lie, as the U.S. has long deported parents with U.S. citizen children. Obama indeed deported thousands of such people.

As far as a president changing the basic law of the U.S., the Constitution, to his liking by his own edict, that is completely illegal. The Constitution specifies two ways in which it can be altered: either by a Constitutional Convention, of which there has only ever been one, the one that created the Constitution, or by a vote of two-thirds of the members of both chambers of Congress AND by ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures. That is how all subsequent amendments after the first ten (the so-called Bill of Rights) have been enacted.

The media headlines should have been the first part of my title above, Trump Asserts Dictatorial Power To Change U.S. Constitution By Fiat. Instead the predominant media reaction was Hmm, can he do that? There would probably be a legal challenge.

 Not, BLATANTLY ILLEGAL POWER GRAB UNPRECEDENTED IN U.S. HISTORY! And saying "there would be a legal challenge" implies he COULD do it, and THEN people would have to take him to court to try and overturn it! (Keep in mind that the Federal courts are now stuffed with extreme reactionary judges courtesy of the Federalist Society, the GOP, and the Democrats' spinelessness and political fecklessness.)

It seems that the establishment "resistance" to Trump consists of placing all hopes on former FBI secret police chief Robert S. Mueller III pulling a rabbit out of his hat and proving that Trump is Putin's Puppet, a criminal stooge of Moscow. Good luck with that. That means there's no hope at all.

As former CIA secret police chief Michael Morell has stated, if there was evidence to that effect, it would have either been leaked by now, or uncovered by the horde of reporters frantically digging for dirt on Trump. Plenty of dirt has been found- David Cay Johnston and Wayne Barrett have spent years digging up a mountain of misdeeds by Trump- but "Russian collusion," like the piss tape, is a fantasy.


The second way Trump is agitating his vile supporters is by screeching about an "invasion" by a few thousand refugees fleeing the violence and poverty created there by the Obama-Hillary Clinton coup in that nation. These refugees are currently over a thousand miles from the U.S., at the Guatemalan-Mexican border. Trump publicly called for them to be gunned down, U.S. Border Patrol style. ("When they throw rocks like they did at Mexican military police I say consider that a rifle.") The U.S. Border Patrol isn't murderous enough already. Trump has to stoke more murders. Just as he called on cops to bash the heads of people they arrest into their patrol cars' doorframes. Just as he praised a Republican lout for body-slamming a reporter, a thug subsequently elected by the goons of the state of Montana to Congress. [1]

Trump also made a big show of sending 5,200 army troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, following that by announcing his alleged intent to sent 15,000 troops. Hey, why not make it a million, asshole?

To borrow from Lillian Hellman, we're in Scoundrel Time (again), in America.



Der Fuhrer, U.S. version. And he's even of German ancestry! (And believes he's superior because of it. Remember 
he wanted more Norwegians to immigrate to the U.S., and stop the flow from "shithole" -i.e. "non-white"- countries.)


                  Gee, I TRIED to overthrow Trump for you. [Robert S. Mueller III, another guy of German extraction.]


Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Republicans Have Already Stolen Georgia Governor's Election Before Election Day

The GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) have gotten so good at stealing elections after over two decades of practice that now they can do it before there's even an election.

In the state of Georgia, the race for Governor of that Confederate, racist state is set to be stolen by the current state Secretary of State, Brian Kemp.

By the way, Kemp is the guy who oversees the election! Kind of like an African dictator, only white.
Kemp has put a "hold" on 53,000 registrations, 70% of them of blacks. JUST COINCIDENTALLY, his Democratic opponent in the race for Governor is a black woman.

In Georgia, the Republicans have purged 1.5 million people from the rolls from 2012-2015. That's 10% of the total registered voters.

Kemp is demagoging a justification by claiming the Democrats want illegal aliens to vote. A nice racist smear that goes down well with Southern whites. (And lots of other whites in the U.S., which is a very racist country.)

The Republicans have pioneered many ways to steal elections. They also close most of the polling sites in heavily Democratic areas. Of course the Georgian Republicans haven't missed that trick either.

The sickest thing is that the U.S. insists on boasting that it's the World's Best Democracy.



Saudis GIft U.S. With 2 Big Bribes To Buy Their Way Out of Khashoggi Murder

Saudi Arabia just gave $100 million to the U.S. Now they've pledged to up their oil production to whatever it takes to fill the void left by the Trump regime strangling Iranian oil exports. This caused the price of oil to drop 4% today October 23rd.

Determined to evade responsibility for the butchering of Jamal Khashoggi, a former adviser to the Saudi "royals" whose patrons were neutralized by the current tyrant, the "Crown Prince" Mohammed bin Salman, favorite son of "King" Salman, they have gone from issuing threats to paying bribes to the U.S. to evade sanctions.

Trump would love to help them out. For several weeks he shielded them. But he is being pulled by the political undertow of the U.S. political establishment and even Republican Senators taking a harder line.

But in the end, the most that might happen is that some of "Prince" Salman's powers will be trimmed. Even more unlikely would be his replacement by another designated heir to the throne.

Meanwhile U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven "King of the Foreclosure Fraudsters" Mnuchin went back on his promise not to attend an "investment conference" being hosted by the murderous "Prince" Salman, and went. This conference was boycotted by numerous heads of large multinational corporations and European officials. However many venal capitalists did attend, and they gave Salman a standing ovation. It's said they're mainly oilmen.



Salman the Younger Explains to Mnuchin Why They Had to Chop Up Khashoggi's Body: "He was a fat man, so we had to
cut him up into pieces no bigger than this. It would have been terrible if someone got a hernia carrying him."



Thursday, October 4, 2018

FBI Finishes Another of Its Specialties, A Sham "Investigation" That Is Actually A Cover-Up

Under pressure from the public, the media, and Democrats, in that order of concern, Trump ordered the FBI on September 28 to conduct a limited "supplemental" background check as an addition to their previous checks that failed to report on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's debauched, violent youth.

Kavanaugh has undergone previous such checks in order to work in the Bush White House on sensitive political programs (such as torture) requiring lying and stealth, and when Bush rewarded him by planting him on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second most important court in the U.S. that in practice has the final word on many vital matters. (The Supreme Court refuses to even consider 90% plus of the cases litigants attempt to appeal to it. Contrary to popular delusion, one CANNOT "appeal all the way to the Supreme Court." Take four months of vacation time a year, the "Justices" only accept about 90 cases a year for review. And most of those are of minor import.)

The FBI was given just a week to carry out this latest whitewash. It finished two days early, on October 3rd. Senate boss Mitch McConnell then said there would be a vote by the full Senate on October 5th. The single copy of the FBI report would be reviewed in a "secure" room by a few Senators at a time, who would have to memorize its contents. (No cellphones or cameras allowed.) McConnell averred that this was "plenty of time" for the 100 Senators to review the report! ("The" media reported this absurdity matter-of-factly, as if there was nothing wrong with it.)

The FBI only interviewed 6 people: 4 friends of violent criminal Kavanaugh, a friend of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's ( whom he attempted to rape when she was 15), and Deborah Ramirez, who was molested by Kavanaugh at Yale University. (He shoved his bare genitals in her face.) The FBI ignored a list of 20 corroborating witnesses provided by Ramirez. They also failed to interview Kavanaugh or Dr. Ford. (Sparing Kavanaugh from committing a felony by lying to the FBI, which carries a five year prison sentence. Not that he would have been prosecuted. Unless the Democrats somehow take over the executive branch by winning the presidency. Kavanaugh's squirming evasions when asked repeatedly by a Democratic Senator on the Judiciary Committee if he would call for an FBI investigation clearly shows he is well aware of the peril of talking to the FBI.)

The FBI specializes in sham investigations when state crimes need hiding. Examples includes the CIA assassinations of John Kennedy (1963), Robert Kennedy (1968), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), its own massacre of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, and numerous political assassinations and other crimes.

U.S. broadcast media has once again done a tremendous disservice by omitting the critical details and instead making it a "he said- she said" story. Not only Kavanaugh vs. Ford, but Republicans vs. Democrats. Republicans say enough time has been wasted (McConnell, and the awful Senator Lindsey Graham, a vicious, rabid cur), Democrats say the investigation was superficial and the vote is being rushed.

McConnell is the same guy who prevented the previous president, the Democrat Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy for almost a year. Which makes McConnell's talk of "wasting time" and his rush now all the more galling. That vacant seat was filled by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, the spawn of Reagan EPA head and zealous anti-environmentalist Anne Gorsuch Burford.

Of course Kavanaugh was just one of 25 interchangeable, extreme reactionaries on the list of Supreme Court candidates the loathsome Federalist Society handed to Trump to pick from. Interesting that Trump chose a fellow sexual predator. He must have sensed a kindred soul. It has also been reported that Kavanaugh has lately adopted a "legal theory" of presidential immunity from prosecution- interesting, since he had exactly the opposite attitude when he was a henchman of Kenneth Starr's in Starr's Get Clinton operation. But I guess we must await a greater legal mind to come up with some legerdemain to show why Democratic Presidents should be subject to prosecution but not Republican ones.



Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Republicans Implacably Determined to Implant a Second Sex Offender on the Supreme Court

We now have credible assertions that Brett Kavanaugh was involved in drugging and gang-raping young women. This is the fourth claim of sexual "misconduct" ("the" media's preferred euphemism for his crimes) against Kavanaugh.

When (or if) he joins Clarence Thomas on the high court, there will be two known sex offenders in effect making laws. Both Thomas and Kavanaugh are extreme misogynists who are champing at the bit to repeal what is left of the weak "right" that women have to terminate their pregnancies instead of being treated as chattel and forced to bear children against their will.

The GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) from their chief, Donald J. Trump, himself a known serial sex offender and adulterer, on down, have responded by attacking the accusers, calling their painful recollections "smears" (a word Trump used and was echoed by Senate boss, the loathsome Mitch McConnell of Kentucky) and avowing that they refuse to "ruin" Kavanaugh's "life" by NOT implanting him on the Supreme Court! (This from reactionary dog, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, on one of the Sunday morning bourgeois political propaganda TV shows September 23.)

So far, we've had Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who Kavanaugh and his crony Mark Judge tried to rape when she was only 15. This is documented by therapist's notes from 2012. We have a letter from an attorney to Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Committee, about complaints from Federal employees against Kavanaugh, which Feinstein suppressed, as she suppressed Dr. Ford's information, refusing even to brief other Democratic Senators when they asked for the information.

Then there was a woman who described Kavanaugh's drunken assaults at Yale University, which included him thrusting his exposed genitals in her face.

Now we have a sworn affidavit from Julie Swetnick, who has a security clearance which she would


lose if she committed perjury by making a false claim. She relates Kavanaugh's involvement in drugging and gang-raping women.

The Republicans' response with each new expose of Kavanaugh has been shriller and more vicious attacks on the accusers, smearing them as politically motivated liars. (Part of their smearing is accusing the victims of "smearing" Kavanaugh, inverting reality.)

Much of "the" media, and not just Murdoch's Minions at Fox "News," are slanting their "coverage" in a sexist, misogynist direction. I will have more on this later.

So the United States under Trump is forcefully erasing what social progress there has been in recent years. Meanwhile, Facebook, Twitter, youtube, and Spotify, in the name of cracking down on "divisiveness," are banning and censoring progressive voices (as well as Alex Jones, the only one banned that "the" media mention). But the divisions are not creations of critics. They are real and fundamental aspects of U.S. society. It is the aggressive attacks on human rights by the reactionary power structure that causes divisions in the U.S., NOT Russian trolls or botnets- contrary to Democratic Party, corporate media, and secret police absurd assertions. Recall that Obama's "Director of National Intelligence," James "Pinocchio" Clapper, commissioned a custom "intelligence report" attacking the likes of RT and Abby Martin for "creating division" in America! What demented, demonic scapegoating by a pathological system!



Your next Supreme Court Justice: Unconvicted Felon Brett Kavanaugh




Friday, September 21, 2018

"Why Didn't Someone Call the FBI 36 Years Ago?" Molester-In-Chief Asks in Smear of Kavanaugh Victim

Serial sex criminal and president of the United States Donald J. Trump asked that rhetorical question to rally his "base" of deplorables, louts, sexists and terrorist scum around Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican apparatchik Trump is trying to make a lifetime Justice of the Supreme Court.   He was speaking to his favorite propagandist and loyal shill, Sean Hannity, one of Murdoch's Minions at Fox "News" and a career radical reactionary and polemical TV bully. The "question" was directed at Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who at the age of 15, in 1982, should have gone to the FBI.

It shouldn't be necessary to point out the numerous things that are dumb about this. But in brief: rape is generally a state crime, not a Federal one, so the FBI wouldn't be involved unless local police asked for help. Second, then as now, the vast majority of rapes- like around 90%- are NOT reported by victims, much less teen ones, much less rape attempts.

And Trump knows this. He has had years of experience sexually assaulting numerous women with NONE of them filing criminal complaints against him! He's full of shit, and his bad faith is stunning.

This is a criminal who we have on video boasting of grabbing women's "pussies" and forcibly kissing them. "They let you get away with it," he said on that video. He has bragged about walking in on naked contestants in the Miss Universe pageant he controlled, to ogle them. He is also a known serial adulturer. He has an extensive history of sexual crimes and misbehavior.

But "the" media hasn't mentioned any of this in the Kavanaugh-Ford affair! I think it is QUITE relevant!

Trump had more idiotic, malign, and dangerous things to say on Twitter today:

"I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!"

"The radical left lawyers want the FBI to get involved NOW. Why didn’t someone call the FBI 36 years ago?"


Radical left lawyers. A classic "McCarthyite" smear, designed as a clarion call to the millions of reactionaries who are the core of Trump's "base."

This is about far more than just the case of Kavanaugh and Ford. The deep problem with what Trump is doing is he is pushing the U.S. backwards socially and culturally. He is promoting primitive, sexist, repressive male supremacist attitudes towards rape and women and the violent victimization of women. 

And he is determined to achieve his oft-stated goal of having the Supreme Court overturn Roe vs. Wade, thus abolishing the "right" to abortion. (More of a privilege that women have to struggle to get, especially poor women.) "It's going to happen," he has said repeatedly, cementing his tawdry alliance with the religious reactionaries of the U.S., the most hypocritical and sanctimonious mass of creeps in the country.

Wither the Democrats? As usual with reactionaries nominated for the Supreme Court, the dominant Democratic politicians surreptitiously grease the skids for the reactionary nominees, as I have explained in previous posts. (Just scroll down.) This time it was the awful Dianne "I love the secret police" Feinstein, who hid a letter from Ford she received in July. The excuse being peddled in "the" media for Feinstein is that Ford asked for anonymity. The trouble with that is that she also hid a letter from July from a lawyer notifying her of Federal employees with sexually derogatory information about Kavanaugh. There was NO request for anonymity in that letter. So "the" media simply ignores it.

Both political parties of the two-party cartel have been dedicated to making the U.S. more repressive throughout their history. The few "progressive" moves by them were done reluctantly and only because of intense public pressure. For example, what's so "progressive" about Nixon allowing Congress to create an Environmental Protection Agency? Polluters were destroying the environment and causing mass disease! That is objectively damaging even from the rulers' perspective!

In America, what is called "Liberalism" is merely pragmatism. What is called "Conservatism" is reactionaryism and even fascism.




"I really really LOVE women's HOLES. Believe me, I understand women.
                                              They say 'No' but they really mean 'Yes'!"


Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Right Wing Terrorist Network Swings Into Action Against Kavanaugh Sexual Assault Victim

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who was nearly raped by Trump Supreme Court nominee and Republican apparatchik Brett Kavanaugh, has been terrorized into leaving her home with her family by death threats and hate mail. Her email was hacked, and she was impersonated online by malign attackers.

As usual, much of "the" media, the U.S. power establishment propaganda organizations, have the backs of the terrorists by not reporting on their terrorist actions. This makes them accessories and accomplices. While the death threats have been reported in print media, the radio news I monitor, including NPR and CBS, have not reported them.

That same media are also accomplices to all the fascist terrorist regimes the U.S. has ever supported by the same means, refusing to report the news. Every "friendly" dictator and dictatorship gets puff-piece treatment from the U.S. media. A current outstanding example of this is Saudi Arabia and its ruling despots, "King" Salman and his vicious son, "Crown Prince" Mohammad bin Salman, architect of the destruction of Yemen, shakedown artist, and repressor of any and all would-be reformers of the medieval Saudi social order.

And what about the police? Why don't they ever hunt down and prosecute rightwing terrorists and harassers? Harassment and death threats are illegal activities. I thought they were "law enforcers." I guess it depends.

Ford is a Congressional witness. Why isn't the FBI tracking those threatening a Congressional witness and arresting them and presenting cases to the U.S. attorneys?

Well, the questions may seem naive, but actually they are rhetorical. To make obvious what should be obvious but is never thought in America. To think the obvious is to immediately and implicitly challenge this repressive system that uses right wing terrorists as auxiliaries to the power structure.

Don't hear any DEMOCRATS demanding the terrorists be hunted down and prosecuted, do you? See, it's the power structure itself enabling rightwing terrorism.

As the U.S. does all over the globe.

Meanwhile, the serial sexual criminal who picked Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court Justice and reactionary hitman to put the final nail in the coffin of the right to terminate a pregnancy, Donald Trump, who boasts of grabbing women's private parts and forcibly kissing them, made a big public display of how awful the treatment KAVANAUGH is getting is! He feels SO BAD that such a GOOD MAN is enduring this ORDEAL!

Being disgusting is par for the course (if I may use golf terminology) for the Groper-In-Chief.

And while "the" media has repeatedly mentioned that 65 women who knew Kavanaugh signed a letter avowing that he's the perfect gentleman, (leaving about 4 billion females on planet earth who have yet to confirm he never tried to rape them), I only found out by accident that 599 women have signed a letter in support of Dr. Ford. It wasn't on broadcast media. But that's only about ten times as many women supporting Dr. Ford as piped up to aid Kavanaugh. Not newsworthy, I suppose. [1]

1]  "599 alumnae from Christine Blasey Ford’s high school sign letter saying they support her," Vox, September 18, 2018.



Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Brett Kavanaugh, GOP Mob Member, Prepares to Commit Third Round of Perjury

Bush regime apparatchik Brett Kavanaugh, whom Bush planted on a Federal Appeals Court as a judge, where he has tried his best to violate the rights of workers and citizens generally and illegally tried to block at least one woman from obtaining an abortion, perjured himself during his Senate confirmation hearings for that lifetime judicial appointment.

Last week, during his confirmation hearings for his appointment to the highest lifetime position in the U.S., Supreme Court Justice, he committed perjury again.

 Come Monday, September 24, he's going to commit perjury for at least the third time and deny deny deny that he attempted to rape Christine Blasey Ford when she was only 15.

He's already told an unsworn naked lie, claiming he wasn't at "the party" where he and his accomplice, neofascist hack Mark Judge, got extremely drunk and assaulted Ford. Problem with that is, no one has said exactly what party it was, where it was, and exactly when.

Actually that's his second lie on the matter of his rape attempt. He's already vociferously denied he did it. Which just isn't plausible. And given his record as a Bush regime apparatchik involved in deception and trickery, and his previous perjury, isn't credible.

His victim, now a 51-year-old psychology professor, has released her therapist's notes from 2012 to the Washington Post which documents her discussions with the therapist about the event. She has also taken and passed a polygraph test, for what's that worth. [1]

Also she has proven to be very reluctant to come forward, which does not sound like someone who is setting out to sabotage Kavanaugh's nomination,.

Kavanaugh's accomplice in the assault, Judge, at first claimed to have no memory of the event. Given how drunk he apparently was, that could well be. He has since changed his story to denying the assault. His "memoir," more a roman a clef about his drunken, degenerate youth, quite obviously includes his friend and crony Brett Kavanaugh, who appears in the book as a character named "Bart O’Kavanaugh."

Gee, I wonder who that could be!

The Republican Senators are planning to resolve the matter NOT by hearing from additional witnesses, NOT by conducting an investigation, NOT by asking the FBI to investigate, but by having Kavanaugh and Ford testify to the Judiciary Committee and that's it. Then they can pretend to believe Kavanaugh, or throw up their hands and say there's no way to determine the truth- and proceed to have the whole Senate vote on Kavanaugh's nomination,

Kavanaugh's previous perjuries included lying about knowing obviously stolen documents he received- documents the sender made clear were stolen- were stolen; lying about his views on abortion; misrepresenting his judicial record; lying about his activities in the Bush White House, including his involvement in the conspiracy to commit torture and to create war hysteria against Iraq based on a mountain of lies; and denying that his superior on the Appeals Court, Alex Kosinski, shares salacious material with him. (He pulled the "not that I recall" trick for that one.)

Kavanaugh is an oppressive reactionary whose elevation to the top court, if it happens, will once again have been done with Democratic Party complicity, in this case by Senator Dianne Feinstein, as I explained in a previous essay on this matter. The Supreme Court has functioned as a primary instrument of repression and corporate hegemony over U.S. society that permits the rest of the establishment to shrug and feign helplessness. There is a shabby pretense of neutrality, "legality," impartiality about the political decisions handed down by the court. There is nothing inevitable about those decisions. Rather, the reactionary Justices concoct rationales and esoteric legalisms to justify these political decisions.

You would have thought that after five GOP apparatchiks on the high court blatantly stole the 2000 election for Bush the Younger, the court would be completely discredited. But both the putative "opposition" party, the Democrats, and the corporate propaganda system, aka "the" media, pretend it was a legitimate decision. It is political theater designed to dupe the populace into seeing the power structure as legitimate and fair, not corrupt, venal, and having no right to their misrule over us.

1]  Polygraph's are claimed to detect lies, but they are still unproven after decades of use and considered so unreliable that U.S. courts mostly do not allow their introduction as evidence. And U.S. courts have really really low standards for what is acceptable "forensic science." For example, claims by pseudo-experts that they could match a bite wound on a person to another person's teeth have been allowed and used to convict people. Common sense along is enough to prove that is ridiculous.)




Monday, September 17, 2018

There They Go Again: Dominant Democratic Politician Connived To Put another Reactionary On U.S. Supreme Court, Failed Rapist Brett Kavanaugh, and Joe Biden, Blackmail Victim??

The Democratic Party is truly hopeless. When it comes to protecting human rights, or even just what paltry protections for average people exist on paper in U.S. law, or "standing up for" its proclaimed "values," or "fighting for" people it claims to represent, the Democratic Party has proven once again to be a political death trap for anyone relying on them for these things.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, did her utmost to keep secret a letter from a college professor that stated that Trump's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, attempted to rape her while both were high school students. Feinstein is the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which just concluded high-speed "confirmation hearings" led by the Republican chairman, Charles Grassley, a fossilized reactionary from Iowa. [1]

The woman, Christine Blasey Ford, now 51 and a psychology professor, described how Kavanaugh and a chum, who were 17 at the time, attempted to rape her when she was just 15. Both men were very drunk, and Kavanaugh threw her down and lay on top of her, stifling her screams with his hand and tearing at her clothes while his accomplice turned up music in the room very loud as cover. When the accomplice jumped on top of the two, they tumbled over and she managed to flee. In 2012 she confided in a therapist, who notes corroborating the woman's account were obtained by The Washington Post newspaper. The victim also just passed a polygraph test of her veracity.

Kavanaugh, predictably, denies it. However Kavanaugh’s classmate, a neofascist hack named Mark Judge, said of the attempted rape, “I have no recollection of that.” That's not a denial! Furthermore, he wrote a memoir that provides some indirect evidence for the victim's claim, "Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk." The title gives an accurate sense of the contents. [2]
 
Feinstein refused to let her Democratic colleagues on the Judiciary Committee see the letter from Ford, and stonewalled questions from other Democratic Senators and staffers about the letter from Kavanaugh's victim.  Her staff brushed them off by saying it was too long ago to matter and that Feinstein had “taken care of it.” [Yeah, the way Joseph Biden "took care of" Anita Hill's revelations about Clarence Thomas in 1991.] The New Yorker magazine quotes "Congressional sources" saying  “We couldn’t understand what their [Feinstein and her staff] rationale is for not briefing members on this. This is all very weird;” and “She’s had the letter since late July. And we all just found out about it.” [3]

After being exposed in the media, Feinstein passed the letter (and the buck) to the FBI for "investigation." The FBI announced that it put the letter in Kavanaugh's file, and that's it. Feinstein announced her passing of the hot potato to the FBI with this internally contradictory statement: “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.” Which of course isn't honoring the victim's request for confidentiality, as telling the FBI exposes her identity and the FBI passed it along to the Trump White House for good measure.

By first deep-sixing and then being forced to reveal the victim's letter, Feinstein reaped the worst of both worlds. She is exposed as trying to cover it up, and attacked for the timing of a "last minute attack." White House spokesperson Kerri Kupec quickly took advantage, stating  “Not until the eve of his [Kavanaugh's] confirmation has Sen. Feinstein or anyone raised the specter of new ‘information’ about him,” slamming the revelation as an “11th hour attempt to delay his confirmation.”

Which, unfortunately, is how it looks. [4]

Republican Senators have followed suit, also blasting the Democrats.

But there is more. Feinstein ignored a letter she received in July, months BEFORE the just-concluded high-speed "confirmation hearings," from an attorney stating he had information from several Federal employees regarding Kavanaugh. Grassley also received that information. Here Feinstein can't pretend she was protecting someone's confidentiality. Taken together, the two cover-ups prove Feinstein's intent to help seat the extreme reactionary Kavanaugh on the high court, where he will vote to kill Roe vs. Wade, ending women's right to abortion in most of the country immediately, empower every abuse by the secret police, and immunize Donald Trump from any prosecutions. [5]

We're been here before, over and over, in fact. The Democratic Party has a HISTORY of smarmily helping the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) elevate anti-human reactionaries to the Supreme Court. Then every election they send out political junkmail saying only THEY stand between us and a far right wing Supreme Court that will overturn Roe vs. Wade, etc.

Recall that Antonin Scalia was confirmed by a Senate vote of 98-0. Those weren't 98 Republicans.
And in 1991 the man who proved indispensable to elevating known sexual harasser Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, another extreme reactionary, was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator Joe Biden. (Yes, the same whom Barack "The Drone Assassin" made vice president, and who has pretensions of becoming president in his own right.)

Biden blocked the testimony of three corroborating witnesses for Thomas' victim Anita Hill at the confirmation hearings for Thomas. He also privately advises his Democratic Senate colleagues to discount Anita Hills' testimony. The damning story is recounted in a book by two establishment reporters. [6]

In December 2017 Biden, preparing his run for President in 2020, issued what The New Yorker mischaracterized as an apology to preempt criticism of his dirty deed in 1991, saying “I wish I had been able to do more.” Of course he certainly WAS able to "do more," or rather just NOT do what he DID, which was to privately smear Hill and block her supporting witnesses.

Unless he literally means he had no choice. Which could only mean the regime of Bush the Elder was blackmailing him.

If that is the case, Biden needs to come clean right now!

 Reactionary birds of a feather: Grassley and Feinstein, both born in 1933, both 85. 
Feinstein thinks life begins at 90, as she is currently running for another 6-year Senate term.

1]  "Dianne Feinstein Withholding Brett Kavanaugh Document From Fellow Judiciary Committee Democrats," The Intercept, September 12, 2018.


2]  "Brett Kavanaugh’s High School Friend Isn’t Helping the Nominee’s Case," Mother Jones, September 15, 2018.

3]  "A Sexual-Misconduct Allegation Against the Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Stirs Tension Among Democrats in Congress," The New Yorker, September 14, 2018.

4]  Similarly, New York officials let Donald Trump run his fraudulent "charitable foundation" in blatantly illegal fashion for years, and only after he became president initiated legal action against it. Which sure looks "political," don't it! Likewise, the FBI questions Paul Manafort years ago about his work in Ukraine, and took no action against him. And of course the NSA knows everything about everyone's money transfers, including Paul Manafort's. Since he'd been allowed for years to "launder" his money, underpay his taxes, and work for a Ukrainian ruler without registering as an "agent of a foreign power" without the government minding- and remember, the Democrat Obama was president for the previous eight years!- it is little wonder he was complacent. Yet suddently secret police apparatchik Robert Mueller III hurls all these charges at him. Rather like the scene in Casablanca, when the French police chief, under Gestapo pressure, suddenly "discovers" gambling in Rick's club.

5]  "Attorney Sent Letter to Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein Claiming Federal Court Employees Willing to Speak About Brett Kavanaugh," The Intercept, September 17, 2018.

6] See "How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultrareactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights," July 10, 2018.






Wednesday, September 12, 2018

How the GOP and Trump Henchman Kris Kobach Stole the 2016 Presidential Election

The Gang Of Plunderers has been stealing elections for at least 20 years now. While the Democratic Party sleeps.

Well, not exactly. What the Democrats DO is turn a blind eye to the theft of elections and instead scream bloody murder at Ralph Nader (2000) and Vladimir Putin (2016)! Scapegoating irrelevant targets on which they unleash their wrath. They're afraid of the Republicans!

It's cowardly, and makes them accomplices to a rotten and corrupt and fraudulent system of pseudo-democracy. They would rather preserve the increasingly shabby and threadbare illusion of a fair electoral process then actually HAVE one! This makes them accomplices in their own victimization, as well as enemies of democracy.

But since the so-called Democrats are a front group for corporate oligarchy and global imperialism, why would they even care about democracy? Of course they wouldn't. And they don't. Democracy means power in the hands of the people, the precise opposite of corporate oligarchy and imperialism.

Aaron Maté of The Real News Network interviewed investigative journalist Greg Palast in August 2018 on some of the evil machinations of Kansas Republican Secretary of State and nominee for Governor Kris Kobach, and the theft of the 2016 presidential election. That makes three presidential elections stolen by GOP skulduggery- 2000, 2004, 2016. [1]

Seems they can't win anymore except by cheating.

Kobach has devoted his career to election theft. He has taken his underhanded methods of skulduggery national, as this video explains.

Palast describes systematic disenfranchising of tens of thousands of voters in "swing" states. The Democrats response? As in Florida in 2000, they don't defend the right of "minorities" to vote, Instead they gnash their teeth at the Green Party for daring to run in elections and "steal" the Democrats "votes," on the spurious assumption that every single voter for the Greens would be voting for Democrats instead. The other villain in the Democrats version of reality is that Internet memes spread by Russians induced people to vote for Trump who otherwise wouldn't have.

And according to Democratic Party astronomers, the moon is made out of green cheese.

The Republican apparatchiks who sit on the Supreme Court as the highest judges in the land have played their part in the election-stealing conspiracies of the Gang Of Plunderers (GOP), most infamously in 2000 when they banned Florida from conducting an accurate vote count, and by aiding and abetting Kobach's schemes. One method of covert disenfranchisement invented and spread by Kobach to the two-thirds of U.S. states the Republicans control, which these GOP operatives-in-judicial-robes have "legalized," is pretending that people with common black, Hispanic, and Asian-American last names living in different states are the same person, and if they fail to respond to a postcard mailed to them by election officials are automatically removed from the voter registration rolls without further notice to them. (As if people carefully read and comprehend every bit of seemingly insignificant mail, and mail never gets lost or misdelivered or stolen. And the phone hasn't been invented yet, so there's no way to call people.)

Here let me remind you that if it wasn't for Democratic Senators, these extremely partisan Justices would never have made it onto the Supreme Court. For the story of that betrayal, see footnote [2].

People who vote twice are subject to imprisonment for five years. Kris Kobach, who has conspired to deprive millions of the right to vote, should at least get life in prison. As a destroyer of democracy, he is subversive to the proclaimed values of America. Like a termite, he bores in secret, eating away at the foundational legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system.

The Man With the Crocodile Grin: Kris Kobach, anti-democratic reactionary 
white supremacist, GOP go-to guy for election-stealing.

1]  Watch "How the GOP and Trump Henchman Kris Kobach Stole the 2016 Presidential Election."

2]  For how the Democrats helped create a reactionary Supreme Court, see "How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultrareactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights."