Epic FAIL By Trump and GOP To Repeal Obamacare! SAD!

So. The GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) have an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives, control the Senate, and hold the Presidency, and they couldn't repeal Obamacare (aka the "Affordable Care Act," and "Affordable" it ain't [1]). As a certain president is wont to say of others, "Pathetic!"

Here's how it went down. During the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, the Republicans who control the House passed bills over 60 times repealing Obamacare. (A bill has to pass both chambers of Congress, the House and Senate, and then be signed by the president to become law. If the president vetoes a bill, both chambers of Congress have to pass the bill again by at least a 2/3rds majority in both chambers to override the veto and become law. This rarely happens.)

Now, with their control of both chambers and the presidency, you'd think it would be child's play for the Republicans to have their way at last with the hated Obamacare. They've only spent practically the entirely of the Reign of Obama cursing at Obamacare and vowing to repeal it. It was also one of the main campaign themes of Trump's candidacy (along with deporting immigrants, building a wall on the Mexican border and making Mexico pay for it, tearing up existing trade deals and magically recreating millions of lost industrial jobs. Oh, and "winning." So MUCH "winning!" Indeed, "we’ll have so much winning, you’ll get bored with winning!" Trump bellowed. [2]

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Republicans' Promised Land, the repeal of Obamacare, something they spent the past seven years vowing to do and that Trump made a major theme of his presidential campaign: the Republicans couldn't agree amongst themselves about a replacement law! So they didn't even vote!

Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, (the highest member of the body, who is elected by the House, meaning that the party with the majority picks one of their own party members for the post) had the responsibility to pass the "replacement" for Obamacare, which Trump and various GOP politicians promised, absurdly, would be cheaper than Obamacare, insure more people, and provide better coverage. All lies, as duly exposed by the analysis of the Congressional Budget Office. 

In any event, just hours before a scheduled vote on the bill, Ryan cancelled the vote. He didn't have the votes for it to pass, even though the Republicans hold a large majority in the House. 

"Moderate" Republicans realized that too many of their constituents would be smashed by the Trump-Ryan replacement plan. Fearing for their reelection prospects, they balked.

Another batch of Republicans, the most extreme reactionaries among the GOP House members who clump together in a group and are self-dubbed the "Freedom Caucus," refused to support the Trump-Ryan bill because it wasn't destructive enough. 

And of course the Democrats were solidly opposed, united in defense of Obama's signature "achievement," a key trope in his "legacy."

Trump, that Supreme Dealmaker and Negotiator Extraordinaire, unleashed his mighty dealmaking superpowers by holding a jawboning session with Republican House members. 

To no avail.

Trump once paid someone to write a book for him, that Trump has ever since pretended to write himself, titled The Art of the Deal. So Trump, the dealmaking artiste, made a messy finger-painting of a deal.

Trump claims that his favorite activity is making deals. I think what he means is he enjoys taking advantage of people and exploiting them and conning them. He's conned investors, bankers, business partners, contractors, and many others. 

Yet on the day the House was to vote on the measure, having done a last headcount of supporters and opponents of the bill, Ryan cancelled the vote to avoid a humiliating defeat.

Trump, never one to admit failure or accept responsibility, much less blame, just walked away with a shrug, declaring that he's moving on to tax "reform."

Nevertheless, the undeniable bottom line is this:

Self-proclaimed World's Greatest Negotiator, Ace Dealmaker Donald J. Trump FAILS!

Maybe he should fire himself.

1]  85% of the people who visited the government website to purchase insurance as they are now required by law to do, under penalty of a fine collected by the IRS if they don't, didn't purchase insurance there. At least one reason was expense. Those plans aren't cheap, and not everyone qualifies for a government subsidy to partially offset the cost.

On the other hand, the expansion of Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, helped people in those states not ruled by cruel Republican governors who forbade the expansion in "their" states. (GOP apparatchiks sitting on the Supreme Court as "Justices" allowed this refusal to go along with the law.) Unfortunately Medicaid pays so little to health care providers that most doctors won't accept it, and those on Medicaid have to rely on public hospitals or on clinics with second and third rate doctors. And forget about dentists. Almost none accept it. Only bad dentists accept Medicaid. (I speak from experience.)

2]  Yeah, he said that.

He also said, "We gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning and you'll say please, please It's too much winning! We can't take it anymore!" It's on video. 

See, the U.S. will "start winning again" when he's in charge, he said, ad nauseam, while campaigning, so much winning that  "people are gonna get sick of it." "You're gonna come up, and they're gonna call me up from Texas, 'Mr. Trump, sir, you have thousands and thousands of calls from Texas. They're all your friends. They heard you speak one night. Mr. Trump! They're very upset. President Trump, they're very upset,'" Trump vowed.

He predicted getting "thousands and thousands of calls from Texas" from people upset with him because he'll be "winning" on every issue.

He claimed  people will be saying "'Everything is a win. You're winning on trade. You're winning at the border. You're winning with your military. You're winning on health care.' We're gonna repeal that horrible stuff and replace it." (Umm, or not.) ["Donald Trump goes on epic rant about winning," (CBS News, June 18, 2016.)

He repeated the theme, immediately contradicting himself. "We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning," Trump said Wednesday. "Believe me, I agree, [he agrees with himself!] you'll never get bored with winning. [Which is it? Bored or not bored?] We never get bored. We are going to turn this country around. We are going to start winning big on trade. Militarily, we're going to build up our military. We're going to have such a strong military that nobody, nobody is going to mess with us. We're not going to have to use it." [Real Clear Politics, September 9, 2015.]

Well, Mr. Trump, no one is tired or bored yet with all your winning, but some people have had more than enough of your bluster and braggadoccio.

Believe me.

 

FBI Secret Police Boss Tacitly Admits Trump Wiretap, While Denying It

FBI secret police chief James Comey testified to the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, and disclosed what the U.S. media considers a "bombshell;" namely that the FBI has been running a so-called foreign counterintelligence investigation since July 2016 into possible ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia. He also averred that criminal charges could be brought, depending on what was found.

Well, obviously such an investigation would involve monitoring of phones. And since Trump ran his campaign out of his lair in Trump tower, those phones would likely be tapped. And the calls of campaign aides to Trump would capture conversations between him and them.

The U.S. media is absurdly pretending that the likes of Comey would never lie. What nonsense. In fact, the first secret police poohbah who was trotted out publicly to deny Trump's claim of being tapped was known, egregious liar James "Pinocchio" Clapper, Obama's former Director of National Intelligence. That U.S. corporate propagandists could pretend Clapper has the slightest credibility shows how cynical and unethical they are.

In any event, ALL of our phones are tapped ALL the time by the NSA, a military agency. The media propagandists want us to believe that if the FBI and NSA bosses deny something, we should absolutely trust them. (Both claimed to be unaware of any taps on Trump.) Secret police agencies are in the business of deception and concealment. Lying is their usual mode. Only a fraction of what they say is ever truthful.

NSA veteran Russ Tice has told us about the NSA's practice of spying on the communications of all the members of the top echelons of U.S. power, including their putative "overseers," the judges of the FISA court and Congresspeople on the intelligence committee. They even spied on an Illinois State Senator who was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, a guy by the name of Barack Hussein Obama.

Here are links to Clapper's most notorious lie:

Short version: "James 'Pinocchio' Clapper's biggest whopper."  

Longer excerpt with context: "7 Minutes of Lies & Evasions From DNI James 'Pinocchio' Clapper culminating in his notorious whopper."  

Here is the link to the excerpt from the Tice interview. From there you can go to the full interview. "NSA Whistleblower Russ Tice Describes top NSA domestic targets."  

Rex Tillerson Is The Most Irrelevant Secretary of State Since William Rogers

 Rogers was Nixon's Secretary of State. Kept out of the loop, Nixon ran foreign policy himself with his henchman Henry Kissinger, a sycophantic brownnoser to power. Kissinger was Nixon's National Security Adviser until Rogers was tossed overboard and Kissinger became Sec. of State.

Nixon was a pathological creep who held his cabinet members in contempt.

I don't know if Trump holds Tillerson in contempt. He probably thinks he's better than Rex because he's richer (presumably). Tillerson has been nearly invisible. The top staff positions at State other than Tillerson are vacant. Trump is proposing to slash the State Department's budget by 28%- a huge downgrade.

Tillerson makes pronouncements that disappear almost immediately, like pebbles tossed into a pond.

For some reason, Tillerson refuses to allow the media to accompany him. Either he doesn't want to be observed, or Trump decreed this. On his current trip to Asia, he brought along on his plane just one pseudo-journalist, a propagandist who is designated to function as a shill. Two GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) operatives formed a fake "news" outfit a few weeks ago, and hired this young women with zero journalistic background or experience to pretend to be a reporter. She is the sum total of the "press pool" accompanying Tillerson in Asia.

Tillerson just made an empty threat to go to war with North Korea, employing the usual U.S. gangster lingo, the euphemism "all options are on the table." Except that war with the deranged, nuclear-armed North Korean regime would be an act of insanity. Aside from its nuclear weapons, the North Korean totalitarian cult has 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, South Korea, the capital and commercial center of that nation. I don't think the South Koreans would appreciate having it obliterated.

But Tillerson has wasted no time in prnetsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt      oving himself truly loathsome. Since the bloodthirsty Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines last June on a platform of murdering "drug dealers an users," over 6,000 mostly poor Filipinos have been murdered in their homes and on the streets by Duterte's hit squads and independent "vigilantes." When pressed on this in Congress, Tillerson refused to condemn or criticize it.

See "Rex Tillerson Sets Off Alarm Bells in the Human-Rights Community," The Nation, January 12, 2017.

"I am NOT irrelevant, DAMN it!"

 

More Evidence Trump Voters Are Idiots. YES THEY ARE! YES THEY ARE!

More Evidence Trump Voters Are Idiots. YES THEY ARE! YES THEY ARE!

We're hearing a lot of apologia for the approximately 25% of the U.S. adult population who are morons. We're lectured to stop "condescending" to them, that we need to "talk" to them to "understand" them.

The problem isn't that people capable of rational thought and action don't "understand" Trump voters. The problem is that millions of Trump voters are SO IRRATIONAL that they vote against their OWN OBVIOUS SELF-INTEREST.

Case in point: this headline from the New York Times:

California Farmers Backed Trump, but Now Fear Losing Field Workers

Well DUHHH! Didn't these idiot farmers notice that their workers were Mexicans? And didn't they notice, for a whole two years, Trump attacking Mexican immigrants, calling them "rapists," and vowing, OVER and OVER and OVER AGAIN, to BUILD A WALL and MAKE MEXICO PAY for it? Those were effectively campaign slogans of his!    

This is one of many examples of the self-destructive nature of Trump voters, There will be more in the years to come.

Democratic voters suffer from a similar if less severe case of false hopes invested in con artists who they think will save them. But that's another story, which I have touched on in past essays.

For the vast majority of people in the U.S., if they voted for the party whose policies would benefit them, and avoid parties whose policies are harmful to them, the correct choice would be the Green Party. It would basically take a treatise for me to demonstrate that fact, which this is not. If large numbers of people would read it, it would be worth the effort. Merely stating it as fact sounds dogmatic, but it is not. I'm not particularly committed to the Greens. They simply are the best choice available. (Of course, to actually change the U.S., the malign power of the Deep State, the permanent military Goliath and the “black” government of secret police agencies, would somehow have to be neutralized. Congress would have to be captured, and the Judiciary largely restaffed with new judges. Oh, the media would have to be something other than the mouthpiece of corporate oligarchy and imperialism. Speaking of the corporate oligarchy, it too would have to be cut down to size. So voting Green is really just the start of a daunting political project. Only a change of consciousness on a mass scale among the population of the U.S. would make all this possible. That's a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition.

There's a hoary cliché that two things one should never discuss at family gatherings are religion and politics. That's because, for most people, both are matters of “faith” (irrational attitudes and belief) and not susceptible to rational discourse.

But then, the lack of rationality seems to be the curse of homo sapiens. (Global warming, anyone?) And an ingrained viciousness. (War, torture, repression...add your own examples.) That viciousness not only eliminated the Neandertals (I suspect) but helped make this species globally dominant, to the detriment of innumerable other species, and increasingly of itself.

If you want to waste your time reading a long, repetitive article that reports the obvious, you can read it by clicking on the title: “California Farmers Backed Trump, but Now Fear Losing Field Workers,” New York Times, February 9, 2017.

Trump: The American Emperor Nero

The Roman Empire had some venal emperors infamous for cruelty and deranged malignity. Now the U.S. empire has one. (Arguably not the first. Think of the vulgar, genocidal Andrew Jackson, the fanatical racist and pioneer of radical purges and witch hunts Woodrow Wilson, the pathological paranoiac Richard Nixon, the fascist racist Ronald Reagan, to name some. And except for Nixon, all are lionized in the U.S. pantheon. Poor Nixon has merely been rehabilitated.)

Trump is different in the modern era in that he wears no mask. What you see is the real him. This is quite different from standard political practice going back well over a century.. He puts on no act, as virtually every other president has. Trump can't be bothered trying to project a false image of rectitude, of restraint, of sober and judicious judgment. He's an in-your-face demagogue. For some reason, Trump needn't restrain or censor himself to be "respectable." He floats in a zone above respectability. He considers fawning his due. And somehow that works. It is accepted as legitimate that he should have power.

Like Nero, he is self-obsessed and self-indulgent to an extreme degree. Like Nero, he is given to extreme acts, made on impulse. Like Nero, he is a highly destructive force who causes great damage to people's lives, and who weakens structurally the empire over which he reigns. (That second part is the upside.)

Typical of emperors, Trump brooks no dissent, and is indifferent to the cries of protest from the rabble below. Millions around the world have already marched in the streets against him, to no visible effect. (Just as millions marched before the regime of Bush II invaded Iraq in 2003, to no avail. That's "democracy," bourgeois class dictatorship-style.)

Only a week into his reign, Trump has turned the lives of students, families, scientists, academics, workers, upside down, if they were unlucky enough to hail from seven countries that Trump capriciously decreed none shall enter the U.S. from. Including dual citizens and green card holders- later amended, sort of. (You can review the piteous tales in the New York Times, or at NPR, or even the BBC, among other places.)

And Trump has already committed his first atrocity, putting the scalp of an 8-year-old girl on his belt, who was murdered by "heroic" U.S. Navy Seals on a terror raid in Yemen. BONUS POINTS: the child was the daughter of the reviled Al-Qaeda propaganda Anwar al-Awlaki, assassinated by Obama. [1]

That makes the second child of the enemy propaganda the U.S. has offed. Two weeks after finishing off Awlaki, Obama iced his 16-year-old son, a nephew, and others.

But the terror raid in Yemen that bagged an 8-year-old and other civilians was plotted under Obama, so by rights he should have to share the credit with Obama, although Trump is not one to share credit- or anything, really.

Trump probably won't murder his own mother, or castrate a young man and marry him, as Nero is reputed to have done. (The man unfortunately resembled Nero's dead wife, whom Nero missed.) So I guess Trump won't be "so bad." One can always relativize things in order to swallow them. Similarly, the Democrats "aren't as bad as" the Republicans, so might as well vote for them, right? No point actually trying to take power away from the criminal two-party political cartel that monopolizes it. Let humanity keep suffering instead.

Decades of voting for "the lesser evil" has only resulted in greater and greater evil. Time for a change, sheep.

HAIL, TRUMPIUS!

Nero from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.


1]  I only learned of the killing of the child from "alternative" broadcast media. The establishment's media called it a raid on terrorists, and wrung its hands over the single U.S. casualty. The U.S. government's domestic radio propaganda network, NPR, appended a single sentence to the end of its report, that neighbors reported "civilians" were killed. Given the prominent demonization of Awlaki during his lifetime, one must conclude that the omission of the death of his daughter at the hand of U.S. commandos must be no oversight, but deliberate.

Trump Hits The Ground Running on Establishing Authoritarian Regime

On his very first day as president- and it was just a half day, as Trump was sworn in as president on noon, January 20- Trump already is quashing with an iron fist merely implied criticism of himself.

An employee of the Federal National Parks Service, which is part of the Department of the Interior, retweeted two tweets that failed to glorify the New Leader, the Magnificent Trump. One tweet claimed the crowd at Trump's inauguration was smaller than Obama's. The other noted, correctly, that upon taking the reins of power at noon on January 20th, the White House website, whitehouse.gov, was scrubbed of various policy areas, such as those dealing with disabled people (Trump infamously mocked in juvenile fashion a reporter with an affliction that causes spastic movements of the limbs) and women (Trump has bragged about how he grabs women "by the pussy" whenever he feels like it). References to climate change and other bête noires of the right also immediately disappeared, replaced by chest-thumbing bellows about "Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community" (meaning in practice supporting to the hilt police summary execution of African-Americans) and a "Making Our Military Strong Again" (who knew it was weak?).

A ukase immediately came down from on high to the Interior Department, ordering the immediate suspension of all the Departments twitter accounts:

"“All bureaus and the department have been directed by incoming administration to shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice,” Park Service employees were ordered on the very afternoon of the investiture of the Great Man. [1]

But lest you think that Obama represented light to Trump's dark, recall such things as Obama's government-wide diktat to all parts of the Federal government, that each employee should function as a spy and report on any "odd" behavior by fellow employees, apparently to put potential malcontents under scrutiny to prevent leaking. Furthermore, failure to report oddballs is itself an offense. Pretty nightmarish.

Obama perfected the perfect secret police state, in which the NSA secretly collects and stores everyone's phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Internet searches, and has advanced software to search this gigantic trove of data. They collect surveillance camera footage from thousands of cameras. Where license plate recorders are in use, they have records of where your car has been. Same with using EZ-Pass to pay tolls. Obama empowered all 17 U.S. Federal "intelligence community" agency members to freely access the NSA database. The FBI, DEA, and other police use it to cook up criminal cases against victims, hiding the warrantless search and Unconstitutionally obtained evidence from the courts and defense lawyers. The DEA has a formal unit dedicated to laundering the evidence through "parallel construction," inventing a legal explanation for how they acquired their evidence.

The FBI and the rest have free access to your financial records, your medical records, your credit card records, your airline ticket purchases, your everything.

Obama brought us "legal" indefinite imprisonment of Americans in military gulags without charges, as a matter of law- a law that currently is in force. And Obama has brought assassinations, including of American citizens, into wide acceptance.

Typical of Democrats, Obama is a slick operator who wears a velvet glove over the mailed fist, the better to delude and conceal, whereas the Republicans wear thin cotton gloves- or in Trump's case, no glove at all for disguise. Obama's many, systematic repressive acts has created the most thorough secret police surveillance state that has ever existed. This is his contribution to American history, and his bequeath to all his successors.

Meanwhile, in "violent" protests in Washington, D.C., (likely led by police agents provocateur posing as radicals, as per standard police practice) 90 people were arrested. No, 250. Wait,it was 90. Make that 100. On fifth thought, it was over 200. That, in sequential order, are the numbers reported on air by U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR yesterday and this morning.

As the French saying goes, The more things change, the more they stay the same.

1]  "Interior Department told to stop tweeting after unflattering retweets about Trump." Washington  Post, January 20, 2017.

No Honeymoon For President Trump

The current change in U.S. regime has certainly been different from the pattern of most of the last century or so. The usual practice is for the power structure to be at least outwardly respectful to the new Leader, and formally deferential. Media fawn over the new chief executive of the U.S. Government. The honeymoon can last for years in the case of an arch-reactionary like Reagan. Nixon had a second honeymoon in 1972 when he ran for reelection, when except for the Washington Post, the Watergate burglary was virtually ignored by the media- to the disgruntlement of Senator George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president that election year.

The New York Times spent the first year of Jimmy Carter's presidency putting his smiling visage on their front pages almost daily, in a strenuous effort to repair the damage to the public esteem for the presidency in the wake of Nixon's forced resignation and his hand-picked successor Gerald Ford's pardoning of Nixon to protect him from criminal charges. But by the last year of Carter's rule, the Times was smitten by Reagan, and did its best to sabotage Carter's reelection, such as by putting a photo of him on the front page running a marathon and looking exhausted, and describing him as panting and weak. The media also ginned up a fake "rabbit attack" on Carter to make him look ridiculous.

With Trump, the media assault has been unrelenting. It began after he won the Republican nomination, when it apparently dawned on the media czars and their minions that Trump would be dangerously destabilizing an unpredictable with presidential power. (Until then they had made him the center of mostly benign media attention for months.) The assault increased in intensity and virulence after he "won" the presdiential election November 8, with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, by winning in the Electoral College, that extremely peculiar U.S. version of electoral  "democracy." A shabby piece of libel, an alleged "dossier" or "report," cooked-up by a former British secret policeman from MI6 (Christopher Steele, currently in hiding) who was hired by Republican primary opponents of Trump to come up with derogatory information about Trump, and then peddled by the Brit to the Democratic camp, was used by the so-called "intelligence community" and U.S. media to smear Trump as a pervert who had hired Russian prostitutes to piss on a hotel bed in Moscow in which one of the Clintons had slept, and the Russian secret police covertly videoed the whole thing and are now using it or are going to use it to blackmail or control Trump. That such a cheap spy-novel fantasy is taken seriously shows the desperation of part of the U.S. power elite, including the main secret police agencies, to hobble Trump.

And when Trump refuses to buckle, and instead denounces the "intelligence" agencies for this tawdry behavior, he is attacked by the commentariat for "attacking" "his own" intelligence agencies and "siding with Putin," and admonished by "experts" (various secret policemen, secret police veterans, and members of the established nomenklatura) that he'll have to learn to "work with" the CIA, FBI, et al, and sit at their knees to learn from them.

Now, Trump is awful, for sure, and his cabinet appointments are the worst in modern history, worse even than the egregious ones of Reagan. But this tawdry propaganda campaign throws into stark relief the unethical nature of the power establishment. It also proves once again that the Deep State agencies, in particular the CIA, FBI, and NSA, truly are states within a state that care first and foremost about their own power and prerogatives. Their loyalty to the state as a whole, to the U.S. government, and certainly to the president, to whom they are nominally pledged to serve, is far less important to them than their own self-aggrandizing schemes. After all, the CIA arranged the assassination of the president in 1963, with the FBI as a full participant in aiding and abetting the crime by helping cover it up. And the entire U.S. media played along, and still do to this day by maintaining the absurd fictional account of the assassination by the Warren Commission. (By the way, Gerald Ford, the guy who pardoned Nixon, was one of the Commissioners and functioned as FBI spy on the Commission.)

It's unfortunate that "alternative" media and public figures have so lost perspective and are so incapable of objectivity that they are playing right along with every propaganda assault on Trump. Between Trump's distortions of reality, and the distortions of reality being fostered by the elements of the power establishment desperate to undercut Trump on foreign policy mainly, (they seem not too troubled by what he threatens to do domestically), people will be disoriented without a lodestar of objective truth to turn to.

Instead of becoming foot soldiers in one side of an intra-ruling class power struggle, progressives should chart an independent course, a principled course, and ultimately the actually pragmatic course of declaring a pox on both houses of the power elite and devise ways to take advantage of their conflict. Playing them off against each other, for example, not legitimizing the slanders of the anti-Trump faction. Heaven knows, there is plenty of legitimate information about Trump to use against him, without trying to paint him as a Putin puppet who engaged in a lurid defilement ritual involving urination.

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.

New York Times Propagandizes Shamelessly For Obama

And so too does, shamefully, Democracy Now!, if a bit unintentionally.

Take as our starting point this headline from the "liberal" New York Times:

Obama’s 78 Pardons and 153 Commutations Extend Record of Mercy. [1]

Let's take a look at this "mercy."

On December 19, Obama "pardoned" 78 individuals, meaning their convictions were erased, and commuted (shortened) the sentences of 153 prisoners, meaning they won't have to wait as long to get out of prison.

In some cases, it means they won't die in prison. As in this case cited by the Times:

Anthony DeWayne Gillis of Supply, Va., was convicted in 2005 of possessing cocaine, making false statements and possessing a firearm in “furtherance of drug trafficking.” He was sentenced to 145 years in prison. Mr. Obama’s grant of commutation reduces the sentence to 20 years.

Meaning he'll be out in 2025. See? Obama's all heart!

One might reasonably ask, What sort of cruel country imposes such draconian sentences in the first place? But the Times doesn't ask that question. Instead we are meant to be touched by the compassion of the Merciful Obama.

The Times article points out that commutations do nothing to restore rights lost for the rest of their lives to people with felony convictions. Oh, and those pardons all go to people who have already finished serving their sentences. And the Times doesn't tell you how many of Obama's commutations merely lopped a few months of time off prisoners soon to be release anyway. (It was a large percentage in his previous commutation media blitzes.)

So there is much less than meets the eye in the Times celebratory headline.

Of course, by buffing the image of the chief executive of the nation-state, they reinforce the perceived legitimacy and humaneness [!] of the system the Times is an integral part of. That is their motive, not some imaginary "liberal bias."

Every time Obama has deigned to show a bit of "mercy" towards Federal prisoners, he gets a blitz of positive propaganda from the press. He went through most of his presidency being extremely parsimonious in his issuances of clemency and pardons, for which criticism began to build up, belatedly.

The Times puts his "acts of clemency" total to date at 1,324, pardons and commutations combined. Of these, over 1,000 were commutations, "more than 50 times the number of people whose sentences were commuted by President George W. Bush and more than the past 11 presidents combined." Gee, sounds impressive. This is out of a total of over 200,000 convicted Federal prisoners, and tens of thousands more immigrant prisoners not convicted of anything. But he looks good compared to the remorseless cruelty of his predecessors. (On the other hand, Horrible Russia has freed 20,000 prisoners by official pardon in the last few years, including the 3 members of Pussy Riot, whose case was of such interest to the Western media. If only they paid 1/1,000 the amount of attention to U.S. political prisoners.) [2]

During past tranches of Obama Mercy, U.S. Government propaganda network NPR has put on groveling prisoners, in tears of gratitude for The Master's Mercy, so psychologically beaten down are they. Obviously the prisoners sought are those in deep self-abnegation who will show the proper ring-kissing gratitude towards the emperor.

What's unmentioned in all the fawning gratitude is the fact that Obama deliberately kept 6,000 drug war prisoners locked up for longer. That is six times the number whose sentences he has reduced, many reduced by only a few months, and over four times his total "acts of clemency." (Commutations plus pardons, but he's given pardons to people only after they've completed their sentences. That way, no one can criticize him for letting "criminals" off "easy." He cares much more about avoiding criticism than about freeing prisoners.)

Here's how he kept those 6,000 prisoners locked up. Congress, also being "merciful," reduced the "disparity" in sentencing for crack vs. powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to "just" 18 to 1. That means, under the previous law, 1/100 the weight of crack cocaine gave casualties of the drug war the same sentence as an amount of powdered cocaine. In other words, it took 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine to receive the same sentence as for a given amount of crack. That's soo unfair! They should get the same prison time, right? (How about no prison, because the government has no right to outlaw cocaine if people want to use it- and they obviously do.) So Congress "reformed" the law by reducing the "disparity" to a mere 18 to 1 ratio.

With that change in the law, lawyers for victims serving sentences under the prior law filed suit in Federal court to apply the new law retroactively to current cocaine prisoners in Federal prisons- the aforementioned 6,000 prisoners. Which, if they had won, would have shortened the sentences of those prisoners.

In comes Obama. He sicced his then-Attorney General, the millionaire corporate lawyer Eric "Friend of High Finance" Holder, Jr., on them, to fight them all the way to the Supreme Court. Where the government, as virtually always happens when it's the government versus "criminals," prevailed.

Now, if the U.S. government had simply not opposed the suit, the prisoners might have won.
Furthermore, if the government had come in on the prisoners side, and said "We agree, they should be resentenced under the new law," almost certainly the Supreme Court would have said Okay.

If Obama had simply nothing, then someone else would have taken responsibility for freeing those prisoners- Congress and the courts. Instead he exerted himself to keep them in prison, away from their families and friends.

Why Obama thought it was so important to keep these 6,000 mostly black and Hispanic prisoners locked up longer, you'd have to ask him.

But this story is never mentioned in all the puff-pieces about Obama The Merciful. [3]

And oddly, it goes unmentioned by most progressives when they report on Obama's Mercy. I mentioned Democracy Now!  a program that should know better, because they just did it again. It should be told, to put Obama's Mercy in proper perspective, alongside his numerically far greater cruelty, and also to make people aware that Obama did this, as it is only through repetition that people remember.

Let the likes of the NY Times and its establishment ilk burnish Obama's "legacy." Progressives should NOT be doing that. Or have they learned nothing in eight years about Obama?

While we're on the topic, Obama won't be commuting the 35 year sentence of political prisoner Chelsea Manning, who he first tortured for two years in the Marine brig at Quantico. (Manning is in he U.S. Army, so they had no business sticking him in the Marine brig in the first place. And it was the UN Rapporteur on Torture that found the conditions constituted torture.) Then he staged a "trial" at which no official transcript was kept, and army spies peered over the shoulders of journalists who managed to force the Army to let them into the "courtroom."

Nor will he commute the sentences of other political prisoners, innocent men like Leonard Peltier. And he sure won't be pardoning any of them.

And Obama the Merciful won't be apologizing for breaking the arm of Medea Benjamin, or murdering 16-year-old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his cousin, and five other people while eating in a restaurant. Or any of the other family members of putative jihadists the U.S. singles out. (If they really want to defeat jihadism, they need to go after Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani military "intelligence," the ISI- Inter Services Intelligence.)  [4]

Nor will Obama be expressing regret for his cheerleading the last time Israel "mowed the lawn" in Gaza, killing 550 Palestinian children in the process, many more adults. (One Israeli child was killed by Hamas' return fire. That prompted Obama to express sympathy and understanding- for the Israeli "need" to bombard Gaza for the third time in a decade. It's to protect "the children," you see.)

But one could write thousands of pages about Obama's cruelties and repression, which he hides behind a cynical mask of benignness and thoughtful concern. I don't think any more is necessary to make the case. Not that he is atypical for U.S. presidents in this regard. Empires are about imposing domination, so emperors must be ruthless and cruel. It's a requirement for the job.

1] "Obama’s 78 Pardons and 153 Commutations Extend Record of Mercy," New York Times, December 19, 2016.

2] See for example "NY Times Obsessed With Plight Of Dissidents- But Only In Certain Countries," August 8, 2012; "Pussy Riot Get Exact Same Sentence As Tim deChristopher," August 25, 2012; "One Member of Pussy Riot Freed; Tim deChristopher Still In Prison," October 10, 2012.

3] Glenn Ford of Black Agenda Report discussed this on The Real News Network. That's how I learned of it. See "A Critical Look at VICE's Story on Mass Imprisonment with Obama and Holder," October 1, 2015.

It's worth noting that the U.S. has the highest rate of imprisonment as a percentage of the adult population of any country on earth. That includes places like North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia. The U.S. has more people imprisoned than any other nation, including China, even though China has over four times the population.

The number of people locked up in Federal and state prisons and local and county jails is about 2,500,000. That is almost one of every 100 adults.  The U.S. has 25% of the world's total prisoners. It currently has 4.38% of global population, derived from UN population estimates.

For good measure, U.S. police killed over 1,200 people last year, the most ever recorded.

U.S. Census current population estimate.

4] For Medea Benjamin's mauling, arranged by Obama, see "Obama Has Egyptian Military Regime Break American Peace Activist's Arm," March 8, 2014. For the murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki et al, see "Obama Ordered the Murder of a 16-Year-Old American," November 19, 2014.