Don't Look Now But.......

It’s really tiring listing all the bad and malicious actions that the Trump administration has subjected our citizens to.  It is numbing in the worst way.  We begin to accept as ‘normal’ the egregious changes that are occurring all around us as piece by piece, quietly in most cases, as decades of progress against all manner of challenges met are being dismantled.

And all the while we are distracted by scandalous episodes that seem to pop up like mushrooms in a fertile swamp.  This week it is the Rob Porter mess.  Every news outlet and media platform is stressing over this as if it is the final straw that will break the camel’s back.  Meanwhile the deconstruction continues relentlessly as our attention is absorbed by the most lurid of details. 

Sure he’s a wife beater….and sure he has not passed security screening to have access to the country’s most sensitive secrets…but hey---it turns out that literally dozens of White House employees have the same status.  This is just another example of the complete incompetence of the people who are ‘running’ our government.  This incompetence is present at every level of this administration.  Making matters worse is the fact that most important agencies and departments have not even been staffed with leadership, and it is over 1 year since the Trumpists took over.

Here is a shortlist of just the proposed bad actions that I can recall off the top of my head:

--Trump’s budget reveals that he wants to cut funding for the CDC’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, implementing an 80 percent reduction in the global reach to detect infectious-disease outbreaks abroad.  His budget would cut another $1 billion from the CDC, which by the way is leaderless because he has failed to appoint a new Director.  God help us if we have a real pandemic to deal with.

--And speaking of health, he is consciously destroying the current health care system and not replacing it with anything of value,  eventually resulting in millions of newly covered citizens losing their coverage.

--Trump and the Republicans have passed a huge tax cut, reducing our tax revenues, which will increase our deficit which will be the reason that we have no choice but to institute savage cuts to social programs.

--We learned yesterday from the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings that—guess what?—Russia is going full bore to influence our midterm elections.  Trump’s intelligence people unanimously concur that it is happening again.  When asked what the President and the administration is directing them to do to counter these active measures their answer was….nothing!

Think about that!  Virtually everyone agrees that we need to take defensive action and plan to counter this attack on our sovereignty---except our President who has done nothing and given no support to our counter-intelligence professionals!  Talk about Treason, Mr. President!

--Trump is trying to stem legal immigration by legislating away what Trump calls ‘chain migration’ or the ability of new immigrants to bring in immediate family, that has always been at the heart of US immigration.

--The Trump administration is advocating support for voter suppression, gerrymandering and various other schemes to disenfranchise minority voters.  Trump nominated, and the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Thomas Farr to be a US District judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina.  Farr helped draft and defend the most egregious voter-suppression and gerrymandering laws in the country.

  

--The administration had nominated a person to run the Census Bureau for the 2020 census who wrote a book about how to create legislative districts to influence voter patterns.  Fortunately he withdrew after scathing criticism, but the Census Bureau now has no permanent director, its funding has been cut, field tests have been canceled, and it is unveiling a controversial new IT system for 2020.

---The administration wants to radically overhaul the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which offers about 46 million low-income Americans both sustenance and economic choice by providing an allowance to buy the fruit, meat, fresh vegetables, soda, ice cream and kind of bread they want to eat.  They want half the benefits to be provided in the form of a “Harvest Box” full of food preselected by the federal government, cutting the budget for SNAP by 1/3 and reducing $21 Billion from the federal deficit.  The problem with this is big food retailers will stand to lose billions of dollars in lost SNAP business, and it takes choice out of the hands of those who actually eat the food.

--The Presidential budget plan singles out abortion providers and Planned Parenthood by prohibiting Health and Human Services funding, including money used for family planning.

That is just a sampling folks.  The list goes on and on.  While we are slack-jawed and consumed by lurid distractions, all this other ‘stuff’ is quietly unfolding.

The midterm elections can’t come soon enough.  Let’s hope they are not 'rigged' by the Russians and the Trumpist Republicans.

Deep Throat--Please!

It is time for the Democrats to stop being babies.  There is too much at stake.

SCROTUS (Stupid Creepy Ruler of the US{thank you Kaylie Davis!}) has decided in his hypocratic wisdom to reject the Democratic ‘memo’, that refutes point by point with actual facts, the half truths and deceptions of the Nunes ‘memo’.  Pontificating that there would be heavy redaction necessary, he sent it back to the House Intelligence Committee for revision so as not to release potentially secret information which would prove the Nunes memo a political fabrication.  What a crock!

It is no surprise that SCROTUS is going to play politics with the dueling memos.  His only mission is protecting himself and derailing the Russia investigation.

This is just the latest example of the political hypocrisy we see almost every day.  Well, the time has come for the resistance to find its own ‘Deep Throat’.  For those of you too young to remember, Deep Throat was the secret informant who provided information in 1972 to Bob Woodward, who shared it with Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided key details about the involvement of U.S. President Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal.

The only way the American Public is going to get the actual truth about anything going on in this administration is for the Democrats to ‘find’ their own secret informant who has the power to release or leak the real relevant facts that Trump and the administration are trying to hide or lie about.  Since anything else we are going to learn is going to be labeled ‘fake news’ by the increasingly odious Republican majority, there really is no other way until the midterm elections to uncover the true nature of the deterioration of our democracy.  

The New York Times has filed a motion asking the FISA court to unseal all materials related to the wiretap of Carter Page.  The Republican  ‘memo’s main ‘so called’ revelation was that the FBI showed bias in not letting the FISA court know that the Steele Dossier was used as the primary source justifying the seeking of the surveillance warrant on Page. 

After it was revealed that the FBI, in fact, told the court that the source of some of the information was politically motivated, Nunes was forced to admit there were other sources that were used to justify the warrant, namely the information about George Papadopolous’s overheard drunken musings in a London tavern, and years of suspicion by the FBI owing to Page’s coziness with the Russians.

Perhaps it is time for a Deep Throat to emerge to release those FISA materials, or to provide some similar supporting facts that will make these Republican Trumpists bleed ‘egg’ all over their faces.  I sure wish the Mueller investigation could provide some support and discovery, but while we are waiting for Godot, we need some additional support.

It is going to be a long arduous slide toward the midterm elections, and the first opportunity we as a nation will have to fix this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.  Unless we start fighting like our existence depends on our ability to vanquish this cancer on our democracy, we are destined to lose our republic.

Incidental Groups

First let me thank all of you for your support and attention.  It is incredibly gratifying to know you are all there!

Facebook is a rather amazing platform actually!  At a time when we all feel overwhelmed and fractured by the blizzard of information assaulting us every day, here is this magical technical platform that enables us to form what my old Sociology teacher always referred to as ‘incidental groups’.  We all have ‘history’ and that history’s path leads us through periods of our lives that are populated by different people who really have no connection with each other.

And yet Facebook enables each of us to assemble a unique incidental group representing our historical path through life and to connect the individuals in that incidental group to each other and to ourselves.  The implication is that theoretically there is cross-fertilization of ideas and better understanding of complex issues because there are more minds to review and comment.  Do you think that is true? ...Or has it only muddled the discourse and led to hardening of positions.  My hope would be that we would all have tolerance and consideration for alternate points of view.

What nobody foresaw was the weaponization of this platform into an organ used by nefarious actors to mislead and misinform literally millions of people.  That is what happened during the 2016 general election.  There are many people who now perceive Facebook and Google as ‘publishers’ who should be subject to regulation so as to protect the consumer from spurious information and fake news.  That will be an interesting battle!

But I digress…..the fact that I can remain connected to so many wonderful relationships and acquaintances makes me feel connected to my past in the most surprising and welcome way.  Imagine (or remember) whether it would have been as easy to maintain connection with people in your history if the year were 1985.  Impossible.  So let’s enjoy the benefit of this ubiquitous platform for what it does provide—a way to express our love and admiration for all those great people we have been blessed to know and now continue to enjoy.

I will keep on trying to disregard the annoying ‘sponsored ads’ and gratuitous ‘quizzes’ that I become suckered into participating in…  :=)

The Definition of Treason

This is the first time since all this began that I am really scared.

I feel like I am witnessing the transition of the democracy I grew up with in the US into something different-- something evil that rejects lofty ideals, veracity, the rule of law, and compassion and replaces it with paranoia and a complete assault on truth.

What is happening in the White House and the Congress is a result and condition the founding fathers may have thought was possible, but is only being tested now for the first time 247 years after the country’s founding. 

What we are experiencing is the manifestation of treason. 

We are becoming a society so polarized that we are warring with our institutions.  Our democratic structure of separation of powers and the existence of a system of checks and balances in our governmental structure is being corrupted.  We are  changing from a system where all of us are responsible for monitoring the even balance of power to a new paradigm where self interest, greed, and naked autocracy are replacing the old order.

The collapse of the Republican party and it’s morphing into a tool of the autocratic power center in the Executive Branch marks this transition.  And friends, what that amounts to is the assault and redefinition of truth, evidence and facts into propaganda, lies, and deceit.  It almost doesn’t matter who is responsible for our slow motion slide into this state of chaos and deconstruction.  What is more important is whether there is anything or anyone who can stop it.

What would you call a president who, when confronted with evidence that a hostile foreign power had tried to influence our election, would repeatedly reject those findings and fail to take action to shore up the nation’s defenses against a repetition?  That person, while denying facts presented by the nation’s intelligence community, has tried repeatedly and surreptitiously to remove sanctions on Russia voted overwhelmingly by the Congress--in fact has moved to nullify those sanctions by simply refusing to enforce them. 

And, most unthinkable, a president, confronted with evidence that his own top officials found probable cause to surveil a former campaign aide, Carter Page, for acting as the agent of a foreign power, reacts with indignation — not at the aide but at the accusation.

I know what I would call a person like this.

And now we see Trump rabble rousing his lemming-like Republican toadies to join him in this treasonous quest to destroy our justice system and denigrate our law enforcement structure.

I have always believed that the salvation of this descent into despotism would be our election process.  Get ready folks.  The midterm elections in November are going to be accused by this administration of being rigged, fraudulent, or whatever antidemocratic term they can concoct.  Trump’s re-election effort in 2020 will be even worse.  Trump and the Republican zombies he has created will attempt to sow seeds of distrust , bias and paranoia in the electorate.  You think you’ve seen horrible attack ads in the past?---Wait, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

There are two escape routes from this disastrous path the country is on:

1. Begin to change the Congress back into an organ that accepts its responsibility to be a separate but equal branch of the government.  That will only happen if we are able to actually have elections to change the composition of our representatives over the next three cycles.  Beware of Russia—they are not done with us yet.

2. Hope that the Special Counsel, Mueller, will soon present what I believe will be overwhelming evidence of a long conspiracy by the Russians to groom someone like Trump to be manipulated into office.  He needs to be impeached, but that is only possible if we accomplish solution #1.  It is clear that the Republican majority has been co-opted by treasonous forces, and we can expect only opposition to the re-instatement of respect for our institutions and the rule of law.