(As always, please DO NOT DONATE if you live on a fixed income. Do not choose between eating and funding!)
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Folks,
We had an amazing first couple of days, but since then we've taken in very little. Less than $200 over the last 48 hours.
That's a lot less than the $8,250 we have left to raise so that we can keep the lights on for the next three months.
Can you spare $5? That's all we ask. If everyone reading this little beg kicked in only $5, the stupid ugly box at the top of this page would go away until April.
Wouldn't we all be happier without it up there?
So ... thanks if you can. We really need it, and we really appreciate it.
Have a day, folks.
-- Jeff T. (Paypal's mysterious Trevor)
Trump’s First 100 Day agenda includes repealing environmental regulations, Obamacare, and the Dodd-Frank Act, giving the rich and big corporations a huge tax cut, and putting in place a cabinet that doesn’t believe in the Voting Rights Act or public schools or Medicare or the Fair Housing Act.
Our 100 days of resistance begins a sustained and powerful opposition. Here’s what you can do (it will take about an hour of your time each day):
1. Get your senators and representatives to pledge to oppose Trump’s agenda. Reject his nominees, prolong the process of approving them, draw out hearings on legislation. Call your senator and your representative and don’t stop calling.
2. March and demonstrate. The Women’s March on Washington will be the day after the Inauguration. There should be “sister” marches around the country. And then monthly marches against hate. Keep the momentum alive and keep the message going.
It's been nearly two months and I still haven't adjusted to the bleakest development in American history since Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter. I'm wandering in the same miasma of disbelief that descended on rational America on the night of 8 November, after which, you'll recall, social-worker political pundits promptly assured us that the madman of the campaign season would soon metamorphose -- "presidentially." What preceded was a ghastly carnival act, for sure, but in short order we'd see a mature Donald Trump. His rhetorically reckless guns of early November and antecedent 17 months would silence; at least some passable semblance of presidential dignity was bound to emerge.
So much for post-election predictions, which have proven as spectacularly dunderheaded as those of the pre-election sort, including mine. If anything, Trump's rhetoric -- most commonly deployed in press-conference-averting tweets -- has plunged into an even more appalling abyss of utter rancidity, given that he's no longer a mere, campaigning carnival barker; he is about to assume the world's most powerful office. And yet, of late, he has blown more overseas kisses to the America-loathing tyrant, Vladimir Putin (whose gangsterism is "very smart," in Trump's twisted assessment), and viciously assailed his own nation's intelligence community. Now, of equal distaste (and guttersnipe tastelessness), he has unleashed his rhetorical degeneracy on none other than the U.S. Senate's minority leader.
On election day, Californians favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by a near 2 to 1 margin — 61.7 percent to 31.6 percent. Now, faced with a President many of us detest, California’s best stance is to become a model of Democratic principles. But the Golden State faces intriguing challenges.
California is not an independent state; we’re not going to be able to secede from the union. Nonetheless, we are the 6th largest economy in the world and Trump is not going to be able to ignore us.
California can have the most impact on the national political environment by demonstrating that the best way to grow good jobs and provide a healthy democratic environment is by a judicious combination of taxes and regulation. The Golden State can serve as a vital alternative to the Republican model: minuscule corporate taxes and zero governmental oversight, which has turned states like Louisiana into sewer pits with deplorable public health, while failing to create the promised jobs.
Various factors have kept long-form writing at a minimum lately, but shorter blasts on Facebook have been possible from time to time. Below is a edited selection of a few rants from a month of madness:
Progressives Convert to Langley Literalism
"The CIA said it. I believe it. That settles it." This is apparently the new progressive version of the old Bible Belt bumper sticker. Below, the Washington Post, after five days, walks back its Friday fake news scare story, which was wrong on virtually every assertion of "fact" in the original. Meanwhile, Trump hobnobs with mobsters and his business partners (a tautology, I know) to little notice, while the extremists in Congress prepare their neofeudal blitzkreig. But by all means, let's keep looking for reds under the bed while homegrown, all-American brigands set the house on fire in broad daylight.
They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern Syria, they partnered with both Turkish soldiers and Syrian militias, while also embedding with Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Across the border in Iraq, still others joined the fight to liberate the city of Mosul. And in Afghanistan, they assisted indigenous forces in various missions, just as they have every year since 2001.
For America, 2016 may have been the year of the commando. In one conflict zone after another across the northern tier of Africa and the Greater Middle East, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) waged their particular brand of low-profile warfare. “Winning the current fight, including against the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other areas where SOF is engaged in conflict and instability, is an immediate challenge,” the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), General Raymond Thomas, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year.
The Bible’s Book of John records Jesus as challenging a bunch of would-be woman-stoners who wanted to punish her for allegedly committing adultery. It was intended that the man in the case should receive a lesser penalty or no punishment at all, as continues to be the custom in such primitive nations as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan in which it is legal to stone women to death ; but in neither of these valued allies of the West is there a Jesus to protect women from being barbarically murdered, as approved by fanatical Islamists.
Jesus would not last long in either country before being lashed or having his head cut off, but his wisdom has endured in more enlightened regions. His words are relevant in the wider context of exposing barbaric pietism and hypocrisy and his adjuration to the savages intent on murder was that they should think about the horror of what they intended to do, and consider “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
Big win for Hep-C infected inmates
In a stunning conclusion to a year-and-a-half legal drama, a federal judge in Scranton, has ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to quit stalling and to begin treating prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal with the latest available and highly effective anti-viral drugs for curing him of a raging and life-threatening case of Hepatitis C.
Abu-Jamal, back in early 2015, fell into a diabetic coma, the result of an undiagnosed case of active Hepatitis C which he contracted sometime during his 36 years as a prisoner in the Pennsylvania prison system.
By Michael Winship and Bill Moyers
Mark Twain noted that man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to.
He also believed that “public office is private graft.”
Those two observations from our greatest and most sagacious humorist intersected with a bang on Capitol Hill Monday night, when the bright lights of the Republican House Conference met in secret behind closed doors at the end of the New Year’s holiday.
They tried to vote themselves an especially tasty treat: eviscerating the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). That’s the office created in 2008 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal and the placement of three congressmen behind bars. The conference voted to absorb it into the House Ethics Committee. In other words, they wanted to weaken OCE and put it under the control of some of the very folks the office is charged with investigating for possible influence peddling and other assorted mischief.
It is no coincidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - who was then followed by a slew of ministers and Knesset members - has called for a presidential pardon for Israeli soldier Elor Azaria.
Azaria was found guilty of manslaughter after he shot and killed Yusri al-Sharif as he lay wounded on the ground. This striking mobilisation to exonerate Azaria, which cuts across party lines and includes MKs from Labor, should actually come as no surprise, since the desired pardon is not really about absolving one lone murderer, but rather an effort to vindicate Israel's 50-year occupation.
Consciously or unconsciously, each and every government official calling for such absolution understands that Azaria is in no way an aberration of Israel's colonial project, but rather a clear symptom of its very structure.
The vast majority of congressional Democrats don’t want to take a final stand against Donald Trump’s election, even a symbolic move telling Americans why they believe his presidency is illegitimate, at Friday’s ratification of the 2016 Electoral College vote.
Despite GOP-led voter suppression that civil rights activists say deterred millions of people of color, Russian actions that helped Trump and hurt Democrats, and a new report revealing that 50 or more of Trump’s presidential electors were illegally seated—amounting to vote fraud by a party that bludgeons Democrats on that very issue—grassroots activists said they could not find one senator on Thursday willing to commit to signing a formal Electoral College challenge.
It’s too easy simply to blame Donald Trump for the void that’s suddenly apparent at the center of American government — or will be on Jan. 20.
In fact, I’m utterly sick of hearing his name, let alone accounts of his latest outrage or trivial impertinence, which is the equivalent of crack cocaine in the news cycle: all Trump, all the time. It’s been that way for a year.
Trump is a symptom. But, come on, far less of a symptom — of a deep, raw social and cultural wrongness — than, for instance, the global war and terror, environmental exploitation, climate chaos, poverty, racism (old and new), infrastructure collapse, the commonness of mass murder, the limitless expansion of the security state, or the congealing of a one-party status quo that ignores all of the above.
Airstrikes by the United States and its allies against two Syrian army positions Sept. 17 killed at least 62 Syrian troops and wounded dozens more. The attack was quickly treated as a non-story by the U.S. news media; U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) claimed the strikes were carried out in the mistaken belief that Islamic State forces were being targeted, and the story disappeared.
The circumstances surrounding the attack, however, suggested it may have been deliberate, its purpose being to sabotage President Obama’s policy of coordinating with Russia against Islamic State and Nusra Front forces in Syria as part of a U.S.-Russian cease-fire agreement.
Normally the U.S. military can cover up illegal operations and mistakes with a pro forma military investigation that publicly clears those responsible. But the air attack on Syrian troops also involved three foreign allies in the anti-Islamic State campaign named Operation Inherent Resolve: the United Kingdom, Denmark and Australia. So, the Pentagon had to agree to bring a general from one of those allies into the investigation as a co-author of the report. Consequently, the summary of the investigation released by CENTCOM on Nov. 29 reveals far more than the Pentagon and CENTCOM brass would have desired.
[click image to enlarge]
First President-Elect Donald Trump appeared to have bullied Carrier air conditionining company to keep hundreds of jobs in Indiana that otherwise would have been moved to Mexico. Now he’s had similar success with Ford. Is it really possible that previous presidents could have stopped outsourcing of American jobs with a few phone calls?
(Early in December of 2016 CODEPINK conducted "The People's Tribunal on the Iraq War." Two days of testimony and documentation disclosed the indisputable truth: Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded to gain control of hydrocarbon resources. Combating terrorism was irrelevant, a concocted deception.
The detailed history below is adapted from a powerpoint presentation, The Fraudulent War, included in the Tribunal's record.)
Within ten days of taking office the Bush Administration declared its intent to invade Iraq. This was a triumph for the neoconservative ideology of the Project for the New American Century, and personally for Vice President Richard Cheney and 15 other PNAC members who staffed the highest levels of the State and Defense Departments. Global dominion—by preemptive war if necessary—would define the foreign and defense policies of George Bush's presidency.
A seminal document of neoconservatism, however, described a precondition for achieving global dominance: “...access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil.”(1)
I recall reading -- as a teenaged delinquent punk fascinated by the Great Depression Era's Middle States crime wave (and its cast of romanticized luminaries, such as Dillinger, "Pretty Boy" Floyd and "Baby Face Nelson," whose murderous psychopathology even Dillinger disapproved of, thus, for me, creating a kind of hierarchy of "honorable" criminality) -- that whenever Kate Barker's teenage sons were arrested for some petty crime, dear old "Ma" would make sure that, upon their release, there was hell to pay. Her maternal rage eventuated not because the laddish Herman, Lloyd, Fred or Arthur "Doc" Barker had committed a crime, but because they had been stupid enough to be caught.
I never would have guessed that my youthful absorption into the sordid historical world of 1930s Dust Bowl crime would someday be of analogous value to contemporaneity. But it is. For enter America's unfolding crime wave, this one the organized villainy of all-controlling Republicanism -- one in which Donald "Pa" Trump has unleashed a bit of hell on his incorrigible boys in the House, not because their right-out-of-the-gate scheme of obliterating ethics oversight was a wrongheaded idea, but because they were stupid enough to be caught in flagrante delicto.
Now I don't know but I been told
If the horse don't pull you got to carry the load
I don't know whose back's that strong
maybe find out before too long
One way or another
one way or another
one way or another
this darkness got to give ...
— Robert Hunter
I couldn't sleep last night, so I flipped the TV on at 3 a.m. to find something named Peter Popoff peddling small packets filled with "magic holy healing spring water" that, according to a number of provided testimonials, will cure all that ails me. Not just magic, but also holy, and healing, and spring water to boot. In packets, mind you. Not in vials, or cups, or eyedroppers, or ladles, thimbles or goblets ... small plastic packets, like what you might get at Burger King, or during a short flight on the worst airline ever imagined. Ladies and gentlemen, the Captain has activated the "Blessed Be" light. Please quaff your holy magic packets and place your seats and tray tables in their upright positions. The Rapture will begin upon payment.
Take a look at Oxfam’s report, “Behind the Brands: Food justice and the ‘Big 10’ food and beverage companies.”
A Food System In Crisis
The Behind the Brands report explains, “For more than 100 years, the world’s most powerful food and beverage companies have relied on cheap land and labor to produce inexpensive products and huge profits. But these profits have often come at the cost of the environment and local communities around the world, and have contributed to a food system in crisis.”
Explaining the campaign, the report says, “Oxfam’s campaign focuses on 10 of the world’s most powerful food and beverage companies – Associated British Foods (ABF), Coca-Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg, Mars, Mondelez International (previously Kraft Foods), Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever – and aims to increase the transparency and accountability of the ‘Big 10’ throughout the food supply chain.”
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
Two days before the November elections, Elizabeth Moreno was driving to the Democratic Party headquarters in Manassas to pick up a list of addresses. She was planning to spend another day of canvassing to get out the vote for her candidate Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth had taken off a full week from her job at one of Washington’s premier foreign policy thinktanks to devote herself to electing the first woman president. She was only two years younger than Hillary Clinton, but she considered the former secretary of state her mentor. Elizabeth Moreno would do anything to get her elected.
Two blocks from Party headquarters, as she was gliding through an intersection, Elizabeth took her eyes off the road to glance at an incoming text on her phone resting in the cup holder. It was the latest polling data giving Clinton a 75 percent chance of winning the election. Just as she was digesting the good news, a jogger wearing headphones crossed against the light in front of her. Elizabeth, her eyes darting back to the road, turned the steering wheel hard to the right even as she was stepping down on the brake. The car skidded and slammed into a concrete divider.
Four months later, Elizabeth Moreno opened her eyes.
San Francisco 49er quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, was recently voted by his teammates the prestigious Len Eshmont Award for inspiration and courage. This contradicts previously held assumptions that his protest against racial injustice in America caused irredeemable discord or rancor among his fellow players. While not every player or coach on the team may have agreed with Kaepernick's kneeling down for the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" before every game, they apparently agreed that what he did took courage, conviction, and a commitment to social justice that is rare among the modern-day athlete.
The Eshmont Award, is given to the teammate who "best exemplifies the inspirational and courageous play of Len Eshmont, an original member of the 1946 49ers team," according to the team website.
49ers wide receiver Torrey Smith discussed some of the criticism Kaepernick has received, saying: "Colin has handled that situation better than anyone could have imagined. It hasn't been a distraction in our locker room, and it probably helped him open up to a lot of our team and our teammates better. He's been very open in communication about that as well as football."
From the Seattle Municipal Archives
We're getting off the Trump Train for a minute for something remarkable. I was bowled over by the results of this study and wanted to pass them on. From the Harvard School of Public Health:
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign the corporate media, Democratic Party operatives and the pundit class all proclaimed that Donald Trump is a fascist. The fascistic nature of our political, law enforcement and economic systems were conveniently omitted from these warnings, but assertions of Trump’s untrustworthiness were repeatedly endlessly. If that characterization has any validity at all then Barack Obama’s establishment of a de facto Propaganda Department is a terrible blow to democracy.
On December 23, 2016 Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a federal law that is passed every year. NDAA authorizes defense appropriations but it is also used as a Trojan horse to hide attacks on civil liberties. In 2011 the NDAA authorized indefinite detention of anyone deemed a terrorism suspect. Tucked inside this year’s NDAA was the passage of the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act which establishes the little known or discussed Global Engagement Center.
More than 50 Electoral College members who voted for Donald Trump were ineligible to serve as presidential electors because they did not live in the congressional districts they represented or held elective office in states legally barring dual officeholders.
That stunning finding is among the conclusions of an extensive 1,000-plus page legal briefing prepared by a bipartisan nationwide legal team for members of Congress who are being urged to object to certifying the 2016 Electoral College results on Friday.
“Trump’s ascension to the presidency is completely illegitimate,” said Ryan Clayton of Americans Take Action, who is promoting the effort. “It’s not just Russians hacking our democracy. It’s not just voter suppression at unprecedented levels. It is also [that] there are Republicans illegally casting ballots in the Electoral College, and in a sufficient number that the results of the Electoral College proceedings are illegitimate as well.”
Eight years ago Yes! Magazine published a political platform of progressive policies, along with polling showing strong majority support for each proposal. Now, eight years later, we can show almost total failure to advance any of the proposals, most of which were focused on the U.S. federal government.
Where there have been any small successes, they have mostly come at the state or local level or outside the United States. New York State just took a step toward free college and Washington State toward shutting down fossil fuels while everyone was watching Donald Trump's twitter feed. Most of the world's nations are working on a new treaty to ban nuclear weapons from the earth, while Obama's government has invested heavily in new nukes and (far more offensively, I'm told) Trump has tweeted about them.
In my head I can hear the remake of the old Beach Boys song as I type...
You must have heard the talking point already, some variant on, "Those are all California votes." You know the 2.8 million votes Emperor to be Trump wants to dismiss as all illegal voters, with absolutely no proof?
Horse pucky. Why? Stay tuned.
At least we should be entertained the next few years: excuses, constant bragging and talking points that would insult any 10 year old able to think their way out a bag made of toilet paper. How long? Well, who knows. To quote their fav phrase: as long as they insist on, "shoving this down our throats." It's been such an amusing comment when shoved in our faces: kind of like the guy in a park with a trench coat, by those offended by the very concept of same sex couples. Why, it's as if something about it secretly turns them on.
But the California talking point shows either an extreme lack of knowledge about election tallies or, more likely, simply another strawman way to distract from how badly they lost the popular vote. You see if Dems had won only California, point made. Since that's not true, those votes certainly didn't just come from California.
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