Confederacy of Fascists, the GOP Death Cult

What happened on January 6 was a military operation. To the insurrectionists, the besieging of the Capitol was the storming of the Bastille—a revolutionary act. “Insurrection,” after all, is a violent uprising against an existing government. There was fighting that horrible day: hand-to-hand combat. Blood was drawn. People lost their lives.

The irony is that the insurrectionists did not need to ignite a new Civil War. The new Civil War was already upon us. It predated January 6. And it rages still. This is an information war, a narrative war, a war waged in the press and on cable news shows and across social media platforms. The battlefields are not Antietam, Gettysburg, and Bull Run, but Facebook, Twitter, and Clubhouse.

In this new Civil War, states do not secede from the Union; instead, citizens divorce from reality, inventing their own alternative universe, in which Donald John Trump, not Joe Biden, is the rightful President of the United States; in which Biden’s son, not Trump’s, is exploiting his father’s office for personal gain; in which MAGA Republicans, not Democrats, care about the rule of law and the wellbeing of the people. Biden stole the election! Trump will return to Washington to be sworn in again, in fulfillment of the Q Scripture! Then he can continue his clandestine operation of rooting out the pedo sex trafficking ring! Save the children!

If the battlefields are virtual and fuzzy, the battle lines are clear. On the opposing side is an entire political party that is full-tilt authoritarian—a Confederacy of Fascists. Gone is the GOP of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Reagan. What remains is a zombie party, which looks the same outwardly—we all recognize the pickled husks of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley—but is hellbent on the annihilation of democracy. This is no longer about right versus left, management versus labor, Medicare expansion versus tax cuts, “cancel culture” versus “woke.” This is a fight against tyranny, simple and plain. Everything else, everything else, is just noise.

Reality check: The Republican Party has no substantive platform. It has no policies beyond voter suppression, gerrymandering, and looting the Treasury for its billionaire whoremasters. It quashes dissent, it cheats, and it steals. And when legislation comes up that will actually help people, it obstructs. The Republican Senate under Mitch McConnell is a kidney stone, an aortal blockage, a banana in the tailpipe, that ship in the Suez Canal. It has been this way with Washington Republicans since Newt Gingrich was House Speaker.

 (snip)

Malfeasance is now standard operating procedure for the GOP. This is the reality. Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor, went on TV a year ago and said that seniors should be willing to die for the economy. “There are more important things than living.” Ladies and gentlemen, the Republican Party!

All of these GOP clowns and their Republican-controlled statehouses have crafted a fresh batch of voter suppression laws, most notably the one signed into law last week by prick-faced election thief Brian Kemp. We all know the new Georgia law bars the handing out of water to voters waiting on line, but it also—this is important!—cedes power to the state legislature to overturn election results if the preferred candidate doesn’t win. That’s tyranny, in black and white. (That’s also what should have been the front-page headline, but of course it wasn’t.)

The scales of the federal government are inherently weighted in the GOP’s favor. Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota, each with a population well below a million, each staunchly red, have two Senators each—same as true blue California, with its 40 million residents. What the Republicans will do, if these laws are allowed to stand, is craft new, even more repressive laws to ensure they stay in power indefinitely. They have made no secret of this. It’s happening right now, in Georgia and other statehouses across the country.

As a minority party, the GOP as currently constituted can only survive by minority rule; thus, it seeks to establish a Russia-style oligarchical system here. Joe Biden and the Democrats cannot compromise with a party that wants to shit-can democracy. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. The current GOP must be destroyed, laid to waste, so that a new conservative party, one that doesn’t oppose universal suffrage, one that doesn’t want to kill us all, can take its place. Which means a stake must be driven through the heart of the filibuster. End forever that noxious vestige of whitewashed racism.

We have less than two years to put safeguards in place to ensure the survival of our democracy. There is no time to waste.

Not that the media has any fucking clue of the stakes, or even the battle. These Beltway fops only care about presidential press conferences and their own book deals. Just as the press is only now figuring out that, oh yeah, oops, Donald Trump did have ties to Russia and organized crime, and what do you know, he was a thief and a con man, so the MSM is still covering the two parties like it’s 1964. How many articles have there been criticizing Biden for not being “bipartisan?” As Eric Boehlert has pointed out, 70+ percent of Americans favored the $1.9 trillion relief bill. That’s as “bipartisan” as it gets. It’s the Republicans in Congress who are out of touch. But the buffoonish Beltway press paints a completely different, and counterfactual, picture.

It is up to us, I’m afraid, to fight this new Civil War, this battle of narratives. We must disseminate the truth we insist on, and ensure that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people does not perish from this earth.

 

 

20th Anniversary of 9/11 in 6 Months

For the 20th anniversary, I will try to do a review of how things stand with the 9/11 conspiracy-- any new ideas, findings, changes in my conclusions.

Please put in comments any news you've heard or interesting 9/11 info.

The Awesome Power of Rightwing Propaganda

Nothing shows the awesome power of right-wing propaganda and brainwashing better than the Trump presidency.

By ANY objective measure, Trump was a historically terrible president:

-- deeply corrupt

-- committed countless crimes while in office

-- made countless offensive statements

-- made countless lies as president

-- damaged American institutions

-- damaged race relations

-- seditious: he fomented an insurrection against Congress 

-- treasonous: he openly praised American enemies and accepted foreign help in his election

-- horribly mishandled a pandemic leading to the deaths of 100s of thousands of Americans. He actively  killed US citizens!!!

Normal people think-- WHY THE FUCK ISN'T HE IN JAIL for all this????

But Republicans! 

Republicans actively deny he did ANYTHING wrong and still say he was the greatest president. 

It's like you simply could not find a starker difference between reality and delusion accepted by millions of people. 

That's the power of rightwing conservative propaganda.

Now HOW the fuck do we get around this???

These people are literally ruining the country.

33 of the Day: The Strange, Crooked Island of Jersey

Really interesting article here on how the island of Jersey, a possession of the British crown, is basically a massive haven for financial crimes, bank fraud, tax sheltering, and pedophilia.

Basically the only oversight is the Queen of England, and she's not doing anything about it.

The 33 is quite blatant:

What followed was even more startling. The couple, along with Dick-Stock’s father, 83-year-old Canadian millionaire John Dick, filed reports with the Jersey police detailing what they described as decades of financial fraud perpetrated through an offshore trust company called La Hougue, a name derived from the ancient Jersey-French word for mound or heap, harking back to the island’s long history of pagan burial mounds. When police officers arrived at the family home, St. John’s Manor, which also served as La Hougue’s opulent headquarters, to seize the pile of documents in March 2015, they needed a truck to haul all 333 bank boxes away. Dubbed Operation Scarlet in Jersey police records reviewed by Institutional Investor, the investigation sought to uncover the mastermind behind La Hougue and the extent of its alleged global financial crimes. 

Also see https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1PlJQPQWdYXGE

From Ex-Senator Stuart Syvret, Whistle-blower. In July 2007 exposed decades of child-abuse cover-up on Brit tax-haven Jersey island. International anti-mafia activist.

The-Jersey-Situation includes - on-the-evidence - the following ‘ingredients’: child-murder, murder, child-torture,…. 

..child-rape, rape, political violence, police corruption, judicial corruption including that carried-out by scions of Nazi collaborators, transnational serious organised crime, prosecution corruption, political oppression and suppression of opposition political activity,.. 

.… a police force with an uncombated cultural history of actual Nazism, undisguised mafia activity, routine outright perjury, failures to disclose evidence, intimidation, coercion, money-laundering, “public-inquiries” run by child-abuse concealers,…. 

.…the exclusion of core witnesses, fraud, fascism, misconduct in public office, misuse of public money & resources, the conveyance to this author of detailed death-threats by Jersey’s mafia-captured police force on behalf of one of their pet, actual, murderers,…. 

.…, open corruption in the UK Department of Justice including the failure to disclose evidence in actual judicial proceedings, a conflicted former UK Home Secretary who corruptly excluded the roles played by UK agencies in the Jersey child-abuse cover-ups from review,…. 

.…racketeering, embezzlement, Russian-type political imprisonings, and - in the context of Jersey being a ‘Crown Dependency” a “supreme leader” in an absolute monarch - ultimately constitutionally culpable for much of the foregoing - …. 

.…who’s favourite son has been pretty convincingly accused of being a child-abuser and who is wanted for questioning by the F.B.I.  

Massive Voter Suppression Effort by the GOP Underway

 Because they hate democracy because they can't win any other way. 

Stacey Abrams on twitter:

This week, there is a coordinated attack on voting rights. 

GOP-led legislatures in GA, AZ & NH are pushing dozens of bills to make it harder for people of color & young people to vote. 

We voted in Nov & instead of listening, they are trying to shut us out of the process.   

In GA, SB 241 would end no-excuse vote-by-mail (VBM), risk identity theft of voters + allow the legislature to steal power from state & local election officials. It's one of the worst VBM bills in the nation & part of the largest push to restrict voting rights since Jim Crow. 

GA HB 531 is a direct attack on our communities of faith. It would limit weekend voting, curtailing Souls to the Polls and may create an impossible position for Jewish Georgians who celebrate the Sabbath and vote on Sundays. HB 531 could force counties to raise taxes on working families to cover the $52.7 million needed to implement the bad policies in this bill. Worse, this legislation also blocks counties from accepting critical grant funding, which GOP + Dem counties of all sizes used in 2020. 

Like GA, voters of color drove record turnout in AZ. Last week, the AZ Senate voted to approve SB 1485 to purge the highly-popular Permanent Early Vote List. Advocates estimate this could purge up to 200,000 voters—including 50,000 Latinx voters. 

SB 1068 will shift significant election authority and oversight power from the Arizona Secretary of State (D) and the Attorney General (R) to the partisan state legislature. 

SB 1713 would force Arizona voters to include personal information on their absentee ballot envelopes, increasing the risk of identity theft and making it harder for people to vote by mail.   

SB 1593 would shorten the early voting period and discard ballots not postmarked 5 days BEFORE the election. These blatant efforts will make it harder for Latinx, Native American and young people to participate because they are the most likely to vote early. 

The New Hampshire legislature is hearing HB 531 today. This bill would allow anyone to challenge an eligible citizen’s right to vote by provisional ballot, significantly impacting new Americans by demanding extensive, unnecessary documentation or risk having their voice silenced. 

HB 554 similarly tries to intimidate young people by introducing confusing residency requirements. 

HB 86 effectively bans out-of-state college students from voting, requiring tax-paying students who wish to vote in NH to prove they receive in-state tuition. 

There’s no question about what Republicans in GA, AZ and NH are doing: targeting vulnerable voters who may prevent them from winning & using taxpayers’ dollars to do so—at the expense of working families, small biz + others. Making it hard for us to make it easy for them. 

Georgia, Arizona and New Hampshire voters: we are at an inflection point and it’s going to take ALL of us to advocate for those who the Republicans are trying to silence. 

So here’s what I need you to do: 

If you live and vote in Georgia, contact your state legislator by going to bit.ly/VotingRightsGA and telling them to vote NO on HB 531 and SB 241. 

If you live and vote in Arizona, pick up the phone and call 877-406-6303 to tell your State Senator to vote NO on the suppressive bills SB 1713 and 1593. Stay tuned for how to tell your House Rep to vote NO on SB 1485. 

If you live and vote in New Hampshire, sign your name to the New Hampshire Coalition for Voting Rights petition telling the legislature to reject HB 86, 531 & 554 and additional anti-voter bills. 

These bills in GA, AZ, & NH do more than restrict voting. They also aim to steal power from local boards and state elections officials who did their lawful jobs and instead consolidate power in partisan state legislatures that supported the Big Lie. 

This is why Congress must pass the For the People Act to safeguard critical protections, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which will re-establish Federal oversight to guard against racial discrimination in voting. Republicans cannot have it both ways. 

They can’t fight for the filibuster and claim Democrats do not respect existing rules, while simultaneously snatching power from election officials in their states so they can change the rules. 

To stay up to date on our efforts to protect the vote in other states, make sure you bookmark https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZbakSAuONXb63yM2bgPKUW-NMUhTMn-Y4Aq1WzgDiec/edit