Ever since forever, Donald Trump has had two principal mantras. “No compliance & Witch hunt!” He has repeated these mantras ad nauseam at every occasion. He’s fed it to the ignorant 25% that follows him blindly, he’s thrown it in the faces of the Democrats and the press, he’s probably mumbled it in his sleep just before he woke up and Tweeted it.
But all of a sudden that’s all gone, disappeared, denied. Yes, the national liar-in-chief came out this week and admitted that Don Jr. was deeply involved in colluding with the Russians and was in compliance with them to subvert the election. Of course he didn’t put it that way but he still, he threw the kid under the bus.
What’s really interesting is that in dumping his son and make no mistake, that’s what he did, Trump has shown us all, including the true believers, what a scumbag he really is. No one with any intelligence believes that anyone but Trump led this criminal conspiracy. Sure his dumb kid brought it to him, but no one really believes that Don Jr. went ahead with something as important as this without the explicit approval of his criminal old man. Here was a real chance to get Hillary! The Russians seemed to have the goods on her. Does anyone really think that this simpleton child was going to mastermind the whole operation without the permission and more important the praise from the fat liar? If you do, that bridge is still for sale.
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Understanding the above, it’s really hard to grasp the depths of stupidity to which some people can sink. You all remember Sheriff Joe Arpaio, that rancid bigot who spent his time on the job harassing and arresting anyone who wasn’t pasty white. Arpaio was finally convicted of racism and bigotry but our bigoted, racist President pardoned him. Now Arpaio makes his living appearing on Right wing programs as a paid guest.
So the other night he appeared on a new show that is featured on Showtime called, Who is America?The show is the creation of international nut Sacha Baron Cohen who appears in various disguises interviewing people who would generally be considered too stupid to breathe.
This week Cohen, in the guise of Finnish unboxing crazy man, OMGWhizzBoyOMG (real name Ladislas Kokkonen) got Arpaio on the show and interviewed him. The first thing he did was to get Arpaio to have a dialog with a one-inch, fake, chocolate donut. But it was when he went on to get Arpaio to agree to help him get a golden shower from Donald Trump that things got really funny. The crusher however, was when Cohen got Arpaio to admit that he would accept a blowjob from Trump. It’s hard enough to believe that Arpaio would buy the whole phony setup but it was when Cohen led him into a sexual relationship with the President that his absolute stupidity became cast in stone. We always knew Arpaio was a horrible human being. Now he proves that he may not be a human being at all, but some latent sub-species that operates completely without brain function.
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In 1999 Mike Pence, was a radio host who published articles of indictment against then President Bill Clinton, condemning him for his moral decay and explaining most lucidly how immoral behavior by the President was eons more important and less acceptable than in an average man because of the influence a President had over so many people. Pence was absolutely eloquent in his condemnation of an immoral President, just as today, he is more than eloquent in his acceptance of the lack of morals in our current President.
This is a guy who absolutely condemned Clinton but gives Trump a complete pass on behavior that has been proven much worse than anything Clinton ever thought of doing. Clinton got a blowjob from an adoring young woman who was more than anxious to contribute to the Presidential pleasure. Trump brags about grabbing women by the pussy, has been known to wander the dressing rooms of half-naked teen contestants in his beauty contests, had affairs with Playmates and porn stars while married and been involved with any number of criminal activities. Trump is a slimeball and no amount of fawning will change that. It seems that nothing can ever redeem Pence from his hypocritical slide into the swamp. Who knows, maybe an alligator will bite off his useless balls.
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With the beginnings of the mid-term elections taking over the news in the last couple of days it appears to this viewer that it is time for the American people to take a look at the most important aspect of the democratic state; those same elections. For years we have just sloughed off all the many problems with our elections but now that Russia, and possibly other enemy countries are interfering with our democracy it’s time we stopped to reflect and do something to fix our most important democratic institution.
Twice in the last 16 years we have had men in the White House who lost the popular election. That alone is the most significant condemnation of the very system we are using to translate our votes into who sits in the White House. One man, one vote, is the backbone of our electoral system. Except it’s not. We still choose our President by means of the antiquated, non-functional Electoral College. Yes, there are reasons why the Electoral College existed and even reasons why it still exists, but they have definitely become inconsequential. It is far past time to liquidate the Electoral College and elect our President directly at the polls. And just in case you don’t think it’s important; If we had made this change 17 years ago George Bush wouldn’t have been around to crash the economy and start the Iraq war and right now the fat liar wouldn’t be screwing up our economy, creating human rights abuses along our borders and turning our allies into enemies
But the Electoral College isn’t the only problem. Just as important are gerrymandering and interference with registration and identification at the polls. Both of these have cost the Democrats hundreds of thousands of votes in the last few years but they could be doing the same thing to hurt the Republicans if population logistics shift in the future. These latter two problems presage more difficult solutions then just eliminating the Electoral College.
Gerrymandering has been around for years. Quite simply it’s the redesigning of voting districts to accommodate the wants of the party in power. Historically both parties have done it, but right now it is being done principally by the GOP. Whenever this is debated in Congress the solution is always the same. That august body always comes to the same conclusion; the only solution is to have the entire country redistricted by a committee of Senators or House representatives that is completely bipartisan and therefore supposedly unbiased. Such a committee has never existed and will never exist in our political system. So the only solution seems to be redistricting the entire country along some system that is already established and set in stone. That system would be county lines. Every state has them. They are already established demarcations of political activity. They have existed long enough in individual states to give them the gravitas they need to be considered inviolate. As part of the solution it will have to be established that they cannot be changed except to modify them to reflect significant changes in the numbers of citizens living within their borders. Such a solution would work. The question is; could we arrive at it in today’s fractured political climate?
The biggest problem might be to establish who has a right to vote and who doesn’t, and identifying both. Current law tells us that anyone who was born within the borders of United States or on American territory anywhere in the world is a citizen and thereby entitled to vote. Current law also tells us that those who have gone through the naturalization process are citizens and entitled to vote. Identifying who these people are has only been part of the problem. Establishing their bona fides at polling places has become a major disaster. The Far Right as a way to interfere with the rights of certain ethnic voters keeps demanding various types of identification. Progressives as a way of life have fought this. Neither has been completely right or wrong. Logic tells us that some permanent means of identification is necessary to establish the rights of each citizen to vote. Certain states are currently attempting to establish this concept of universal identification. I think there is nothing wrong with giving each citizen some kind of identification which can be seen as a form of legitimate voter identification and which also can be used for other legitimate purposes.
The Progressive argument against the Right’s desire for ID’s is silly and only helps the Right achieve their goal of preventing those they don’t want to vote from voting. Frankly, if it’s too much trouble to get an ID it’s undoubtedly too much trouble to go to the polls and vote. It may be an imposition the one time you have o acquire it but for that imposition you get to do what millions of people around the world wish they could do and can’t, choose who will lead them.
And if you’re one of those people who scream about this ID being one more way for the government to keep tabs on each of us, it’s time you canned the bullshit. In this day and age with all the credit info and all the computer invasions of privacy, if the government doesn’t know where you are, it’s because they don’t want to.
Those were just a couple of ideas on how to approach solving problems with our greatest democratic institution but there’s another attack on that institution that we all must recognize and demand that our government deal with. I’m speaking of course about the Russian attempt to invalidate our last election and what they are doing to attack our next. It’s obvious that the clown in the White House has a bug up his ass about the Russian interference because he thinks it somehow makes his election even less viable than does the fact that he was outvoted by 3 million votes. The charitable version is that the fat liar’s ego just won’t let him face the facts. The more realistic one is that he was involved up to his eyeballs with he Russians in an attempt to get something really big on Hillary and that now he finds himself in the position of having committed treason. That means that he will never go after the Russians for what they have done so we have to win in November and get a congress who will move past Trump and finally do the right thing.
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Rudy “The Turtle” Giuliani came out of his shell yesterday and popped up on all the Fox and Sinclair talk shows babbling about how the President isn’t just going to allow himself to be interviewed by Robert Mueller because he wasn’t going to set himself up for a perjury trap.
Now a lot of people talked about this spate of diffusion but only Nick Confessore on Morning Joe, bothered to point out that what “The Turtle” was doing was admitting that his client was too stupid or too much of a liar to engage Mueller without committing perjury because he was obviously guilty of something and he just couldn’t avoid the problem. “The Turtle” is supposed to be defending Trump not admitting that he is guilty and too dumb or too much of a liar to stand up to questioning.
How did “The Turtle” go from being “America’s Mayor” to being Trump’s butt boy? It wasn’t an easy transition but it was definitely helped along by the fact that his first nickname wasn’t really earned. Yeah he was there on 911 but anybody with his job would have been there too. It was just too much of a political opportunity to ignore. “The Turtle” didn’t do anything particularly out of the ordinary. He just showed up. That’s certainly something, but it’s not extraordinary by any means. So let’s not get ourselves all in a bunch about “America’s Mayor.” He doesn’t exist anymore. He’s now just “The Turtle.”