No More Palaver! Act!

The signs of the country’s descent into fascist dictatorship are clear and unmistakeable.

There are only three forces that might stop it and no one in itself is powerful enough to do so,  They must work somewhat in concert.

The three forces are the courts, an opposition party and massive citizen resistance.

With the very fate of the republic in the balance, we await a decision by the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that is far larger than the narrow issue that is before it: whether to continue a district judge’s restraining order against the minority president’s Muslim travel ban decree. The larger issue, of course, is the constitutional separation of powers.  

In his very first days in office, the would-be dictator has made clear his intentions to usurp the law-making powers of of Congress and turn it into a rubber stamp for his whims and tweets.  At the same time, he has dismissed the judiciary as a witless gaggle of “so-called” judges who are "so political.  Sad."  Consequently, the Ninth Circuit must affirm the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary.  The case would then go to the Supreme Court. There, Justices Alito and Thomas are probably beyond hope, but the Chief Justice and Justice Kennedy might recognize the constitutional threat and join in a 6-2  decision upholding the Ninth and Judge Robart’s original TRO. These are reasonable hopes at a time of crisis of such magnitude — but they are mere hopes, not even probabilities.

By such a thread our republic hangs.

The second force that might possibly block the path to dictatorship is an opposition party.  The closest thing we have to an opposition party is the Democrats.  They are an undisciplined ragtag of spineless wimps and paid-for dupes of the corporate oligarchy.  But they’re all we have.  Yesterday, they  stood by as the Republican thugs in the Senate stifled debate on a nomination to a key cabinet post.  This was a case of jackbooted Naziism on the part of McConnell and his fellow bullies.  The Democrats have got to begin using the feeble strategies available to them to stand up to the regime.  If they filibuster, the regime will answer with a parliamentary maneuver called the “nuclear option.”  So be it.  At least they will have mounted an opposition.  They should attempt quorum calls to block nominations of unfit rich people to cabinet posts.  Yes, the Republicans have enough votes — barely — to establish a quorum in the Senate.  But the calls would at least delay the nominations.  And who knows?  Maybe some better angel will smite a Republican or two with the sword of enlightenment, and they will be denied a quorum.  This is not even a hope.  It is desperate prayer, a Hail Mary from 99 yards away with one second on the clock.

By such threads our republic hangs.

The last of the forces that might thwart the would-be dictator is massive citizen resistance.

Increasingly, in the weeks since the minority regime took over, the will for such resistance has been evident.  It was particularly visible in the recent women’s march, which drew large crowds even in bastions of right-wing sentiment.  It continues to seethe, ready to erupt.  Someone called for a general strike on Feb. 17, the Friday before the President’s Day holiday.  Someone else called for a big demonstration on March 8.  Now another someone is calling for a massive economic boycott (a good ideal) on President’s day itself, Feb. 20.

Stop playing games!  The resistance needs leadership, a semblance of organization.  Countless well-organized groups have vital stakes in opposing this despotic regime: Planned Parenthood, Code Pink, the environmental groups . . the list is “yuge,” to quote its favorite politician of the moment.  Can’t they fer gawd’s sakes talk to one another?  Pick a date — soon — and define a simple, mass effort  — economic boycott ought to be part of it — and issue a call to action.

Now!

The fate of the republic hangs in the balance.

About That Violence in Berkeley . . .

I join today with the most distinguished public policy mind of our lifetime in a conspiracy theory that should not be dismissed out of hand.  People do conspire, often for ignoble motives.

Robert Reich and I both smelled a rat when violence erupted on campus, causing the University of California at Berkeley to cancel a speaking appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos (nee Hanrahan), a U.K.-born writer, speaker and employee of the Breitbart propaganda organization whose ex-CEO, Steve Bannon, is the alt-Pres. of Trumpistan.

The cancellation gave Trumpistan’s titular leader an opportunity to tweet gibberish about “free speech” and threaten to cut off the university’s federal funding.  Berkeley is perhaps the nation’s foremost bastion of free speech.  Trumpistan’s absurd accusations are as authentic as if Margot St. James, the founder of the COYOTE union for prostitutes, were to advocate for universal celibacy. (This is not rpt not to denigrate Ms. St. James, whom I have met and who is a gracious, charming and intelligent woman, quite a contrast to the aforementioned titular head of Trumpistan. But I digress)

What began as perfectly proper nonviolent protest at Berkeley erupted into violence with the appearance of a cadre of black-clad, black-masked agitators who began setting fires and throwing things around, appearing to cause some injuries to bystanders and peaceful protesters. 

Reich (a former presidential cabinet officer and now a distinguished educator and author) was there; I was not.  But when my wife described to me the scenes she had seen on television, I immediately remarked that it sounded like a false flag operation.  Reich thought the same thing and wrote about it, connecting dots as follows:

(1) Yinnopoulos writes for Breitbart News, which Steve Bannon -- Trump's strategy director -- ran before joining Trump.
(2) Before Yiannopoulos speaks at Berkeley, Breitbart publishes an article saying that Yiannopoulos will call for the withdrawal of federal grants and the prosecution of university officials who endanger their students with their policies.

(3) Berkeley opens its doors to Yiannopoulos, but campus police have to cancel the event because of masked agitators.

(4) Hours later, Trump issues a misleading tweet, accusing the university of not allowing free speech and promoting violence against innocent people with different views, and threatening to withhold federal funds.

(5) The next night, Yiannopoulos on Fox News says the incident proves that universities like Berkeley don't deserve federal grants by cracking down on free speech.

(6) That same night, on CNN, I raise the possibility that Yiannopoulos and Breitbart could have been collaborating with the agitators -- saying "I wouldn't bet against it." This generates a belligerent column in Breitbart with a misleading headline calling me a liar for claiming that Breitbart News organized the riots.

False flag collaborations to advance right-wing causes are not unprecedented.   Two are famously associated with Nazi Germany: 1. Operation Himmler was an elaborate hoax staged by the Nazis to create the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany, which was used to “justify” the invasion of Poland.  2. Many historians believe that the February, 1933 Reichstag fire, Hitler’s springboard to power, was set by Nazi collaborators.

I wonder if we are perhaps witnessing the evolution of a vast new American underworld, political as well as criminal, secretly financed  by such outfits as the Donors Trust.  The Trump foundation is among the known donors to this murky right-wing outfit, which promises to "keep your charitable giving private, especially gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues."

Donors Trust has financed many of the escapades of James O’Keefe, another right-wing sleaze once associated with Breitbart.  It was O’Keefe who created the trumped-up secret videos that enabled Republican congressmen to defund the voter-registration organization, Acorn, and Planned Parenthood.  His doctored videos led to a libel suit by a former Acorn worker; O’Keefe settled out of court for more than $100,000.

In a sauce-for-the-goose maneuver, someone secretly filmed an O’Keefe colleague trying to bribe a lefty protester to commit violence at the Trumpistan inauguration ceremonies.

From black commandos to Milos Yiannopoulos to James O’Keefe to Alt-Pres. Bannon doesn’t seem like a crooked journey at all.  Or does it?

Maybe it’s just me.  And Robert Reich.

A Nation of Law. We Hope.

The fight is far, far from over but the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has struck one clear blow for the Constitutional separation of powers at a time when a minority president and his Rasputin are trying to establish a dictatorship.

The issue, as virtually every citizen knows, is the Bannon-Trump ban on Muslim entry and travel in this country and its accompanying favoritism of Christian people.

A horde of legal experts say the titular president’s executive order is unconstitutional on its face, in violation of the Establishment clause of the First Amendment.  All but one of the federal district judges hearing legal objections to the ban have ruled against it and one, Judge James Robart of the state of Washington, has issued a ruling against it that applies nationally.

It is this ruling that the Trumnpistan Department of Justice appealed to the Ninth Circuit.  The Ninth Circuit denied the DOJ request for immediate relief.  It has ordered the lawyers for the states of Washington and Minnesota, which brought the case before Robart, to file legal briefs by the wee hours of Monday morning.  The government will then have until Monday evening to file its written rejoinders.  After that the Ninth Circuit panel will evaluate the legal filings and make its final adjudication.

Meanwhile, Bannon-Trump’s nominee for the vacant ninth seat on the United States Supreme Court awaits his fate in the Senate, whose constitutional duty is to hold hearings and then vote to confirm or not confirm his appointment.  That nominee, Neil Gorusch, is a right-wing ideologue with a deep personal grudge against even centrist elements of government because he believes his mother, an official in the Reagan administration, was made a sacrificial lamb in a political battle 30 years ago.

Democrats in the Senate already had a moral and legal obligation to obstruct the Gorusch nomination. Now, with a constitutional crisis looming ever larger, the focus on the Ninth Circuit and on the Gorusch nomination becomes even more critical to the future of the republic.

They are opposite poles of the judicial spectrum.  Gorusch is to the right even of Antonin Scalia, who is his judicial idol and whose seat he would fill if confirmed.  The Ninth Circuit is conventionally referred to as the most liberal court in the country, although close scrutiny of its rulings beside those of say, the Second (New York)  or the Third (Philadelphia) mark the conventional wisdom as no more than an idea whose validity rests in the frequency with which the ill-informed repeat it.

It is true, as critics contend, that the Ninth’s rulings have been slightly more frequently reversed by the Supreme Court than those of other circuits.  It is also true that most of those reversals have been at the hands of the Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Kennedy-Alito “gang of five.”  It is also true that the Ninth, being the largest of the circuits, hears more cases than any other — 12,000-15,000 per year.

All of this is trivial, however, by comparison with the great constitutional issue at stake today.  The very essence of the democratic republic established by the Constitution of the United States is its tripartite government — separate but equal branches called the Congress, the Judiciary  and the Executive. In the age of Trumpistan, it is important to note that the Constitution requires the Executive -- the President -- to "faithfully" execute the laws passed by the Congress and interpreted as constitutional by the Judiciary.  

The Bannon-Trump government considers itself to be above the other branches; indeed, above the law itself.  We as citizens should be grateful to the district judges who have reminded them otherwise.  We should be especially grateful to the Ninth Circuit panel if in its final decision it remains true to the course it seems to have set in this case.

Meanwhile, the Democrats in the Senate must unite and stand firm, resisting with every legal resource they have the Trumpistan nominee to SCOTUS.  If the Ninth Circuit rules as it should in the Muslim ban case, and the government appeals to the highest court in the land, the last, best hopes of a democratic republic rest on that appeal being heard by the eight justices now sitting.  The likely result would be a 4-4 split, sending the case back to the Ninth, in effect affirming Judge Robart’s brave and correct judgement.

The alternative, with Gorusch added to the court, is unthinkable.

A National Speak-Out! Go For It!

It is possible that Feb. 17 could become a milestone in the history of popular democracy.

It is also possible that the national strike suggested for that date will fizzle and flop.

I asked a circle of friends, family and acquaintances for suggestions on how to observe the day.  Many hadn’t heard about it; most hadn’t thought about it.  Not a promising start.  The overall success, or failure, of the idea will depend upon participation outside the liberal enclaves on the coasts.  One of my responders noted that a strike by retirees like us wouldn’t be very effective.  We’ve got to find other, practical ways to express our dissent.

We should send a loud, clear message to the dangerous new regime that the American people disapprove of everything it has done since taking power, and everything it intends to do.  After all, in the recent election, voters by a margin of more than 10 million cast their ballots for someone other than the unfit person who occupies the Oval Office because of the quirks of the Electoral College.

Ten million is a lot of voices.  Add to that number the countless Republicans who voted out of party loyalty and now, like federal Judge James Robart  of the state of Washington, recognize that the new regime is a threat to the tripartite form of government mandated by the Constitution.  Robart, appointed by President George W. Bush and unanimously approved by the Senate fin 2004, is the sort of jurist who belongs on the Supreme Court. He issued the order that has temporarily halted the new regime’s Muslim travel ban. Of course, the titular head of the Bannon-Trump government publicly insulted him on an internet social medium. 

Titular Pres.

Such behavior is just one more small part of the reason why it is important for the national strike and protest on Feb. 17 to be an overwhelming success.  Sheer numbers on the streets have changed national politics before.  The Vietnam war protests are perhaps the brightest, shining example of this.  But the Bannon-Trump gang dismisses enormous crowds of dissidents with alternative-facts.  Rigorous intellectual arguments, truth, great ideas, history, precedent to them are mere bagatelles, trifles that they shrug off with a sneer and a bigger new lie.

But (and I thank my daughter, Laura, for arguing this point so forcefully) there is one language these rich and greedy crooks understand and react to, and that is the language of money.

Alt-Pres.

And so, here are some suggestions for Feb. 17 actions that, if enough people participate, will not only make good television (big crowds on the streets with protest signs) but also have a powerful economic impact:

—Take the day off.  It’s the start of the Presidents’ Day weekend.  Or call in sick.

—Make it “Don’t Spend One Thin Dime” day.  Don’t buy that morning cup of coffee or donut.  Wait another day to top off the gas tank.  Eat leftovers and go to the grocery store some other day.  Don't eat out.  Pick up the dry cleaning a few days later.  The bars won’t go out of business if you have a beer at home, or a cocktail, or teetotal for a day.  Don’t do any banking.  Pay your bills on Thursday the 16th or the followingTuesday.    Don’t travel anywhere.  Hit the streets on foot  instead — but bring your own bottle of tap water so you don’t have to buy any. If millions of people spend absolutely nothing for 24 hours it will be an enormous monkey wrench in the gears of the oligarchs' economy.  That'll wake 'em up.

—Use your day off to compose brief, thoughtful messages protesting executive or legislative actions, completed or proposed, that you don’t like.  One issue per postcard.  Get it all off your chest. Mail them to the White House, the Congress, state legislators, government agencies.  Postcards are the most effective way to get your message across.  Telephone calls are good, but switchboards get jammed or ringtones in offices get turned off.  Letters are good, but many are held up in dark security rooms until they can be checked for dangerous substances.  Postcards get dumped on desks.

—Hold meetings.  Call like-minded friends and acquaintances to come to your house to sit around airing gripes and thinking up practical forms of activism that you’ll actually do. It would be great if every such meeting yielded a list of local people who would make good candidates for local public office: city council, county board of supervisors, judgeships, school board.  The right wing took over this country by starting local.  Fight back the same way.

—Stage group call-ins to right wing radio talk shows.  Speak truth to them.  It’s their Kryptonite.  Truth is the one thing — other than losing money— these people cannot stand.  Carefully marshal and rehearse your facts.  Some of these guys are slicky tricky.  Stand your ground.  Repeat your facts.  

—Devote at least one hour of the day — more if you can — to an act of visible public protest.  The women’s march was “yuge.”  Make this one even bigger. Crowd size does matter, even more than hand size.

This country as we knew it is being dismantled before our very eyes.  Let’s tell the scumbags to stop.

Rookies in the Big League

When the world faced the dreadful reality of a new Bannon-Trump regime in Washington, dark clouds formed everywhere.  One of the darkest hovered over the Middle East.

Here was a team of rookies, inexperienced in government, clueless about diplomacy, dismissive of tradition, ignorant of history,  hostile to protocol and deliberately uncivil to foreign leaders, approaching the world’s most volatile powderkeg with a fistful of matches.

Hints that had emerged during the election campaign were not helpful.  Israel, it seemed, had carte blanche to commit the worst sort of crimes against humanity in Palestine and Bibi Netanyahu, through the offices of Jared Kushner, appeared likely to become de facto Secretary of State in Trumpistan.

Now suddenly, the titular head of Trumpistan has slapped the wrist of the Israeli leader for taking too many liberties in launching new settlements in Palestine.  Was this a whim or a dramatic policy shift?  Nobody knows.

Iran, target of assorted insults from people who would have had difficulty finding the Islamic republic on a map, wondered how the rhetoric would translate when the new regime inherited the nuclear accord between Iran and the the so-called P5+1 — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council) plus Germany.  The accord, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is in its second year of implementation and has functioned without a hiccup — until now.

With a vocabulary limited to scatological slang, schoolyard bully-talk and the adjectives of self-aggrandizement, the leader of Trumpistan has been having difficulty making himself understood around the world.  Mainly he has succeeded in irritating people who have been staunch allies of the United States.

There is, however, general agreement that he has threatened to break up the JCPOA.  Of course he can’t do that all by himself, but he could unilaterally withdraw from it.  Such a rash act would immediately trigger an international crisis, since the JCPOA was negotiated by and approved by the entire United Nations Security Council.  It would put the new regime in conflict with most of the European Union and with China, and quite possibly damage all the cozy-posey Trumpistan has been conducting with Russia. 

Iran is much more experienced and adept at playing one power against another than the Trumpistan rookies.  This isn’t a business deal to build a golf course; this is a face-off with countries that hold most of the nuclear weapons in the world.  During the Cold War, Iran used the military and political clout of the United States to dissuade the Soviet Union from invading Iran.  After the Islamic revolution of 1979, the Iranians parleyed with Germany, France and the United Kingdom to dodge a conflict with the United States.  Against that backdrop it took long and excruciating years of diplomacy to create the P5+1 coalition that resolved the Iran nuclear crisis.

The international community strongly supports that accord.  Already, as one influential European newspaper put it, much of the world sees the new U.S. regime as “standing alone against all of us.”   Unilateral action against the JCPOA would further isolate Trumpistan, whose lleadership likes to use business metaphors in foreign policy. Bannon-Trump have repeatedly called the JCPOA “a terrible deal” and hinted that they could cut a better one, but that’s really just one more of their fantasies.

The current agreement was the product of long, difficult negotiations among multiple parties. It significantly curtailed Iran's enrichment capabilities and lifted economic sanctions, allowing businesses in Europe and around the world to benefit.  Why would the European partners agree to try to amend a deal that already gives them what they need? Moreover, the accord was controversial in Iran, where the hard-liners would pounce if moderate President Hassan Rouhani even hinted at renegotiating and risking a more punitive result. It’s dloubtful that even America’s allies in the Middle East would want to renegotiate. The former intelligence chief of Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki al-Faisal said recently, “I don't think (Trump) should scrap it. It's been worked on for many years and the general consensus in the world, not just the United States, is that it has achieved an objective, which is a 15-year hiatus in the program.”

Last Sunday’s ballistic missile test in Iran further muddies the water.  United Nations Resolution 2231, which went into effect July 20, 2015, declares that Iran is “"called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”

The Americans went bonkers, with their tweeter in chief declaring that “Iran has been formally PUT ON NOTICE for firing a ballistic missile.”  Whatever that means.  Iran of course, denied that it was in violation of 2231, insisting that its missile was defensive and not designed to carry nuclear weapons.  

The U.N.called a meeting on Tuesday last.  Trumpistan’s new ambassador there, a hack politician from South Carolina, spelled out the American charges.  The U.N. did the prudent thing: it appointed a committee to study the matter.

Stay tuned, but don’t hold your breath. Do cross your fingers, though.  The world may need some luck on this one.

Another Gift to Our Progeny

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

With a pink hotel, a boutique

And a swinging hot SPOT

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

They took all the trees

And put them in a tree museum

Then they charged the people

A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go,

That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

        --Lyrics by Joni Mitchell.

Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, has introduced legislation in the U.S. House of representatives that would  destroy regulations limiting oil and natural gas drilling within national parks.  H.J. Res. 46 would eliminate regulations passed by the Obama administration in November 2016 to oversee drilling on federal land. They apply to so-called “split state” land acquired by the federal government for national parks where private owners maintain their rights to potentially lucrative minerals underground. “Job creators,” the second-highest level of archangels in the religio-political firmament of Republican mythology, are among the intended beneficiaries of Gosar’s largesse.

How to Mask Theft of Hard-Won Rights

His gift for ventriloquism is serving Alt-Pres. Bannon well.  As inanities spew from the maw of his lap dummy, Donnie, attention is diverted from his real purposes and nefarious doings.

Occasionally, however, documents leak out from behind the curtain that provide a glimpse into how this new regime thinks and what it actually intends to do.

Such was the case this week with the Bannon-Trump plan to destroy forever the Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state.

Alt-Pres. Bannon

A draft executive order called “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom” went public thanks to The Investigative Fund and The Nation magazine.  The title is alternative-factspeak for bigotry, discrimination and Christo-fascism.

The paper covers “any organization, including closely held for-profit corporations.”  It legalizes discriminatory practices “when providing social services, education or health care; earning a living, seeking a job or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.”

The idea is to erase all the recent progress involving reproductive rights, freedom of sexual orientation, fair employment practices or equal opportunity in housing — just for starters.  It opens the door for churches and pseudo-religious organizations to raise unregulated  hell in politics by in effect repealing the 1954 Johnson Amendment and demonically twisting the 1970- Supreme Court ruling in Walz vs. Tax Commission of the City of New York.

Currently, churches stand to lose their tax-exempt status if they blatantly indulge in political activity.  A few years ago, hundreds of people in our heavily-Catholic area received robocalls from a male voice who called himself “Bishop Ramirez” warning them that they would be excommunicated if they voted for a particular candidate.  The real Bishop Ramirez wet his cassock, rushing to deny that the robocaller was he.  “We don’t want to lose our tax exemption,” he declared.

The Bannon-Trump draft order would specifically protect the tax-exempt status “of any organization that believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.”

It’s doubtful that this was an authorized leak from the Bannon-Trump White House.  The Alt-Pres. isn’t one to tip his hand to likely opponents.  There would be plenty of opponents to such an egregious assault on the establishment clause and years of settled law.

But once the leak was out, the master ventriloquist had Donnie go forth to boast about how tough he had talked on the telephone  to a couple of foreign leaders. Having used the tactic in the campaign, Alt-Pres. Bannon knows it plays well with the naive nerds who put them in the White House.  And so Donnie insulted the president of Mexico by threatening to send troops across the border, and rudely hung up the phone after spewing crudities to the prime minister of Australia.

Every ventriloquist knows that the dummy can get by with anything.

A Once and Never-Again Democracy

Probably the best, and certainly the most popular, definition of democracy was given by Lincoln: “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

By that definition, democracy has been dying a slow death in the United States of America for decades, and now, in the Divided States of Trumpistan, it does not exist and never has.

The latest proof is in one of those divided states, South Dakota.  It voted heavily for the Bannon-Trump regime, but it also voted, by a 51 percent majority, for the South Dakota Accountability and Anti-Corruption Act.  The act would have ended South Dakota's status as the only state that allowed lobbyists to give politicians unlimited and undisclosed gifts, also known as bribes.

But South Dakota’s legislature, in one of history’s greatest piss-on-the-people acts, voted yesterday to repeal the law enacted by the people.

So much for “government by the people.”

Other accepted definitions of democracy assume that a nation-state so governed has a viable political left, center and right.

In the Divided States of Trumistan, there is no left and no true center.  

Sen. Warner

The Senate demonstrated this phenomenon yesterday when it approved the CEO of the most profitable corporation in the history of money — Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson — to be Secretary of State.  The “yes” vote included three members of what is mistakenly called “the opposition party,” that is, the Democrats. They are Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Warner of Virginia.  All are right of center politically.

Heitkamp doesn’t even identify as a “Democrat.”  Her party affiliation is with something called the “Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party.”  She’s in favor of guns, gas and oil drilling and Exxon.  Manchin  favors firearms, female serfdom and Exxon.  Warner is the closest to the center of the three; his pro-Exxon vote was especially disappointing to Democrats who hoped that, as vice-chair of the Senate Democratic caucus, he might become a pillar of the effort to filibuster the regime’s far right-wing nominee to the Supreme Court.

“Loyal opposition” is in the noblest traditions of democratic government.  While deeply rooted forms of loyalty exist in the Divided States of Trumpistan, its operational model would be better termed “cronyism.”  The other half of the phrase, “opposition,” is feeble at best, and generally spineless.

Neither Manchin nor Heitkamp will join the filibuster effort against the Bannon-Donnie SCOTUS nominee.  Warner will probably support that nominee as well.

The nominee — Circuit Court Judge Neil Gorusch — has been a dangerous ideologue since prep school, where he railed against liberal faculty members and founded a “Fascism Forever” club.  He is young — not yet 50 — and so would be in position for decades to impose upon the country his views in favor of widespread gun ownership, inferiority of women, destruction of the establishment clause in the name of “religious freedom,” and other legacies of his idol, the late Antonin Scalia.

A Supreme Court with a majority led by Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorusch would assure the removal of the judiciary as a balance against the despotic chief executive embodied in Alt-Pres. Bannon and his lap dummy, Donnie.   With people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell keeping the right-wing Congress in lock step, the descent into a fascist dictatorship would be absolute and irreversible.

Sieg Heil.

A Test of Spine in the Senate

The Democratic party has one last chance to reassert itself as a meaningful force in the government of these United States.

That chance resides in the Senate, where Democrats should use what has been the Republicans’ favorite tool — the filibuster — to prevent a vote on the Bannon-Trump regime’s nominee for the vacancy on the United States Supreme Court.

There are two reasons they should do this.

One is that the nominee,  Neil Gorusch, stands even to the right of the man he idolizes and would replace, Antonin Scalia, the worst ideologue ever to sit on the highest bench in the land. The framers of the Constitution clearly intended that the Supreme Court should be a place for impartial legal judgement, not political ideology.

The other is that for nearly a year, Republicans used every trick in the book to prevent President Obama from exercising his constitutional right to name Scalia’s successor.  Now the Senate Democrats owe it to their own constituents and to the entire people of the United States to do the same to this tainted nominee.

The Republicans have a majority in the Senate, but they don’t have 60 votes, the requirement to end a filibuster.  Some Democrats would have to defect in order to end a filibuster.  Some have already betrayed their constituencies by defecting to vote approval of unqualified nominees to the Bannon-Trump cabinet.  If they do so again on the Supreme Court nominee, they will have sounded the death knell for their own party.

Senate Republicans could attempt to defeat a judicial filibuster by changing the Senate rules, but that would require 67 votes, and both parties have been reluctant to take this step in previous Senate showdowns over controversial presidential nominations. It’s doubtful this Senate could summon 67 votes for a resolution of confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow.

There is also something called the “nuclear option,” an invention of the discredited “Tricky Dick” Nixon when he was Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president and hence the president of the Senate.  His formulation devolved from yet another bitter contest over judicial nominations. The maneuver has a rather complicated history.

In effect what happens is that the president of the senate declares an issue to be a constitutional question, which throws the issue to the full Senate for a vote decided by simple majority (51) rather than a super majority (60). In  2013, Senate Democrats used the nuclear option to block filibusters of  federal judicial appointments other than those to the Supreme Court.  For the Republicans now to reverse field and apply the nuclear option to the Gorusch nomination to the Supreme Court could add fuel to what is already looming as a historic constitutional crisis because of the despotic manner in which the Bannon-Trump regime has been operating since the day it took office.

The Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, has yet to demonstrate that he has the spine to put and keep his entire team in line to use the filibuster effectively.  The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has demonstrated neither the intellectual capacity to grasp the historical significance of a nuclear option showdown, nor the tactical skill to prevent catastrophe and chaos in the national government.

But we’re stuck with what we elected, and the ball is in the Senate Democrats’ court.  Will they run with it or fumble it?

Global Dismay and Anger

The ugly American doesn’t care a whit what the world thinks of us.  George W. Bush was a laughing stock in the rest of the world when he won a second term as president.  “How could 50 million people be so stupid?” a British tabloid asked.  The Muslim travel flap has kindled comparable hostility toward the new U.S. regime.

“In one week,” a Canadian friend said in an e-mail, “Trump has managed to piss off most of the world.    The Brits have a 1.6-million name petition to keep Trump from visiting the UK .The Chinese news service is having a field day.  The USA is shedding friends like a raincoat sheds water.   Uncle Sam looks like an idiot to a world that has always been a bit wary, in any case.”  Indeed, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shamed the president without naming him by declaring that Canada warmly welcomed all the Arab people who had been turned away by the Yanks.

In Austria, an expert in international finance and currency rates told me, there seems to be an educational gap between the two sides of the American immigration flap.  “The more educated people ‎in Austria shake their heads in disbelief," he said. " No one of this group thought that Mr. Trump could win the election.” The less well-educated people of Austria, he said, “don’t really focus on American politics, and if they do, given the strength of the right wing party in Austria, there would be support for Mr. Trump’s latest political decisions against common sense.”

The University of Iowa’s star basketball player, Peter Jok, who was born in Sudan, one of the countries named in the anti-Muslim ban, wrote a low-key, articulate online  tweet lamenting the pain it inflicted on innocent familes, and prayed that it would be lifted soon.

In a letter to 27 national leaders, European Union President Donald Trusk said the new U.S. regime is “seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy,”  The change, he said, “puts the EU in a difficult situation.”  With an EU summit looming in Malta in a few days, Tusk warned that “"We cannot surrender to those who want to weaken or invalidate the Transatlantic bond, without which global order and peace cannot survive.”

British Prime Minister Theresa May, having weathered a hand-holding charm offensive on her recent visit to Washington, was at first reluctant to criticize the Bannon/Trump Muslim ban, but yesterday she told parliament, “this government is clear that that policy is wrong. We wouldn't do it ... We believe it is divisive and wrong.”

U.N. human rights experts say the ban violates U.S. obligations on human rights. Their statement,  issued in Geneva on Wednesday, called the ban "clearly discriminatory" because it stigmatizes Muslims.They said  the United States has a special obligation “to offer refuge" to people fleeing Iraq and Syria, citing U.S. participation in brutal wars in those countries.

Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani described the Bannon/Trump regime as newcomers who don't understand politics, saying, "A man had been living in another world and now he has entered the world of politics."

Newspapers around the world took angry note of the outcry against the new American regime. "Trump sows trouble with his Western allies," was the lead headline in Les Echo in France.  LeMonde said the ban was not “worthy” of the U.S., and would help the terrorist rhetoric against America and the Western world.  In Spain, La Razon led Monday's cover with "World outcry against Trump's Muslim veto" and El Pais had pictures of protests on its front page from the state of Massachusetts. LaRepubblica of Rome ran the headline, “Trump Alone Against Us All.” In the UK, the Daily Mirror reported, “You Are Not Welcome Here, Mr. President,” and the Observer wrote that, “On issues that matter to Britain, Trump cannot be trusted.  Trump is ignorant, prejudiced and vicious in ways that no American leader has ever been.” In Germany, the newspaper Handelsblatt called the ban “Trump’s religion war”, the tabloid Bid reported on “the horror of Trump” and Der Spiegel said the ban opens the door for countless lawsuits against the new regime.

Official Washington seems deaf to the worldwide noise.  After all, the book ghost-written for  Trump was titled, “The Art of the Deal,” not “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”  The world has discovered that for Donnie, the art is to deal from the bottom of the deck.

To Desecrate Hallowed Ground

Forty-seven years ago, in a prescient, prize-winning Detroit Free Press special section on the environment, the late Gary Blonston wrote that a day might be coming “when the only robin will be in a zoo.”

Protection of Planet Earth and its creatures has waxed and waned over the years since then but now, with a new regime in place in Washington and far-right control of many state governments, especially in the west, it is time to revisit Blonston’s warning.

Outrages abound.

In New Mexico, the Bureau of Land Management has auctioned oil and gas drilling rights on land adjacent to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.  Despite the objections of native Americans who live there, and of environmentalists everywhere, the BLM held that a measly $3 million in dirty money was worth more than the centuries of history and culture the Chaco park protects.

That’s just the tip of a melting iceberg.

The Bannon/Trump regime is determined to undo President Obama’s designation of a new national monument, called Bears Ears after a dominant central landmark, in beautiful southern Utah.  The right wingers who hold office in Utah have been seething ever since an alliance of native American tribes and environmental scientists persuaded Obama to act.

One of those ideologues, Rep. Jason Chaffetz. a longtime advocate of dismantling federal agencies, and a supporter of the Muslim ban, has introduced H.R.621 “To direct the Secretary of the Interior to sell certain Federal lands in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming, previously identified as suitable for disposal, and for other purposes.”  The full text of the bill had not yet been published as of noon today in Washington, but a Utahan with a pipeline into Chaffetz’s office said parts of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument would be savaged by it. Sneak attack?

The House has already passed a bill that strips environmental protections for hundreds of thousands of square miles of public lands along the U.S. border, including National Parks and wildlife refuges. It lifts key protections for several other national wilderness and forest areas and blocks wildlife conservation measures for coastal areas. The bill overrides dozens of environmental laws within a 100 mile zone on Federal public and tribal lands along the Mexican and Canadian borders. Wolves, large felines and grizzly bears could be hunted to extinction, legally, as a result.

 H.J. Res. 46, introduced by an Arizona Republican, would  weaken environmental protections for national parks under the Congressional Review Act (CRA). If these repeals become law, it would not only erase protections, it would also prohibit agencies from issuing similar rules and protections in the future.

Even worse, H.R. 427, the Koch-backed REINS act, would render all environmental and wildlife protection agencies of the federal government powerless by requiring them to submit all regulations to the White House before they could become effective.

This war against things of beauty, of historical and cultural significance, of forests and streams and purple mountain majesties, was kindled by the gradual rise of right wing rule in the United States, and came ablaze with the election of the new White House regime.

I, and many of my family, wept when we heard about the Chaco oil leases.  When our grand-daughter, Darcy, learned that she had been accepted for a university doctoral program in archaeology, we celebrated by treating her to a trip to Chaco, where she hiked every inch of every trail. “That is sacred land,” she posted.  “Who knows what we could lose from the archaeological record when they destroy the land near the park? This is so sad. The time I spent in Chaco canyon was life changing! After spending years in school reading about the great houses , and then seeing them right before my eyes, it's an unbelievable area that should be preserved for future research and enjoyment.”

The spirit-lifting aura of protected public land as a vast cathedral pervades Chaco, especially when one first experiences it.  Lois and I first went there with my late brother Bob, like us an avid photographer.  As the sun moved lower in the late afternoon sky, we decided to take pictures in the magnificent light at the great kiva of Chetro Ketl.  We stood in the doorway surveying the panoply of light and shadow, imagining angles of perspective.  Below us, a native American woman of middle age, probably a member of one of the Puebloan tribes, sat on the rock apron transfixed.  Utterly immobile, she was chanting ritual songs in a low voice, her eyes fixed on something far, far distant and invisible to us.  

We froze, then backed away slowly, respecting her sacred solitude.

Our pictures could wait.

The Ventriloquist President

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Alt-President Edgar B. S. Bannon and his lap dummy, Donnie, put on quite a show last weekend.  

Any day now they're going to put up something like a government but for the moment they're on a roll with the comedy schtick. 

Somebody has taught the dummy to actually write his name!  They set up a television event so that we could watch him signing something.  When they sent the paper to the Keystone Kops in the airports the slapstick was hilarious.

Not everyone digs slapstick.  Some surly bitch over st DOJ was not amused.  Just what Alt-Pres. Bannon wanted: you need a foil to sustain slapstick.  Bannon could barely keep his lips from moving while he had the Donnie dummy shout "You're fired! You refused an order from the White House!" Hilarious.

Some of the satire here was probably too subtle for people who actually thought they were voting for the dummy when they put the ventriloquist in charge of the country.  Here's the background:

Back in September of 2015, when we still had a real president, he nominated Sally Yates to be deputy attorney general and the Senate held a confirmation hearing.  One of her questioners was Sen. Jeff Sessions, who is now Alt-President Edgar B. S. Bannon's nominee to be the permanent attorney general and actually supposedly sort of run the Department of Justice.  (This is not a joke.  They mean it.  Sessions. Justice.  Really.) Anyway, at that Senate hearing, the following exchange took place:

 SESSIONS: You have to watch out because people will be asking you to do things you just need to say “no” about. Do you think the Attorney General has the responsibility to say no to the President if he asks for something that’s improper? A lot of people have defended the [Loretta] Lynch nomination, for example, by saying, “Well [Obama] appoints somebody who’s going to execute his views. What’s wrong with that?” But if the views the president wants to execute are unlawful, should the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General say no?

YATES: Senator, I believe the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General has an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution, and to give their independent legal advice to the president."

Hilarious.  It’s like, the Dean waxed wroth and then they turned things around, see, and had Roth wax the Dean for a while. Meanwhile Harpo is behind a fern, laughing like crazy.  I mean, like, send in the clowns!  Don’t bother, they’re here!

You’ve got to hand it to the Alt-Pres.  Takes a guy with his very excellent IQ to divine that old-fashioned vaudeville would play so well  today if you moved it to D.C. and put it on the TV.  

Of course, it helps if you can teach the dummy to write his name.

Hilarious.