David Gerrold: IMPEACHMENT INSIGHT

David Gerrold

September 28 

So ... we know that he's an illiterate, ignorant, incompetent, narcissist who doesn't admit failure — and yet he has declared bankruptcy more times than some people change their underwear. (I wish this particular comparison was only a joke. It isn't. )

We also know that he's a bully and a coward.

So while on the one hand, he has a track record of running from any possible admission of failure — he never acknowledges all those bankruptcies, except as wins (because it was the other guys who lost their shirts) — on the other hand, he's terrified of failure. It's not part of his identity.

He knows that his residency in our White House may very well be terminated soon. He doesn't want to be impeached, but he doesn't want to be arrested either. The bad news there is whether or not he is impeached, whether or not he is convicted, whether or not he is reelected, arrest is inevitable.

So really, the options aren't good.

1) Fight impeachment. That's not an option. He will be impeached in the house. That's inevitable. The Democrats now have enough votes to pass a bill of impeachment.

2) Try to keep the Senate from convicting him. He has two chances of that. Fat and slim. The Republican Senators are in the process of sending signals that they are more concerned with saving their own asses than his. At least 30 Republican Senators have indicated their willingness to convict if the vote is secret. That position will change as the rest of the evidence of criminal corruption is revealed. So he still ends up convicted and arrested.

3) Resign and avoid the public humiliation. And then be immediately charged, arrested, and held accountable. If he is charged under the RICO laws, he forfeits all property.

4) Run away. Be "president" in exile. I rather like this option. It would make for a great political thriller.

5) Become medically incapacitated, physically unfit for trial. This is his best option. It lets him get away with it. Although he still loses control of his "empire."

6) It is unlikely that he will escape conviction. But if he does, then he runs for reelection. It is unlikely that he will survive the growing tsunami of nationwide revulsion, but with enough electoral chicanery, he could hang onto the Blight House. In that case, all bets are off — because this nation will not survive four more years of this reign of error.

7) If he is convicted, he will not go down alone. Others will go down with him. That is likely to happen whether he is convicted or not. So the Republican party has a serious problem for the 2020 election. It would be a Goldwater scenario. In 1964, the Republican party knew they couldn't win the White House. The electorate was solidly Democratic, but more than that, there was a smoldering resentment of the right wing hate campaign that had been aimed at JFK and a vague suspicion that right wingers had set up the assassination. Even Goldwater knew he couldn't win — so the goal wasn't winning as much as it was establishing legitimacy of the right-wing ideology for the future. Whoever inherits the nomination, he will be a placeholder while the party tries to rebuild itself on the state levels.

Given that a Democratic president will likely serve two terms, all the way to Jan, 2029, then the Republicans will have most of a decade to rebuild themselves. Because they have had such success with a half century of lying, cheating, and stealing, ever since Nixon, do not expect the party to change. Based on the evidence of history, however, you can expect a massive rebranding while the same kochroaches continue to dictate robber-baron policies. Short of a massive internal collapse, I cannot imagine the Republican party coming back as a legitimate political party — they're owned by the religious fanatics, the racists, and the robber-barons in an unholy triumvirate of mutual advantage. The robber-barons loot the public treasury, the evangelicals get to control the religious conversation, and the racists get to pretend legitimacy. That kind of alliance will not die easily.

I could be wrong on any of these things — I was wrong when I said he would never get to the White House. I did not factor in the meddling of Russia and a multi-million dollar social media campaign by paid trolls and volunteer assholes, as well as the pretense to legitimacy of that bullshit that came from the Fox Noise pulpit.

The one thing that is true is that we are in a chaotic situation. We have been in a long-running Constitutional crisis and we do not yet know how it will resolve itself.

But it will resolve, one way or another. Tyrannies do not last. They crumble from within. They collapse. They get overthrown. Tyrants die. And sometimes there are revolutions. Sometimes peaceful. Sometimes not.

But tyrannies do end.

Myself, I believe the best option is 100 million voters go to the polls and vote blue.

Jerry Falwell's SCAM

David Gerrold

August 29 

Here's the political problem that we face with the Republican party.

Back in the 80s, there was a grifter named Jerry Falwell. He wanted to fight integration and other progress that African-American citizens had made. But the research showed that overt racism was a public relations disaster.

Falwell discovered there were two issues which would work as red-meat for Republican voters. One was abortion, the other was gay rights. Throughout the 80s and 90s and well into this century, those two issues were used as red-meat initiatives and referendums to get the conservative and reactionary base to the polls — where they would also vote in various Republican candidates. This was a very successful tactic. Even in those few cases where their initiatives were voted down, they still forced the Democrats to spend a lot of money fighting.

But the real issue for Falwell (and his backers) was holding back People of Color. So was the "war on drugs." This was a calculated plan for maintaining white supremacy. This was the real agenda of the political movement he created, "The Moral Majority." (The Moral Majority was neither.)

With the legalization of same-sex marriage and the national movement to legalize marijuana, both of those issues are no longer viable ones for what remains of the Falwell machine.

But ... the real damage is much more permanent. Because what Falwell created was the appearance of a religious justification for voting Republican. He presented himself as a Reverend and The Moral Majority justified its opposition to abortion and gay rights as a religious one. This worked very well for Falwell — and even for that senile old pustule, Pat Robertson, who declared himself a candidate for president in 1988. (He also won the Nehemiah Scudder award for Best New Attempt at Demented Tyranny.)

The reason Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and the other founding fathers insisted on separation of Church and State was simple. The thirteen colonies represented several different religious beliefs — none of whom fully trusted the others. The only way to unify the colonies into a nation was to guarantee that no religion could have any kind of official status. This is why the first amendment specifically says that Congress shall make no law sanctioning any religion.

This has annoyed fundamentalists for 240 years. They insist that this is a Christian nation. And therefore that Christians are entitled to special rights and privileges. (And gay people are not.)

But Falwell's disgusting legacy is that he very much succeeded in blurring that line between Church and State. As a result, the Republican party is no longer a political party. It's a religious cult.

And that is why bipartisanship has become impossible.

If God is on your side, if you are doing God's work, if you have a mandate from the Creator of the Universe, then you don't have to compromise on anything. Because you're right and the other side is wrong. That's it. End of discussion.

It's not just plain stupid obstinacy that keeps the Republican party functioning as efficiently as a burlap condom. Because the evangelical movement (masquerading as a mad tea party) has captured control of the south, they've restructured the party's ability to govern from inept and incompetent to malignant and dangerous.) The Party Formerly Known As Republican is now indelibly hardwired that their beliefs are reality—therefore, they do not have to listen to any disagreement, let alone negotiate with those nasty lesbian socialist agents of Satan.

In fact, to the Neo-Confederate Party, negotiation is weakness. You don't compromise with evil. Blah blah blah.

So it's not just political maneuvering that keeps our Congress gridlocked--it's a political philosophy that has been perverted by religious mania.

But let's not stop there. Let's follow the money. The bullionaires (intentional misspelling), like Adelson and the Koch bros, were in this from the beginning. They found the religion angle a very convenient mechanmism for furthering their own ends. By funding this movement, they created a political bloc which gave them additional tax breaks, rolled back regulations, and gave them unfettered access to the reins of government.

So once again, religion has been used as a tool of oppression—in this case, it has been used as the crowbar that cracks open our democracy to be looted by the robber barons.

The people who were most desperate for change, for progress, for hope, sold their votes to the national grifter and his entourage of enablers and con men.

A hundred years ago, the United States was being looted by the robber barons. (That's where the term "trickle-down" was first used.) The consequence of that was a decade of global depression that gave rise to fascism and war.

We're heading down that same path because of the greed and stupidity of this generation of robber barons.

The good news--there is still good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for--the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed gave us 20 years of serious reorganization of our government. The most dramatic and important result was the creation of Social Security.

Now, I have no idea why the robber barons are so stupid that they want to keep our economy unbalanced. It seems to me that the more money in the hands of workers and consumers, the more opportunities there are to create a healthy demand for goods and services. You can sell a lot more cars and TVs and cellphones to people who can afford them.

But ... it comes back to that evangelical belief that wealth is a measure of personal validity. Your rich because you deserve it. Other people are poor because they don't deserve to be rich. They're lazy moochers (who have to work three jobs to keep their children fed).

We are not going to change this nation until we change the narrative — it's a simple change, but a nearly impossible one. We have to give up the conversations of selfishness and replace them with conversations of connection, partnership, and most of all, empathy and caring for each other.

And ... we have to create a global conversation that if we cannot live in harmony with the ecology of this planet, this planet has a cure for that — human extinction.

On the home front, a large part of the problem is advertising. All those ads that keep telling you that you're not good enough unless you have this, own that, look like this, wear this, go there, and ultimately vote for this grifter who will take away your last best hope for affordable health care.

This is why the robber barons are so desperate to rip out the machineries of government — because if the government has tools to regulate corporate responsibility, well ... they won't be able to get away with as much. And this is why they love the evangelical movement. It keeps the government gridlocked.

Any questions?

GOP inability to lead - can't get a budget passed? threatening shutdown? 4 Biggest RIght-Wing Lies About Inequality

The Hill

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Speaker John Boehner acknowledged for the first time Thursday that Congress will likely have to take up a stopgap funding bill in September to avoid a government shutdown.

Boehner: Stopgap bill likely needed to avoid government shutdown

The Speaker said "it’s pretty clear" that a stopgap bill will be needed in September.

HILL.CM

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  Mary Ann Jaskiewicz via The Hill

  31 mins ·
  

  Gop trying, in vain to save themselves

Robert Reich

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As more than 17 Republican hopefuls vie for the limelight, these 4 lies about inequality are being repeated incessantly. Because the Republican race has so many contenders it's getting lots of media coverage -- which means the public is hearing these lies far more frequently. So it's more important than ever that you know the truth.

The Four Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Inequality

Even though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we’re heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the nineteenth-century robber barons, right-wing...

ROBERTREICH.ORG|BY PETER VIDANI

Occupy Democrats

This is the Republican Tea Party in a nutshell.

Image by Occupy Democrats.

Former Vice President Al Gore. (photo: Mario Anzuoni)

False Spontaneity of the Tea Party

By Al Gore, Reader Supported News

15 February 13

new study funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health reveals that the Tea Party Movement was planned over a decade ago by groups with ties to the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. The movement was not a spontaneous populist uprising, but rather a long-term strategy to promote the anti-science, anti-government agenda of powerful corporate interests.

 

The two organizations mentioned in the report, Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks, used to be a single organization that was founded by the Koch brothers and heavily financed by the tobacco industry. These organizations began planning the Tea Party Movement over ten years ago to promote a common agenda that advocated market fundamentalism over science and opposed any regulation or taxation of fossil fuels and tobacco products.

 

The disturbing history of links between market fundamentalists, the tobacco industry and the Tea Party movement is part of an even larger trend that I describe in my new book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. Following the era of Progressive and New Deal reforms that restrained corporate influence in American politics following the infamous Robber Baron Era, market fundamentalists were once again motivated and radicalized by the social turbulence of the 1960s. In 1971, a prominent lawyer for the tobacco industry, Lewis Powell, wrote a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that presented a comprehensive plan aimed at shifting the balance of political power in favor of corporations. President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court just two months later.

 

Guided by the Powell Memo, market fundamentalists have pursued a comprehensive strategy to dramatically increase corporate influence in American politics. Powell himself worked with other pro-corporate justices to interpret laws in ways that were favorable to corporate interests, most importantly expanding the precedent of corporate personhood. As a direct result, corporate lobbying exploded, increasing from $100 million in 1975 to $3.5 billion in 2010. Corporations also used increasingly voluminous campaign contributions to promote the election of pro-corporate politicians at all levels of government. Wealthy donors founded conservative think tanks to influence public opinion in favor of market fundamentalism. The Tea Party is a clear extension of Powell's strategy to promote corporate profit at the expense of the public good.

 

Our democracy has been hacked by this expansion of corporate power, preventing meaningful action on several crucial issues. The climate crisis is an instructive example. The strategic goal of the market fundamentalists to "reposition global warming as theory not fact" has created enough false doubt around the issue to hinder progress. The potential consequences of climate change have never been clearer than they are today. Consider what we saw in America just last year. 2012 was the hottest year in American history and 60% of America experienced drought. Extreme weather events, like Superstorm Sandy, caused over $110 billion of damages. Yet Congress remains paralyzed, with many lawmakers even refusing to acknowledge the validity of climate science. The future of our planet demands that we put the sustainability of our planet before corporate profit.

 

We must reclaim control of our destiny. Reducing corporate influence in American politics and reinvigorating reason-based decision-making is vital to the sustainability of our democratic system.