July 28, 2018

Obama to Republican Disavowing Trump: WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG

July 26, 2018

Why So Many Republicans Are Retiring: NRA Quiet On Their Role As Russian Conduit In Butina Charges

They are among those "ongoing cases".

In asking for the return of personal papers, the defense could possibly try a PR case in public.

Silence was consent for all these retiring Republicans who fear for their reputations, salvation and most of all, their stashes of ill-gotten gains.

So they're high-tailing it.

They forget that FBI history shows that it can and will indict by the hundreds.

July 26, 2018

Stockholmie On Ocasio-Cortez:"I saw something truly terrifying...my children deserve healthcare..."

"Stockholmie" = a conservative woman with political Stockholm Syndrome

July 25, 2018

Someone -- Mueller or the Pentagon -- has to speak to Americans, confounded by a growing darkness.

"What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what’s happening,” says 45.

Journalism is doing its world class best. But 45's government is disappearing evidence as he mounts an internal war of presidential disinformation to wage against Americans.

But Americans need even more light and less heat about what is happening to what was once their country.

1. Militarily --

Today, the Russian Ministry of Defense slammed US Gen. Joseph Votel, accused Votel of discrediting President Trump's position after Votel expressed hesitancy about working with Russia in Syria.

The Russian Ministry claimed that General Votel not only discredited the official position of his supreme commander-in-chief, but also exacerbated the illegality, under international law and US law, of the military presence of American servicemen in Syria, in an interview Votel gave to ABC News.

Which raises the question of when Trump ordered that Votel and Centcom cooperate with the Russian military in Syria -- contrary to the armed services committee's report that prohibits military-to-military cooperation with Russia. Since when does the Russian military get to publicly discredit any American general. Since when, as Rachel says, does a foreign military power interfere in our chain of command.

2. Domestically --

Monday, the House and Senate armed services committees released their compromise defense bill for 2019 that once again renewed a prohibition on "military-to-military cooperation" with Russia.

"In regard to Syria, what we do with the Russian Federation is we de-conflict our operations, we do not coordinate them," Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis said.

Is Putin now the American military's commander-in-chief for General Votel in US Centcom Syria. US General Votel seems to say he does not know who is in command. Was it during the secret Helsinki meeting that Putin and his Russian Ministry of Defense were accorded authority in Syria.

3. Diplomatically --

All this military drama happens after this fake president, for four days after his secret meeting in Helsinki, actually entertained Putin's demand that he send the US Secretary of State and other officials to Russia for interrogation, on penalty of filing a Red Notice with Interpol. International drama, as if the US "invaded" some Russia election.

Journalists reveal, so far, that no common sense rules of law seem to exist that can throw legal hurdles to keep Trump from complying with Putin, because neither the international nor domestic orgs are revealing to rest of us how these dramas threaten or defend this country's constitution or its people.

---------------

The dramatic shifts -- from Mueller's civilian jurisdiction to our military's Syrian/Middle East jurisdiction to our diplomats' international security -- must tell Americans that this country's national security is neither national nor secure.

If this is the global -- or Russian -- plan to break down a major military power and its civilian government, we can only hope it's not working.

Someone -- Mueller or the Pentagon -- has to speak to Americans who live confounded in a once-great country -- as domestic law and order, as the world’s greatest military and diplomacy apparatus now languish in diminished normalcy, truth, reality and country — as their leaders shrink and world looks away, aghast.

July 22, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Trump Isn't Ready For A Girl From The Bronx

As party criticisms of Ocasio-Cortez mount, it's good to know how Millennials have become engaged by this candidate.

Given that 78% of Americans working full time live paycheck to paycheck,
and that nearly half do not have four hundred dollars at the ready,
that the social mobility of moving from the bottom fifth to the top fifth is twice as likely in Canada as in the US,
resentment has allowed a demagogue on the right to build a movement on that secondary feeling.

That Ocasio-Cortez addresses these austerity problems is a clue for new Democrats running in red state primaries.

David Remnick's "Left Wing of the Possible" helps us to meet the candidate.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-historic-win-and-the-future-of-the-democratic-party

Democrats need to help more candidates like her, who, in her words, will "widen the electorate."

That electorate is likely the 80% who didn't vote for Trump. Let's hope they are more ready to vote for other new faces in politics than for the current WH occupant or his pretties.

I hope she has gotten the "Colbert bump."

July 22, 2018

TO BEAT CYBER WARFARE IN FUTURE ELECTIONS, GO GUERILLA, GO ANALOG -- Part 2

The U.S. Constitution is not just a piece of paper. Yet the Constitution can only be a living document when Americans provide the uncorrupted evidence of its life in our presidential elections.

We're a big country, with constant voting "irregularities" that get legally shunted aside in preference for closure and winner-take-all pronouncements. Capitalists like the Koch brothers have eyed this system of regulating their influence and control; they have claimed that "constitutional majority rule is a failure." That's on the record.

Thus, we now live under a minority rule vote that tyrannizes 80% of those who did not vote for Trump. We are also under national security threat to have that happen in future elections.

U.S. presidential elections need restructuring so that they are The People's paper trail evidence of the viability of the U.S. Constitution and the majority rule of this Big D Democracy that we are in jeopardy of losing. If we haven't lost it already.

Based what the FBI proves is the cyberwar election threat to US national security, ban electronic voting. That alone could be a problem of their standing before the courts.

The ban could be levied by the Justice Department and/or enforced through the courts.

The ban could be applied to either the 220 counties of the last presidential election, or to all the counties of the U.S. The Department of Justice and attendant court orders can claim this is our only protection against server and vote hijackings of the 2016 election. As in the case of the caged children, it can have a deadline for preparations and implementation at county levels.

Here's how the county-based election system can save electronic hijackings. I'll apply my guerrilla model to all the U.S. counties, not just to the 220 counties I listed in Part 1.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210909150

1. Use serial numbered, thumb printed tear-off paper ballots in all 3,142 counties. Paper ballot making isn't any more costly than machine maintenance and programming for receipts that now exist.

2. Vote only within county structure only -- not in a single partisan drawn district, ward or precinct. The site of voting is in the county seat building.

3. ANY in-person voter qualifies to vote with a state or driver's license or other ID, the usual proofs of address, with their signature and thumbprint on both the main ballot and tear-off section. Crosschecked rolls or other voter rolls are not to be used to qualify a voter. Voting by mail can suffice with the same qualifiers. I haven't worked out the details on how to apply for mail-in ballots.

4. Timeline: all counties can collect votes during the same time period they have allowed for early voting.

5. At the end of election day votes are counted by live, continuous camera footage in each county seat, with legal observers, until the votes are audibly totaled, paper counts certified by each county's commissioner.

6. While still on the same continuous camera, all county ballot locked boxes are loaded onto security truck(s), the same used by banks and businesses, and are driven to the National Archives, 700 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC. There are other important national events, but this is a particularly important national security event.

7. Certified counts of the lock boxes are delivered to the head of the FBI or his designated agents in charge of vote security.

8. No deadline for reporting to the public is required. Our election is complete when the head of the FBI announces the national results.

Voting structures and personnel already exist and can stay within current personnel budgets. Overall, this election method will eliminate middle men. It won't likely be any more costly to our national security than the billions that our highly threatened electronic voting system costs us right now.

It's doable and overall, accurate and tamper-proof, unless some trucks get criminally hijacked.

Please know, before you lay out what I hope is constructive criticism, that I've tried, at least, to provide a tamper-proof system to the third largest country on the planet which has already been hit by a cyber act of war and continues to be threatened.

We have to fix our national security threat before the next election. We have to try.

Lay it on me.

You needn’t be gentle, but please be informed and constructive.

July 22, 2018

TO BEAT CYBER WARFARE IN FUTURE ELECTIONS, GO GUERILLA -- Part 1

First: Because we know the goal is TO WIN, our focus could be on the 220 counties that voted for Obama in 2012 and did not vote Hillary in 2016. I learned all this here in DU. So I'm trying to put all this info together toward a winning vote model.

The Democratic Party admits that they have nothing -- nothing! -- that comes close to the Republican ground game that the Koch machine has built over forty years.

Kochs' machine focuses its spending on

1. academic influence (see Nancy McLean's book, Democracy In Chains for the institutional buildout)
2. Citizens United-based dark money (I can only think of OpenSecrets, etc. -- please help here)
3. suppression systems through fake cyberware like Crosscheck (specialized site explanations are best)
4. buying and promoting the best institutional trainees as GOP (Koch) machine candidates (many from religion-based law schools, right wing for profit law schools, foundations, etc.)
5. creating horse race, divisive scripts to distract from all the above, from political fearmongering radio (Armed Forces network, Levin, right wing communications networks like Sinclair, Channel One, et. al.) to Internet-TV ad buy.

With free horse race-tabloid-outrage AV coverage ...

Trump won 30 out of 50 states to Clinton’s 20 states.
He won 2,623 counties to her 489 counties.
There are 3,242 counties and county equivalents in the United States.

Trump won 220 counties that had voted for Obama in 2012.

Trump's turnout wasn't high, just high enough in WI, MI, PA, to get electoral college dudes for the technical knockout win.

Second, Dems can win those 220 counties back. They are key "base." When everyone who has registered to vote actually votes, results always go to Democrats.

Someone in the party's has got a list of those counties -- see Tom Perez and campaign operatives.
All the rest of us should know exactly where they are.
This party and the rest of us had better go find out what these voters want to motivate them to vote.
Koch has used money.

What Dems have is a People's track record. But money is now blasting their voices.

When the Dems can't match Koch's money, they'd better come up with A GUERRILLA MODEL.

The Guerrilla Model is laid out in Part 2.

July 16, 2018

President Obama on Gerrymandering, Redistricting, & the 2018 Midterm Elections

July 10, 2018

I can't with the coping humor. Americans have got to get ready AF.

Social media people are vivacious in their humor, likening this to a "second civil war" and an "olympian battle into which Hercules/Mueller will save the day!" laughingly calling each other truth sayers and soothsayers. UGH.

It hurts me to read all this.
Maybe I need to take a break, go have a stiff drink.
Lord knows, I've taken to smoking again.

But before I stop reading all the coping humor around here, I want to say this:

1.
Don't get to joking about this situation.
Don't get your hopes up.
Don't entertain fantasies.

Sure, there's a Lawyer Civil War going on out there. (We can even define the legal teams, which I myself call the constitutional v the corporate teams.)

Don't underestimate the Koch machine and its corporate adherents to minority rule -- their goal since the 70's.

Now, two, and soon three branches will serve as the Fifth Column for a fossil fuel Russian mafia. Together, two nations' oligarchs and their pretties are about to take control of all three branches of a democratic republic. Many of their bagmen have become conscience stricken and resigned to save their asses and souls.

2.
The likely reality:

The Mueller final report and indictments will not at all end a congressional party that refuses to impeach.
The solicitor general's case for The People will lose in a SCOTUS that may not allow the indictment of a president, the consequence being that a criminal boss president pardons himself, his family and his syndicate.

Constitutional Law and order will not be enforced.
Constitutional Law will then be beside the point.
Moot.

3.
Just because the FBI has all the evidence of collusion and conspiracy to commit treason, and just because the FBI will make the case -- just because they and We The People are in the Right -- given the current structure of party power, it doesn't mean The Constitution will win.

4.
There's always the US military. Would it, could it step up and take over to preserve the Constitution? As privately outsourced and mercenary as it's become, that solution is in doubt. Then there are the gun humpers.

The International Criminal Court won't be able to do anything, since this country is not a signatory.

After Cuba and Venezuela, the US will become Russia's third western satellite. I'd rather welcome Chinese overlords.

5.
I knew when Obama said "The end of the Republic never looked better," that he wasn't joking. The correspondents at the WH dinner knew it, too.

That's why the coping humor hurts.

Because Americans have got to get ready.

6.
I don't want to be correct.

I just want Americans to get the fuck out and vote out this Congress in November.

I want to wake up bored with my government because it's doing what it's supposed to do for the greatest number, here and abroad.

Cigarette break time...

July 7, 2018

Founder of the Polaris Project Gets 2017 Skoll Award

Bradley Myles describes the problems of 25 types and business models of human trafficking.

All the traffickers are in it for the money, and that's where we can get them. $9.5 BILLION (of $32 billion profit from worldwide trafficking) comes from operations carried out in the United States alone. Human trafficking is also the 2nd largest source of illegal income in the world,

Never think trafficking should be left up to the "experts."

Polaris is The North Star, the guide in the Underground Railroad.

Human trafficking is the fastest growing economic sector worldwide of international organized crime.

Are these missing border children dragnetted into this dark world? That's what we need to find out.

Four common U.S. destinations for trafficking are California, Texas, New York and Nevada.

If you think you're seeing trafficking, call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) hotline at 1-888-373-7888
or text HELP or INFO to BeFree (233733)