Grothe

The Last Day

Jul 06

POST 1192

The BBBB

At last there were just enough Republican cowards, liars and hypocrites to pass Trump’s Big Barfy Betrayal Bill. Who would have thought it possible to amass so many legislators more afraid of losing their privileged seats in Congress than motivated to keep people from starving to death or dying of preventable maladies?

The Congressional Republicans cheer

ed and took a group thumbs-up photo after the signing of that awful legislation that is so destructive of the American people and our way of life. They seemed to say “cheers for our side,” as though getting a legislative win were more important than doing what is best for the people.

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That bill is the gateway to the loss of our freedom.

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Its passage has created the next to the last day.

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Who Doesn’t Care?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) offered an amendment to stop the Republicans from cutting half the funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Board. That’s the agency that has caused over $20 billion to be returned to Americans who had been cheated by a bank, credit card company or the like. Every Republican voted against her amendment.

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) submitted an amendment to increase taxes on income over $10 million. Every Republican voted against that.

Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) had an amendment about Medicaid. The Republicans want to take it away from 17 million Americans. Her amendment was to at least keep in place Medicaid for brand new babies and their moms while they are in the hospital. Every Republican voted against it. Hey, if babies die, they die. Same for moms.

Republicans tell us that they care, but here’s their flag

Sen. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) amendment opposed the Republican plan to cut food assistance for low income families. It would guarantee food assistance at least for families with children under age 12. Every Republican voted against it.

The Republicans are for letting millions of Africans die from lack of medicines and surplus food already paid for and ready to ship.

The answer to the question beginning this section is that Republicans don’t care.

From Robert Reich:

[Their BBBB] establishes an anti-immigrant police state in America, replete with a standing army of ICE agents and a gulag of detention facilities that transform ICE into the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the government and it’s accountable to no one.

That is Trump’s private fascist army.

All of this is stuff you don’t want and perhaps you don’t even want to hear about, but this is what you get from Trump and his cowardly Republicans.

And we may have few chances left to vote them out of office. Trump said so.

The Posse Of Destruction Makes It Worse

From The Onion. Click me

John Roberts, Chief Justice to those other 5 black robed thieves of liberty, has placed himself in history to be the leader of the cabal who wouldn’t do their jobs – that “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” thing. Instead, they have substituted the name “Trump.”

The Roberts Court outrageously gave the President a get out of jail free card, allowing him to commit practically any crime while President and do so with no consequences (Trump v. United States). That matches nearly all of Trump’s no-accountability life. Then the Court put a nail in the coffin of birthright citizenship (Trump v. CASA). That oughta keep non-Whites from voting.

There are more Roberts assaults on our Constitution, of course. These are just two of the most recent.

John Roberts and his Posse of Destruction have abandoned their sworn duty (the real one) and have systematically dismantled our We The People protections from government cruelty. Indeed, they have neutered nearly every avenue to protect this nation from the onslaught of fascism and a cruel dictator.

That has dire consequences for your freedom.

The Final Manipulation

From Wikipedia:

The Reichstag fire . . . was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday, 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany . . . the Nazis attributed the fire to a group of Communist agitators, used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties and pursue a “ruthless confrontation” with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

That freedom killing Decree lasted until the end of the war.

Trump just got his horrible BBBB passed. It will give him radically enlarged power; hence, its passage signals the next to the last day. Now he needs something else big to solidify his dictatorship, so watch for some large act that looks like sabotage. He will blame Democrats, immigrants, LGBTQ citizens and journalists. He’ll use it to curtail our freedom and to declare a state of martial law. That will put Marines in your town and your freedom will be gone.

Then our Republican controlled Congress will sit like lap dogs, mute and meek, and watch Trump dissolve Congress and the courts. Trump will be a dictator exactly as he declared he would be when he said maybe there won’t be another election.

Then by extension, Prof. Timothy Snyder’s post Concentration Camp Labor tells us what comes next, powered by ICE thugs, who bring us imprisonments and deportations of innocents, concentration camps, then the normalization of slave labor.

I know that all sounds radical, outrageous. The German people didn’t see it coming, either.

Nevertheless, that will be the last day.

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Unless There Is A Lot Of Action

First, a definition: autocracy = dictatorship

And dictators are never good for the people. The Founders knew that because they lived under a dictator, mad King George III. He was a lot like Dementia King Donald I. We need to get to the same level of clarity as our Founders possessed.

Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt wrote How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy? and I strongly recommend that you read it. The article ends with this:

America’s slide into authoritarianism is reversible. But no one has ever defeated autocracy from the sidelines

Got it?

A Final Question About Our Self-Debasement Into Fascism

Every day Trump and his Gestapo are kidnapping people, beating them, killing them, locking them up and deporting them. Due process isn’t something even thinkable under these circumstances. Now they’re making jokes about detainees being eaten by alligators. They’re even selling Alligator Alcatraz merch. That extreme cruelty is being normalized and it’s being done in your name.

Here’s the question:

Are you okay with that?

**The “Deconstructing Trump”* Corner**

All Congressional Republicans know that the Big Barfy Betrayal Bill will badly hurt their constituents, but they voted for it, supine before Trump.

Accordingly, we begin this series with two quotations specifically for Congressional Republicans.

To sin by silence when we should protest
Makes cowards out of men.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1914
He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth
makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
Charles Péguy, 1899
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* Deconstructing Trump by friend Mardy Grothe explores The Trump phenomenon through the lens of quotation history. As such, we explore his volume and add its applicable wisdom to these posts.

Mid-Term Election

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Accountability & The Questions

Mar 13

Regular readers of these disambiguations know that I have strong views about accountability. There are two reasons.

One is that we’ve known since childhood that wrongdoing should be punished. The absence of punishment is an affront to our sense of right and wrong and it leads to the second reason.

In the absence of punishment for wrongdoing, the wrongdoer will do more wrong. Often, the bad acts become worse because there is no impediment to bad behavior.

Vladimir Putin got away with crushing Chechnya, Georgia, the eastern section of Ukraine and the Crimea and he used chemical weapons on Syrians. The world did almost nothing to stop him.

World War II comparisons are fraught with the danger of mistaken causalities and correlations, but this one fits. Hitler rolled over Czechoslovakia, Poland and more and the world did nothing but ignore or try to appease him for far too long. With 80 million killed, that didn’t work out too well for the world.

Putin has now invaded all of Ukraine, perhaps expecting a similar non-reaction from the world. He’s laying waste to all of Ukraine’s cities and endangering the world by bombing its nuclear power plants. Our human reactions include sadness, grief, anger and the desire to step in and stop the atrocities and step on Putin’s neck. The constraint is that engaging with Russia militarily will likely have unintended and disastrous consequences.

Consider this question: If the world had stepped up to stop this megalomaniac from one of his other outrageous assaults on life, liberty and sanity – i.e. had we held him accountable – would we be facing today’s dire circumstances?

This is why Putin cannot win.

This time, in this globally connected world, we’re not letting him get away with it entirely and he, his cronies and all the Russian people are paying the price. We’re strangling Putin and Russia economically by governmental action, by private businesses bailing from Russia and even through the actions of international hackers, yet there is danger in that.

Putin appears to be unhinged and is becoming forced into an ever-tightening corner. We all know what cornered animals do. Even a rabbit will attack if sufficiently threatened. The problem is that this rabbit has nuclear weapons and is threatening to use them. That makes accountability really tricky, but it is nevertheless necessary. We all must hope that our VSPs (very smart people) are working day and night to figure out how to avoid global annihilation.

What About Here?

We can and must extend the issue of accountability to our domestic challenges. Trump has gotten away with wrongdoing for decades, largely because he has not been held accountable. He was impeached twice for his wrongdoing, but our polarized Senate failed to make it stick and – guess what? – he then did worse by inciting an insurrection. He is still working to end our democracy, all because he has not been held accountable.

There is a hint of the cavalry coming over the hill in the forms of the Secretary of State of Georgia, the State of New York, the SDNY, the Justice Department in DC and maybe more. The hope for accountability lies with them and their courage do to what we all know must be done if we are to both punish the wrongdoer and make a statement to the next miscreant wannabe, who may be smarter and more cunning than this convict-in-waiting.

And we must hold accountable all the sycophants, dupes, spineless ones and selfish villains who have done so much to allow all the wrongdoing. No amount of their back pedaling should be allowed to exonerate them.

From Thom Hartmann:

You may remember [Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL)] as the guy who ran the company convicted of the largest Medicare fraud in the history of America, who then took his money and ran for Governor of Florida, where he prevented the state from expanding Medicaid for low-income Floridians for all the years he ran the state.

Now he’s the second-richest guy in the senate and, IMHO, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2024. [emphasis original]

And he wants to:

. . . raise taxes on poor and working-class Americans, end Social Security and Medicare, jack up pollution and corporate profits, all while continuing to pamper their billionaire donor base.

No worries about Scott back pedaling, because he needs to appeal to his basest base, but he must be held to account for being a selfish villain, fundamentally dishonest and probably a lot more nefarious things.

We The People must punish these – let’s call them “bad guys” – in their next elections. If we fail to do that, we will have told them and future sycophants, dupes, spineless ones and selfish villains that they can get away with their dishonesty. *

It’s long past the time when we should have been holding people accountable and punishing them for their wrongs. Think of it in either (or both) of these easy questions.

Trump and these Republican officials are your employees; they work or worked for you. It says so in the Constitution. If you have ever had a job working for someone else, what do you suppose your employer would do if s/he learned that you had been working to destroy the company? Now, what do you think we should do to our employees in government who are working to destroy our democracy?

Here’s a second take on this: What would Mom and Dad have done to you had you behaved as dishonestly as these “bad guys”?

Accountability. It’s a good thing.

The Ukraine Questions For The Moment

Russia and Putin’s standard M.O. is to pound cities and people into submission and there is no limit to the methods of brutality, including chemical weapons, they will use. Putin first raises a false flag (lies claiming awful things the other guys did) which he then uses as justification for his barbarity. Count on hearing about phony Ukrainian awfulness from Putin in the days to come.

Infants, babies, children, mothers, grandmas, grandpas and young, fit men are being killed by Putin’s army of murderers. President Zelenskyy is begging for an enforced no-fly zone to help his fighters battle the invaders. Everyone understands his insistence.

The west has assaulted Russia with massive economic penalties, but refuses to become physically engaged in a conflict with Russia to stop Putin’s murder spree. We all understand that, too. Here are the questions.

When will Putin’s madness and cruelty be too much for us to tolerate and to counter only indirectly?
If Putin uses chemical weapons on the people of Ukraine – or biological warfare agents or tactical nuclear weapons – what will we do?
If the answer to question #2 is that we will intervene to stop Putin from committing such horrid acts, why would we wait for him to kill millions of people before taking action?

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* From friend and CWP (Certified Wise Person) Mardy Grothe:

“If politicians can’t condemn Putin as a war criminal,

what does that say about them?

And if those politicians still get your vote,

what does that say about you?”

Click here for Mardy’s recent newsletter, which concludes with his lines above. If you’d like to subscribe, just send him an email at [email protected] and write “Subscribe” in the subject line.

And read Paul Krugman’s piece, America’s Right Has a Putin Problem. Then think about what we should do to our anti-democracy officials.

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1,476 more dead from Covid on Friday. Q. Can we spike the ball in the end zone now? A. Ask a Red state governor.

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**The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.**

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