useful idiot

The Lede


POST 1173


Here’s the Lede

Our Constitution’s Peril Is Not Now Nor Was It Ever About Trump.

America’s real enemy is the fascists – call them ultra-fat cats or oligarchs if you prefer. They are the home grown terrorists, the diabolical evil ones, working for over 40 years to steal our country away from us.
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Trump is the front man, the warm-up act, the circus sideshow barker, the Distractor-in-Chief. Trump is just a tool for the fascists.

The extremists are directing Trump to cripple our government, our markets, our international relationships, our leadership of the free world and the maintenance of our values that have protected peace and international relations for 80 years. Tens of thousands of our people who make the trains run on time, who find cures for killer diseases and who protect us from unsafe food have been fired, leaving nobody to stand guard. They have kicked aside all who used to be our allies and snuggled up with bad guy dictators.

Now, in plain violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, the Trump administration has militarized our southern border from New Mexico to California, making it legal for our military to detain, arrest and imprison migrants and even our native born citizens, the ones guaranteed citizenship by the 14th Amendment. It’s essentially making the U.S. Army into a Gestapo. All the Constitutional protections and our laws shielding us from overreaching, crushing governmental power are being shredded by this cruel administration of extremists.* No Americans voted for these calamities.

“I don’t want everyone to vote.” “As a matter of fact, our [Republican] leverage in the elections quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Paul Weyrich, co-founder of The Heritage Foundation and proud proponent of voting suppression.

You can find the plan for the ruination of America in the Project 2025 handbook, painstakingly crafted by anti-American geniuses over the course of decades. They are a very talented cabal of megalomaniacs, people inspired to treachery by the likes of Paul Weyrich (link through and watch the 40 second clip). He’s the guy who told us plainly that he didn’t want all Americans to vote – only the ones who would vote his way – Republican. His political descendants are stationed all about our country now, constantly creating voter suppression everywhere. This diabolical plan was designed specifically for the destruction of your values and your freedom.**

Trump has claimed that he knows nothing about Project 2025. Given that he is reputed to be incapable of reading anything that doesn’t have pictures and that the document is 922 pages long, he probably has not read it. But he is being fed instructions from it by the billionaire fat cats and manipulators who wrote it, the people who want to rule the world, who think they are entitled to steal your power and your rights.

Trump cannot even spell “strategy” or “plan.” Creating such things is far beyond his abilities. But he is the very best at several things:

  1. Getting attention, promoting himself, grabbing the focus by being outrageous and thereby distracting you from his wrongdoing
  2. Demonizing opponents
  3. Lying instantaneously, making stuff up, like claiming that the price of eggs is down 92% – whatever fantasy or lie suits his purpose in the moment
  4. Never admitting mistakes and never backing down, even to the point of absurdity

The billionaires and the sneaky pols crafted this Project 2025 plan for domination and they have the perfect shill for their task: Donald Trump, their useful idiot. When their absolute power is firmly established, they will discard him like leftover fish gone bad.

That is the plan behind the seemingly self-destructive stuff of the past 100 days. The destruction makes perfect sense in the context of the grandest larceny ever committed.

If the fat cat dictator wannabes get their way, the complete loss of your freedom will be the result.

Once More: Here’s the Lede
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Our Constitution’s Peril Is Not Now Nor Was It Ever About Trump

America’s real enemy is the fascists – call them ultra-fat cats or oligarchs if you prefer. They are the home grown terrorists, the diabolical evil ones, working for over 40 years to steal our country away from us.
.
Action

You know what to do to fight this. Here it is spelled out for you by Adam Kinzinger’s Country First in just 1 minute, 38 seconds.

And listen to Gov. Tim Walz’s State of the State address on April 23 (start at 2:17, unless you want to listen to the complete list of attendees).

Perhaps you’re both discouraged over the spinelessness and hypocrisy of Republicans and dismayed over the apparent lack of strength and direction – the wimpiness – of Democrats. Walz has clarity about all that and you need to hear it now. The only disappointment in watching this presentation is seeing the Minnesota Republican legislators refusing to applaud, even when Walz announced things that everyone likes, like that crime is down. That brain-free, hyper-partisan behavior is part of the Project 2025 scheme.

There was a time in America when Democrats stood tall for We The People, when they were bold in demanding fairness and they continuously banged the drum of decency for and from everyone. But their strength has been diluted into watery pablum and they insist upon refusing to come together for what they all know is right. They’ve made themselves into a force that can be knocked down by a simple tap on the forehead.

There was a time in America when Republicans were the big flag wavers, the most muscular defenders of liberty, the thumpiest of Constitution thumpers. They had the courage to stand against what was un-American. But those people are long gone, replaced by others who cannot even recognize an elephant. No matter how much lipstick you use and regardless of how you dress up today’s Republican pig, it’s still a pig.

America’s real enemy is the fascist terrorist thieves and those Americans too chicken to stand up to them.

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* Long time friend Jim Nathan is the co-founder of Floridians for Democracy, an organization dedicated to protection of our democracy. Read his clear message about the destruction of rights and the norms you count on from here.

** Read David A. Graham’s The Project 2025 Presidency in The Atlantic.


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The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not necessarily mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
  2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine, but I do wish that I could blame someone else. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
  5. Clicking on most pics in these posts will take you to the source information.
  6. Comments offered by readers, whether in agreement with my opinions or opposing, are encouraged and greatly appreciated. All are reviewed prior to going live. I reserve the right to edit for readability, punctuation, typos, voluntary idiocy and to exclude those I deem inappropriate.
  7. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.

Click me

JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Law And Order: Special Hush Money Unit


POST 1062


Headline of the Month

From Politico of 4/14/2024

“A porn star, a president and a publisher named Pecker:

“The key potential witnesses at Trump’s criminal trial”


The Hoped For End of the Hush Money Trial

It’s the conclusion of jury deliberation in the Donald Trump hush money/criminal fraud/election interference, multiple count felonies case. The courtroom is silent in anxious anticipation, as the jury solemnly returns to Judge Merchan’s tense courtroom. The defendant has awakened from his courtroom nap and is focused on the jury with a sneering stare.

Judge Merchan: “The defendant will rise.”

Trump rises slowly, belligerent and hostile in rebellion against authority.

           Judge Merchan:   “Jury foreman, have you reached a verdict?”

Jury Foreman:     “We have, Your Honor.”

Judge Merchan:   “Regarding 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a crime, what is your verdict, guilty or not guilty?”

The jury foreman reaches into a pocket, pulls out a pitch pipe and blows a note. The entire jury turns menacingly toward defendant Trump. They furrow their brows in obvious distaste and snarl in unison,

“YOU’RE FIRED!”


Gang-Greene

You’ve known all along that Marjorie Taylor Greene is cruel and dishonest, vulgar and infantile and constantly inappropriate (ref: any Biden State Of The Union address). Her foaming-at-the-mouth refusal to help Ukraine leaves European nations and the U.S. at risk from the war mongering new iteration of megalomaniac Josef Stalin. That’s why she has earned a special title from Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who said, “that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene . . . should be appointed as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”

In one of her most desperately cloying, grabbing, begging, pleading for attention idiocies, Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened to call for Speaker Mike Johnson’s removal from his speakership for his impudence to bring to the floor a bill for support of Ukraine. Putin didn’t want that to happen, preferring the continuing depletion of Ukraine’s war matériel so he can succeed in his invasion. Greene and her extremist conspirators in un-American activities, the Gang-Greene, are brain-free suck-ups to Donald Trump, who is completely captivated by Putin and proudly wears the title Putin has given him: Useful Idiot. That title goes for Greene and her abominable Gang, too.


Boomer Corner

From a recent post by my friend Ed Gurowitz:

It is this thoughtlessness that worries me. I have many German friends and family, and I’ve asked some of them what their parents told them it was like during the rise of Nazism. Even allowing for a people providing exculpatory explanations, what I have heard overwhelmingly is that people just let it happen – whether through apathy, feelings of powerlessness, or secret sympathy, it doesn’t matter. As Edmund Burke famously said, “All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

That is what I’m afraid of – good people doing nothing when the opportunity to vote is there.

Me, too. Which is why I offer the following.

From Wikipedia – Click the pic

We Boomers did some good work in the 60s when it was our asses on the line in a senseless war, our values were being assaulted by a continuation of centuries of cruelty that seemed like it would never stop. It was our time to respond to Abigail Adams, who expected her husband John to come home with a Constitution that guaranteed women the right to vote – he didn’t do that. And it was even time to (gasp!) guarantee non-Whites all the rights of citizenship. Crazy, right?

But those days are gone.  Our job was largely done, so we left the protests and went about our lives. The world moved on, only not always in a good way. Some of what we accomplished was tragically reversed and now we face a very bad threat.

We never thought we’d have to fight this fight again, but right now the forces of destruction are shaking our world, this time with an even greater threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The bad guys have been plotting this since we left the protests behind and they are organized and well funded by billionaires, who plan to be our fascist overlords.

You know what that means:

It’s time for us to saddle up again and fight for what is right.
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It’s time for we Boomers to once again make our voices heard in a deafening thunder to say that we’re not going back. We will never back down. We will stop the forces of destruction. We will protect our sacred democracy.

READ THIS: An Urgent Call To All Boomers.
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Then take action. You’ll know what to do.


Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Useful Idiot


POST 1059


From a Salon interview of Dr. John Gartner:

We have becrumb a nation.” “All comp-ply-ments”. “I know Poten.” “He can’t cam-pay.”  “We will expel the wald-mongers.”

There are more examples where Trump couldn’t complete a sentence and strung the fragments together incoherently. It’s worth noting that his demeanor changes dramatically at these moments. At one point, Trump was making nonsense sounds, struggling to form even a single word. At one of his events, he said “We’ll re-ve-du. Ohhhh..” At that moment, Trump took a long-defeated sigh, and looked up at the ceiling blankly, looking confused and de-energized. Finally, Trump is sometimes reduced to simply vocalizing nonsense sounds that are not words at all like an infant. For example, at a recent rally Trump said “Gang, boom. This is me. I hear bing”. Trump is, at times, literally babbling nonsensically.

From an updated version of an article originally published on September 7, 2018 in The Conversation/Reuters:

At least several thousands of mental health professionals who are members of the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts share the view that the nuclear launch codes should not be in the hands of someone who exhibits such levels of mental instability.

Trump is dangerously messed up, at times detached from reality, narcissistic, paranoid, sociopathic and a few more descriptors that we most certainly must not tolerate in a President of the United States. Let’s connect that to another piece of critical information.

From the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute:

Treason refers to the betrayal of one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the state or materially aiding its enemies.

According to the United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

Furthermore, 18 U.S.C § 2381, states that a person guilty of treason against the United States “shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

By that definition, along with various of Trump’s other felonies, including inciting an insurrection against our country, his over 35,000 lies, promises to pardon the January 6 traitors and his ever-expanding pile of gibberish, Trump is both demented and a traitor.

It has been plain for at least 7 years that Trump is Putin’s useful idiot, which is why Putin expended so much online effort and invested so much money to get Trump elected. We shouldn’t care a bit whether the idiot is useful to Putin because he’s hoping to get permission to build Trump Tower Moscow or to become an authoritarian tyrant himself or for any other reason. He’s a useful idiot for Putin whether through greed or loss of mental function. As a result, Trump is an idiotic enemy of the United States. And this gets worse.

The 2025 Project is an effort by extremely rich authoritarian wannabees to take complete control of the United States. These guys can see the same thing you see – that Trump is deteriorating before our eyes and they don’t care. Trump is their guy because they will be able to control him for their own purposes. In other words, Trump is a useful idiot for our hateful, anti-America far right extremists, too.

These are the guys who want to take away your rights, your freedom, your ownership of anything and your fundamental right to safety and security. They want to brainwash your children and make everyone scared all the time. So, one more time:

TRUMP IS A USEFUL IDIOT FOR BOTH PUTIN AND FOR OUR OWN FAR RIGHT EXTREMISTS!.

Click the pic. Thanks to JN for it.

I don’t have any idea whether Trump understands that he’s a tool for the 2025 Project despot wannabees, any more than whether he understands that he is Putin’s useful idiot. But your crazy cousin Buddy, wearing his MAGA hat, donates over and over to Trump’s legal defense costs, even as that deprives his family of what they need. He is happily succumbing to his confirmation bias and, in the process, promoting the overlords who will savagely repress him. And poor, severely duped Buddy will wonder what happened.

For Your Use

Here’s Steve Schmidt’s description of MAGA. Feel free to quote him.

” .  .  .  a political movement that breathes victimization, resentment, grievance, contempt and anger as air .  .  .”

And here are my questions about MAGA politicians and their followers:

What does it say about MAGAs that they believe known liars, cheaters, murderers and propagandists like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump, Greene, Comer. Johnson and Jordan and refuse the reality that is in front of their eyes? What does it say about them that they refuse funding for arms that Ukrainians desperately need, allowing Putin’s army to continue to bomb apartment buildings and hospitals, killing children and grannies?

Note for our Gaza protesters: You cannot be in integrity while protesting the plight of Gazans and at the same time support the withholding of aid to Ukraine.


Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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