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The Damage The Monster Leaves In Its Wake

Since 1970 the only times, until now, that the deficit has been 

above 4% of GDP is when there has been a recession

PolitiFact link

Context

Most Americans are probably not aware of the scope and depth of the damage the president and this enablers, including the radical right GOP leadership (collectively, The Monster), have caused. Once again, The Monster leaves gigantic messes for a democratic president to deal with. Despite their culpability, the GOP leadership will fight tooth and claw to oppose all efforts by Biden to fix the messes. 

That strategy leaves open the argument by The Monster acting as a government breaker that government is broken and should it be eliminated as much as possible. The radical right GOP will howl in outrage over federal spending, but the GOP itself was responsible for massive fed debt increases, including those caused by their December 2017 tax cuts for the rich. They have no basis to complain about federal debt, which skyrocketed over the last four years.

Two articles exemplify the damage The Monster has created and leaves in its wake.

Detaching facts from policy

The New York Times writes on new rules at the EPA that literally detach facts from policy considerations. Both the president and radical right GOP hate the EPA. Either The Monster falsely believes that climate change is a  hoax, unreal or otherwise not something to be concerned about, or it knows climate change is a real problem, but it is too concerned about money and power to care enough to do anything. The NYT writes:

Nearly a quarter century ago, a team of tobacco industry consultants outlined a plan to create “explicit procedural hurdles” for the Environmental Protection Agency to clear before it could use science to address the health impacts of smoking.

President Trump’s E.P.A. embedded parts of that strategy into federal environmental policy on Monday when it completed a new regulation that favors certain kinds of scientific research over others in the drafting of public health rules.

A copy of the final measure, known as the Strengthening Transparency in Pivotal Science Underlying Significant Regulatory Actions and Influential Scientific Information Rule, says that “pivotal” scientific studies that make public their underlying data and models must be given more weight than studies that keep such data confidential. The agency concluded that the E.P.A. or anyone else should be able to independently validate research that impacts regulations.  

Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the E.P.A., is expected to formally announce the rule on Tuesday during an online forum with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank that opposes most environmental regulation.

The new rule, public health experts and medical organizations said, essentially blocks the use of population studies in which subjects offer medical histories, lifestyle information and other personal data only on the condition of privacy. Such studies have served as the scientific underpinnings of some of the most important clean air and water regulations of the past half century.  

Environmental groups assailed the rule as the culmination of a decades-long strategy to undermine science that took off in the tobacco wars of the 1990s and continued as a way to raise doubts about the research upholding pollution rules. (emphasis added)

The new rules are deceptively couched in terms of fostering transparency, but in fact they are designed to keep necessary data away from EPA analysts. With the new rules, the carbon energy sector scores a major victory in its endless, ruthless fight against belief in and responding to climate change. Fortunately, this damage to government by The Monster seems to be readily undoable. Environmental activists said Biden could suspend and repeal the new rules.

The profit motive for the carbon energy sector's happiness with this sabotage of the EPA is obvious. 

We used to have allies, now we have acquaintances

One major area of damage to America and its interests is the president's constant attacks on our allies, while supporting our enemies as much as he can. In this area, the damage is enormous and not easily fixable. Given the facts, it is reasonable to believe that our president works for Russian president Putin (motive: bribery, blackmail and/or admiration of dictatorship and autocracy). In this regard, Putin's influence has been a major source of damage. Seeing the US president as Russian asset is a minority opinion, but all the circumstantial evidence points to Putin being a major detrimental influence on Trump. 

One thing the Trump-Putin monstrosity has done is to convert allied into acquaintances. That represents a major victory for America's enemies, especially Russia. And, one needs to point out that, yet again, The Monster will oppose Biden's efforts to try to re-establish an American presence in the world. America's enemies love the vacuum and will also fight to undermine any American presence or role in world affairs. 

The NYT writes:

President Trump’s extraordinary, wheedling telephone call to state officials in Georgia seeking to overturn the election results there has shaken many Europeans — not so much for what it reveals about Mr. Trump himself, but for what it may portend for the health of American democracy.

“A lot of people will just roll their eyes and wait for the clock to run down,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, the British research institution. “But by far the most troubling thing is the number of Republicans who are willing to go along with him, and what it’s doing to the Republican Party, playing out in real time.”

With Mr. Trump continuing to have such a hold over the party and winning more than 74 million votes in November, Ms. Vinjamuri said, “It shows us that it will be incredibly difficult to govern the country in the next year or so.”

If so many Americans feel that the election was fraudulent, “it looks like America can’t even secure the most fundamental norms of democracy, the peaceful transfer of power, when losers have to accept that they lost,” she said.

Indeed to distant observers, the corrosive effects of Mr. Trump’s presidency are not isolated to Mr. Trump himself but extend far beyond the president — to the deep coterie of enablers around him, in the White House and his party, and even to an American public where significant numbers themselves believe that their democracy has been compromised and cannot be trusted. (emphasis added)

One can reasonably believe that The Monster will work against Biden and his foreign policy efforts to repair the damage it has caused. Our former allies will see this and take it into account. When I refer to The Monster, it includes the to the deep coterie of enablers around the president, in the White House and his party. 

What about The Monster's rank and file supporters?

The question is whether The Monster includes average Americans who support the president and the radical right GOP. Are they enough of the mess to be considered part of The Monster? I like to think not but as time passes, that feeling weakens. Their role cannot just be ignored or denied.

What a sorry mess. America has been seriously crippled. The Monster cannot see it, nor can its supporters. 

The Weak Rule of Law

Political prosecution - good, bad or

something else?

On Saturday, the president called Georgia election official Brad Raffensperger, and attempted to get him to “recalculate” the votes to give the election win to himself, not Biden. The votes in Georgia had already been counted three times and each time the president lost. In asking for such massive voter fraud, the president even threatened Raffensperger with some undefined “criminal offense” for failing to do what the president was telling him to do. The New York Times writes:

President Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the presidential election and vaguely threatened him with “a criminal offense” during an hourlong telephone call on Saturday, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

Mr. Trump, who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, that he should recalculate the vote count so Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, would end up winning the state’s 16 electoral votes.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr. Trump said during the conversation, according to a recording first obtained by The Washington Post, which published it online Sunday. The New York Times also acquired a recording of Mr. Trump’s call.

Clearly, the president is attempting to commit enough voter fraud to change the election outcome in Georgia. Is voter fraud illegal?

Were laws broken?

In theory voter fraud is illegal. When average people are caught doing it, they are generally prosecuted. But as we have seen over the years, laws generally do not apply to politicians like they apply to normal people. The discouraging truth is that the rule of law is weak for white collar criminals, including the president.  Most white collar crime (~98% ?) is never prosecuted and even less results in criminal convictions. The main problem is that evidence of intent to commit a crime is rarely to be found. 

All modern criminals with a tenth-ounce of brain know not to create or keep written or electronic evidence of their crimes or to discuss crimes except via secure phone calls. With no evidence, there are few prosecutions and even fewer convictions. The last, best line of defense against the massive tide of white collar crime is prosecution for tax evasion. Tax documents are written records that must be filed and cannot be avoided.[1] 

The New York Times describes the issue:

The call by President Trump on Saturday to Georgia’s secretary of state raised the prospect that Mr. Trump may have violated laws that prohibit interference in federal or state elections, but lawyers said on Sunday that it would be difficult to pursue such a charge.

The recording of the conversation between Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, first reported by The Washington Post, led a number of election and criminal defense lawyers to conclude that by pressuring Mr. Raffensperger to “find” the votes he would need to reverse the election outcome in the state, Mr. Trump either broke the law or came close to it.

“It seems to me like what he did clearly violates Georgia statutes,” said Leigh Ann Webster, an Atlanta criminal defense lawyer, citing a state law that makes it illegal for anyone who “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage” in election fraud.

At the federal level, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” is breaking the law.

The president broke the law except for two factors. First, he is a white collar criminal and above the law. Second, he will claim he never intended to break the law. Here is how the GOP and defense attorneys spin this according to the NYT article:

Matthew T. Sanderson, a Republican election lawyer who has worked on several presidential campaigns — including those of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor — said that while it did appear that Mr. Trump was trying to intimidate Mr. Raffensperger, it was not clear that he violated the law.  

That is because while Mr. Trump clearly implied that Mr. Raffensperger might suffer legal consequences if he did not find additional votes for the president in Georgia, Mr. Trump stopped short of saying he would deliver on the threat himself against Mr. Raffensperger and his legal counsel, Ryan Germany, Mr. Sanderson said.

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call, referring to his baseless assertions of widespread election fraud. “That’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.” (emphasis added)

Right there is the crime. Its rock solid defense is also in plain view: “It was not clear that he violated the law.” Biden has clearly signalled that he won't defend the rule of law regarding Trump and GOP crooks.[2] Trump is a GOP president, so the GOP as a partisan political power will defend him. Georgia is a GOP state that will not prosecute a GOP president. That's it. That is the whole story. 

Questions:

1. Should Trump be prosecuted for his crimes while in office and all other times, or should prosecution be avoided in the name of political comity to avoid endless partisan investigations and prosecutions of political enemies. That assumes that (1) neither party is capable of investigating and prosecuting its own crooks, and (2) there actually is rough parity in comity between the two parties.

2. Is it better to have few or no prosecutions of political crooks like Trump or to have endless partisan investigations to settle scores and try to gain political advantage and/or to deceive the public? Dark free speech (deceiving and manipulating the public) is legal and very popular among politicians, especially republicans.

Footnotes: 

1. Bipartisan congresses have neutered the ability of the IRS to prosecute tax evasion (illegal cheating) by slashing the budget needed to investigate and prosecute tax cheats. Protecting tax cheats is a bipartisan sport, but the GOP is more enthusiastic and aggressive about blocking attempts to allow the IRS to enforce tax law. That pro-corruption trick costs taxpayers about $700 billion/year, although the IRS feebly asserts that the number is closer to about $400 billion/year. As usual, honest taxpayers are, as Trump would say, suckers, losers and disgusting people.

2. Regarding Biden's tolerance of Trump crimes: “He's going to be more oriented toward fixing the problems and moving forward than prosecuting them.” Biden wants to avoid divisive investigations. Therefore, all the GOP has to do is to make clear they will see any investigations deeply divisive and that will be the end of it. Biden will crumple into a heap of spineless goo. In this regard, Biden is exactly like Obama, who let lots of crooks off without any prosecutions, including every single criminal involved in the massive financial and housing meltdowns. Politicians in the democratic and republican parties are fully in accords with protecting white collar criminals. 

The sleight of hand “logic” used to protect political crooks dates back to president Ford. One source describes the weak rule of law situation like this:

Presidents have historically gone out of their way to avoid using the power of the office to pursue their political rivals. When President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Reagan White House officials who were involved in the Iran-contra affair, he warned of “a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences.” Bush was sparing members of his own party. President Obama created what is perhaps an even more relevant precedent for Biden by choosing not to prosecute members of the George W. Bush administration who had authorized the unlawful torture of detainees; his nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, used the very same phrase — the criminalization of policy differences — when the issue came up during a 2009 congressional hearing. Over the summer, I asked David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, what he thought would happen to Trump if he lost the election. “My gut is that you’re very unlikely to see a federal prosecution,” he told me. “For me, the real accountability will be on Nov. 3, if he is sent packing from the White House.” It was a sentiment that I heard from a lot of legal thinkers and former government officials in the months leading up to the election: The visions of Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit were more fantasy than reality. His true moment of reckoning would happen at the ballot box. (emphasis added)

There you have it. Crimes by bipartisan politicians are merely “policy differences” even if the policy amounted to actual criminal acts. Did the president try to commit massive voter fraud in his phone call to Raffensperger, or was that just a policy thing? One thing is certain: America's two-party system protects political crooks, including politicians, candidates, crooked partisan pundits, campaign donors and campaign workers.

This is what politics would look like if the law was enforced by partisans,

or does it already look like that? Will this kind of lying and sleaze 

end after Trump is gone because politicians will regain their moral compasses?

About That Russian Cyberattack: “This is looking much, much worse than I first feared”

The president's inspired entrepreneurial leadership  has inspired a wave of 

entrepreneurship across the moderately damp land, 

in the wet sea and in the drier air

Another big failure of the Trump administration has been, and still is, its failure to even detect, much less block, a massive months-long Russian cyberattack that is still ongoing. US officials are still struggling to understand the scope and strategic goal of this monster. 

Being in his usual emergency ops mode, our president is valiantly ignoring it, blaming the Chinese (or Obama or Hillary, etc.) and playing golf, pardoning murderers, thug cronies and various crooks in his last acts of pay-to-play politics. In other words, our treasonous president is generally being his usual happy-go-lucky immoral, incompetent, corrupt self. And, GOP leadership isn't any better. The New York Times writes: 

Three weeks after the intrusion came to light, American officials are still trying to understand whether what the Russians pulled off was simply an espionage operation inside the systems of the American bureaucracy or something more sinister, inserting “backdoor” access into government agencies, major corporations, the electric grid and laboratories developing and transporting new generations of nuclear weapons.

At a minimum it has set off alarms about the vulnerability of government and private sector networks in the United States to attack and raised questions about how and why the nation’s cyberdefenses failed so spectacularly.

Those questions have taken on particular urgency given that the breach was not detected by any of the government agencies that share responsibility for cyberdefense — the military’s Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, both of which are run by General Nakasone, and the Department of Homeland Security — but by a private cybersecurity company, FireEye.

And, if past performance is any indication of future stupid, culpable players in the private sector will get off with a golden parachute and generally evade responsibility. The company that is believed to be the Russian attack point, the Texas company SolarWinds, relied on software that was produced in Eastern Europe. The NYT comments on SolarWinds' acts of stupid:

SolarWinds, the company that the hackers used as a conduit for their attacks, had a history of lackluster security for its products, making it an easy target, according to current and former employees and government investigators. Its chief executive, Kevin B. Thompson, who is leaving his job after 11 years, has sidestepped the question of whether his company should have detected the intrusion. Some of the compromised SolarWinds software was engineered in Eastern Europe, and American investigators are now examining whether the incursion originated there, where Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted. (emphasis added -- attaboy Kevin, sidestep those pesky questions and keep distributing cheap Russian hacker software) 

Publicly, officials have said they do not believe the hackers from Russia’s S.V.R. pierced classified systems containing sensitive communications and plans. But privately, officials say they still do not have a clear picture of what might have been stolen. 

They said they worried about delicate but unclassified data the hackers might have taken from victims like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, including Black Start, the detailed technical blueprints for how the United States plans to restore power in the event of a cataclysmic blackout. 

All Thompson needs to do is discretely, or blatantly, donate to the president's fund that is fighting to subvert the 2020 election, the Sleaze, Lies & Cash for Trump PAC, and he can get a pre-emptive pardon for whatever bad acts or stupid failures to act he was involved in. One has gotta admire captains of industry like that. What a bunch of brave patriots. Looks like maybe we're gonna have to redo the plans for good ole operation Black Start.[1] 

One can tentatively put the cost of this failure at about $1.5 trillion. The president and GOP should be made to pay for the damages since it was their incompetence and stupid that allowed this to happen. Also, Kevin the patriot should also chip in a few million from his hoard. [2]

Honestly, January 20, 2021 cannot come soon enough. 

Footnote:

1. Fortunately, I just ordered some flashlights, so the neighborhood will be in good shape once the lights go out.

2. I know, I know. This was Obama's fault, and made much worse by Hillary and her cabal of baby-eating cannibal pedophiles. LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP! 

HOW SIMILAR ARE THE FAR-LEFT AND THE FAR-RIGHT?

 Do the far-left and the far-right ever seem hopelessly similar to you? As odd as this question may sound at first, Horseshoe Theory suggests that the political spectrum is not a straight line with ideologies moving across a line from left to right, but rather a horseshoe, with its farthest outliers bending in toward each other and sharing a number of beliefs. In recent years, violent clashes between the far-left and far-right, at UC Berkeley, in Charlottesville, North Carolina, in Portland, Oregon, and most recently during the George Floyd protests, have challenged society to take a look at the actions of both extremes and ask: To what extent does similarity in action mean similarity in character?

The Far-Left and the Far-Right Are Two Peas in a Pod

 

Victim complex.

People on the outermost poles of the political spectrum, meaning on both the far-left and the far-right, often view themselves as aggrieved parties. Interestingly, one study found that having faced adversity – namely violence, loss of a loved one, or experiencing illness or disability – is indeed a predictor of extreme political views; the more adversity people faced, the more likely they were to lean to the far right or far left in their ideologies. Experiencing adversity may explain the rhetoric of victimization that permeates the far-left as well as the far-right. White Nationalists complain of cultural and economic obliteration at the hands of multicultural movements and affirmative action, while proponents of the far-left demand restitution for the silencing of minority groups via discriminatory legislation, the recent rise in popularity of white nationalists, police brutality and micro-aggressions.

 

By any means necessary.

Militancy pervades the ranks of the far-left and the far-right. More than idolizing violent purveyors of their ideologies (think far-right’s Hitler to the far-left’s Che Guevara), many far-right and far-left movements are vehement in their rejection of non-violence and employ it regularly. Right-wing groups are said to have carried out 150 attacks on US soil – from shooting to bombings – since 1993. Similar crimes have been perpetrated by militant offshoots of left-wing groups, beginning with the 1960’s Weathermen and continuing until today with the Antifa movement.

 

An idle mind is the devil’s playground.

Scientists have connected boredom to the adoption of extreme political stances, calling youth, wealth, and education the most common risk factors of extremism. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, it could be argued that without families to support or even necessarily the need to support themselves, the average college student has more free time than others to develop defined political views. As such, it is hardly surprising that constituents on the far-right and far-left are overwhelmingly educated and even well-off (a trend that held even for the Hezbollah fighters of the 1980s and 90s).

The Far-Left and Far-Right Are as Different as Night and Day.

 

Different hard-wiring.

Psychologist have determined that liberal and conservative brains literally function quite differently. For example, an examination of the possessions of liberal and conservative college students revealed that the former had more books and travel-memorabilia, while the latter had more items relating to cleaning and organization. This investigation suggested key differences in liberal and conservative mindsets – with one leaning toward the discovery of new experiences and the other emphasizing self-discipline and order. This hard-wiring gives rise to dramatically different value systems – systems that view the basic ideas like fairness, equality, and even right and wrong in radically different terms.

 

History is in the eye of the beholder.

The far-right and the far-left have dramatically different interpretations of the past – interpretations which dictate their political stances and calls to action. The far-right expresses nostalgia for the past and actively works to preserve their history, regardless of what that might mean in today’s context. For right-wing Southerners, like the members of Save Southern Heritage, this means protecting statues of famous Confederates, and decrying the removal of the Confederate flag from public buildings or the removal of Confederate monuments. Conversely, the far-left (and in this case, many liberals) associates the past with its ills – slavery, sexism, and other injustices. History and its institutions are not to be preserved and cherished, but rather, an embarking point from which to begin reform.

 

Superficial similarities.

When two groups utilize similar tactics, it does not necessarily mean that the groups are one and the same. The Antifa and white nationalist movements exemplify key ideological differences that should not be overlooked. While Antifa and white nationalist movements both express distaste for the government (and even a will to overthrow it), their reasons for these sentiments are rather opposite. Antifa, whose members also frequently identify as anarchists, view government as an instrument of inequality, while white nationalists express hostility toward government because they believe it facilitates equality – a notion that offends those whose identity is built upon a defined racial hierarchy.

 

The Bottom Line: Both the far-left and the far-right have a victim-like mentality and employ militant strategies, yet each group has contrasting views on history and personal values. What do you think? Do overlapping tactics and stances in the far-right and far-left amount to a hegemonic portrait of extreme personalities, or is each extremely distinct?

https://www.theperspective.com/debates/politics/similar-far-left-far-right/

Trump's Radical Right Saboteur

Russell Vought - GOP radical right extremist

& rabid religious bigot

In the coming months, memories will start to fade. But some obscure things are worth mention before that process gets underway. The Washington Post writes in an opinion piece:

If, in the new year, pandemic vaccines aren’t available as promised, Americans can’t return to work because economic relief isn’t delivered or an adversary successfully attacks the United States because national security agencies couldn’t pay for new defenses, a hefty share of the blame should be placed on a man you’ve probably never heard of: One Russell Thurlow Vought.

As President Trump’s budget director, he conspicuously failed in his stated goal of controlling the debt. Despite his efforts, the debt increased by $6 trillion on his two-year watch as director of the Office of Management and Budget, the biggest jump in history.

But what Russ Vought is very good at is sabotage. He’s sabotaging national security, the pandemic response and the economic recovery — all to make things more difficult for the incoming Biden administration. That he’s also sabotaging the country seems not to matter to Vought, who has spent nearly two decades as a right-wing bomb thrower.

He has blocked civil servants at OMB from cooperating with the Biden transition, denying President-elect Joe Biden the policy analysis and budget-preparation assistance given to previous presidents-elect, including Barack Obama and Trump himself.

Thursday afternoon, Vought released a bombastic letter accusing the Biden transition of making “false statements” about OMB’s uncooperativeness — and then essentially confirming that it would not cooperate: “What we have not done and will not do is use current OMB staff to write the [Biden transition’s] legislative policy proposals to dismantle this Administration’s work. . . . Redirecting staff and resources to draft your team’s budget proposals is not an OMB transition responsibility. Our system of government has one President and one Administration at a time.”

Vought’s 2017 nomination to be OMB deputy director (he later served 18 months as acting director and has served five as director) was nearly undone over a 2016 article in which he wrote: “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, his Son, and they stand condemned.”

Vought spent seven years on the vanguard of conservative extremism as a senior official at Heritage Action, the political wing of the Heritage Foundation. The group fought GOP leadership and pushed lawmakers into unyielding positions.

During that time, Vought wrote a series of rambling posts for RedState.com arguing that “incrementalism doesn’t work for the right,” that Republicans “are fundamentally in their DNA unwilling to fight” and that Republicans needed to have “a willingness” to shut the government down. He exhorted Republicans to “embrace the sort of brinkmanship that shows they are playing to win.” He railed against a 2012 infrastructure bill as “communism.”

Lying, incoherent radical right authoritarians like this are now mainstream in GOP leadership. Authoritarians don't compromise. Only democrats compromise. The president gets the blame for all of the damage this incompetent bigoted freak caused.