Rick Perry and the Department of Energy

R. Perry, the ex-governor of the State of Texas, has been nominated by Da Trumpf to head up the Energy Department.  In some ways this is appropriate for Perry is known for his commitment to fossil fuels, building nuclear plants, fracking the hell out of west Texas and generally ignoring the welfare of his constituents with the exception of the well-heeled, the ignorant religious kooks, and the well-connected.

He's also an accomplished liar, much like da Trumpf.  For example, when he was governor he complained constantly that the federal government took Texas money and gave nothing or very little in return.  The truth is much different. Texas received considerably more money from the feds than they sent to Washington.  But the truth wouldn't play well with the folks in the hinterlands who had been brainwashed into thinking Texas didn't need nobody and could go it alone.

Another of Perry's accomplishments is the public schools.  Texas has been a constant leader in the race to the bottom.  And in terms of caring for the welfare of women and children, Texas is comparable to most third-world countries.

Texas is known for football, though, and most every high school sponsors a football team filled with wannabes looking toward a career with the Dallas Cowboys.  That, of course, rarely if ever, happens.

Texas also has lots of religion, fundamentalistic Christianist religion, with huge churches that look like big box stores, and preachers that rant and rave against sex and drugs and infidelity (well, at least until they're caught in a tryst of their own) and unbelievers who they claim are leading Texas and the nation toward some mythical biblical apocalypse.

During the recent presidential primary race, Mr. Perry was an enemy of Mr. Trump.  Mr. Perry couldn't stand Mr. Trump and said so at every opportunity. There was one funny moment when Perry complained about several federal agencies, claiming he would get rid of them if elected president.  Then he couldn't remember the name of one of the departments he intended to abolish!

It turned out to be the Energy Department.  When asked about that department it quickly became clear he knew nothing about it: he did not know its mission or how it worked; nothing. (Interestingly enough, some of da Trump's "advisers," when asked about this department, acted like they'd never heard of it.)

Back to the primary race.  Perry had this to say about da Trumpf in an address he gave at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.:

"He offers a barking carnival act that can best be described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.  Let no one be mistaken, Donald Trump's candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded."

And there's more.

"...Donald Trump, the reality television star, is a great generator of ratings.  But Donald Trump the candidate is a sower of division, wrongly demonizing Mexican-Americans for political sport.  He has piqued the interest of some Republican voters who have legitimate concerns about a porous border and broken immigration system.  But instead of offering those voters leadership of solutions, he has offered fear and sound bites.  This cannot stand."


You might think that such statements would disqualify anyone from a position in the Trump administration.  But noooooo.  In spite of those terrible comments about da Trumpf and even though Perry knows nothing about the Department of Energy, he was offered the position of head of that department by da Trumpf.

This is one more example of the crass stupidity of Trump and friends.  Once again they put their own welfare above the welfare of the country for Perry can be counted on to serve the rich and powerful first and foremost.

A Washington Post article said it best:

“There is no doubt that Rick Perry is completely unfit to run an agency he sought to eliminate — and couldn’t even name. Perry is a climate change denier, opposes renewable energy even as it has boomed in Texas, and doesn’t even believe CO2 is a pollutant,” League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski said in a statement. 

“Not only that, he is deep in the pocket of Big Polluters, who have contributed over $2.5 million to his presidential campaigns, a disturbing sign that they expected him to protect their profits in office, not do what’s best for the American people.”


Hang on to your hats, because if there is a hell, we're headed in that direction.

Presidential Traitor

It just can't get any worse than this.  The Russians successfully elected their puppet to the presidency of the United States.  Trump knew they were working to get him elected and did nothing.  The Republicans knew the same thing and did nothing. President Obama confronted Republican representatives with the fact that the Russians were engaged in sabotaging the election, but the latter pretended that was a Democratic ploy to defeat Trump.

If Trump knew before the election what the Russians were up to, he is a traitor.


Read the entire horror story at Shareblue HERE.

Death By A Thousand Cuts

Lingchi is a form of torture and capital punishment used by Imperial China from the tenth century until 1905.  Lingchi is "death by a thousand cuts."

In most cases, a small cut will not kill a person.  Multiply one small cut by a thousand, however, and death will likely ensue.  The same is true for nations.  A few small aberrations of policy or stupid decisions by presidents or legislatures or judges may not affect the overall health of the nation, but when you multiply those "small aberrations" and "stupid decisions" you've got a problem.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem.  We are led by a man who would feel right at home in Imperial China; a man who is likely to bring about the death of the United States by his decisions and his policies, as well as by the decisions and policies of his minions and his appointees.  Never before, except maybe during the Warren G. Harding administration, have we seen such scum rise to the surface in positions of power!  As others have noted, Trump did not "drain the swamp" as he promised, but pulled out the creatures of the swamp and made them his secretaries and advisors.  The swamp is now the official residence and workplace of the Trump administration.

Here's one small example of a "cut" and Trump isn't even president yet.  A number of his advisors are advocating the take over of 56 million acres of Native American tribal lands.  The title to these lands is currently held by the federal government. It is a power play intended to privatize those lands so that energy corporations can enjoy deregulated drilling for profit.  Tribal leaders are vehemently opposed to this dastardly and cowardly attack on their lands and sovereignty (note that for over 100 years the United States has followed a policy which promoted the preservation of Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations and these reservations are considered sovereign nations and ruled by leaders chosen by the respective tribes).

With Trump and his swamp denizens in power, expect many more such attacks on the rights of the people, on the programs that help people, on common sense and the common wealth.


Nomi Prins in an article at TomDispatch, notes that Trump is choosing his players from a similar socio-economic background of wealth and privilege to his own, who carry with them "an assumed allegiance to a dogma of self-aggrandizement that overshadows everything else.  In the realm of politico-financial power and in Trump's experience and ideology, the one with the most toys always wins.  So it's hardly a surprise that his money- and power-centric cabinet won't be focused on public service or patriotism or civic duty, but on the consolidation of corporate and private gain at the expense of the citizenry."


Let's see how that is working out in real time.  Trump has selected as his Secretary of Commerce one Wilbur Ross.  Ross, as described by Nomi Prins, "made his fortune as a corporate vulture (sporting the nickname 'the king of bankruptcy'.  He was notorious for devouring the carcasses of dying companies, spitting them out, and pocketing the profits.  He bought bankrupt steel companies, while moving $6.4 billion of their employee pension benefits to the rescue fund of the government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation so he could make the company financials look better."

Ross's chances of being selected as a member of Trump's cabinet were doubtless increased because he bailed out Trump's casinos which were going down the tubes in Atlantic City.

While Trump promised the world to the battered coal industry and its workers, Ross will not honor those promises.  He owned a coal mine in West Virginia which was given numerous citations for various violations, said mine exploding and killing 12 miners.

Ross is a member of a secret Wall Street fraternity, Kappa Beta Phi which isn't surprising considering that in 2014 he whined that the one percent is being harassed for political reasons.

Ross is also connected financially to China, that country having invested $500 million in a private equity fund owned by Ross.  Another negative:  "In August 2016, his company had to pay a $2.3 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges for not properly disclosing $10.4 million in management fees charged to his investors in the decade leading up to 2011."

What the hell is going to do as Secretary of Commerce? He's sitting on a pot of gold and does anyone think he's going to fined for any financial chicanery so long as he holds that position?


Then there's Betsy DeVos, daughter of a billionaire and daughter-in-law to the guy who started the Amway corporation.  She's going to be Secretary of Education.  The problem is she did not go to a public school, nor does she know anything about public education except for the fact that she hates it and has worked for years to destroy it!  Count on her to promote private schools and charter schools at the expense of our public schools.  Additionally, she is a fundamentalist Christian who wishes to impose her particular beliefs upon students in the public schools.  Which all means we can count on a war on public education in the near future.


Elaine Chao has been nominated as Secretary of Transportation.  That sounds about right; she rode a bus once when a little girl.  She may not know anything about transportation but being the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, she knows how to make contacts and money.  She has served on the boards of Wells Fargo Bank (while Wells Fargo was scamming its customers out of millions of dollars) and Murdock's News Corp.


Trump has selected a really bad guy as Secretary of Labor, Andy Prudzer.  He is the CEO of Hardee's and Carl's Jr. parent company CKE restaurants.  Pudzer is not a fan of the little guy.  In fact, he hates the idea of the minimum wage.  He's afraid raising the minimum wage will make companies go bankrupt.  This from a clown who made $4.458 million in 2012.  People who actually work for a living and make this country what it is are in deep caca with Pudzer in this vital position.


Jeff Sessions is Trump's pick for Attorney General.  Sessions was turned down for a federal judgeship a few years back because he is a notorious racist.  He is known to be an enemy of civil rights and women's rights.  Sessions thinks the ACLU and the NAACP are "un-American."  He voted NO on the Violence Against Women Act, and twice voted NO against laws which would help curb sexual assault in the military.


Secretary of the Treasury is the plum Trump offered to one of the worst of the Wall Street execs.  Steve Mnuchin is a hedge fund patriarch and a Hollywood producer, though I don't know what he's produced.  A former exec at Goldman Sachs he knows how to cheat folks out of their homes and how to con the government out of billions of dollars.  He got rich on the backs of regular folks by foreclosing their homes, 36,000 of them!

There's so much dirt on this guy, I could write several pages, but suffice it to say that he wants, as Secretary of the Treasury to help fill the coffers of the bankers on Wall Street once again; thus, his numero uno priority is to delete the Dodd-Frank legislation so Wall Street can run amok unregulated once more.  Just like the good old days!


Any normal person would not choose someone to head up the Environmental Protection Agency who hates and wants to get rid of the EPA.  Trump being anything but normal has chosen a horrible person by name of Scott Pruitt to be the administrator of the EPA.

Scott has been in bed with the fossil fuel industry for years and fought every bit of legislation which would call that industry to account for their shenanigans. It's no surprise, therefore, that Scott doesn't believe in global warming or climate change.  He has sued the EPA again and again attacking the Clean Power Plan and Clean Water Rule.


Tom Price, a 6-term Repug Congressman from Georgia, is nominated for Health & Human Services. It would be hard to find a worse choice.  He's an orthopedic surgeon and hates Obamacare.  In 2015 he tried to arrange a budget switch that would defund Planned Parenthood.  In spite of being a doctor, he doesn't seem to give a damn whether people get decent health care or not.


Another horrible person was nominated by Trump to be director of the CIA. Mike Pompeo, from Kansas, is a Repug and has served 3 terms in Congress. Being from Kansas should tell you all you have to know.  He's anti-Muslim and has made untrue anti-Muslim statements.  He thinks CIA personnel who were involved in torture are "heroes."  He opposes closing Guatanamo, is against the Iran nuclear agreement and stupidly claims that Obamacare has increased labor costs.  He believes further that there is, in fact, a "government mandated restaurant recession."


One of the fundamentals of our system is that civilians run the government and the military stays out of the way, except to obey the president, who is also commander and chief of the military.

Trump is challenging that tradition and risking serious problems such as they've had in 3rd-world countries and in American banana republics.  His choice for Secretary of Defense is James Mattis, a hard-nosed retired Marine Corps general. He's what they call a "hawk" and has debunked Obama's Iran agreement. He likes to kill people and is an unknown quantity when it comes to the fight for peace.  His nickname is "Mad Dog."


Another retired Marine Corps general is John Kelly, picked by Trump to head Homeland Security.  His last job included oversight of Guantanamo.  He's a hard-liner whose treatment of prisoners was severely criticized.  He is opposed to closing Guantanamo and the Iran deal.  It is hard to know what he would do in all circumstances, but his values and past actions predicate a noisy pseudo-patriotic patronizing of military responses to possible future crises.


Michael Flynn is Trump's choice to be National Security Advisor. Unfortunately, Flynn is a whack-job and a conspiracy aficionado.  A retired Army general, Flynn tends to treat all Muslims as terrorists, claiming falsely that Sharia law is spreading across the US and the the country is currently engaged in a world war with radical Islamists.  Flynn also sent out 16 fake or propaganda news stores on the social media, which General Barry McCaffrey said were "demented."  He appears unstable and would be another horrible addition to Trump's group pack of goofballs.


Linda McMahon, who co-founded the WWE, has nothing to qualify her for the job of running the Small Business Administration, unless you consider the $7.5 million she gave Trump for his White House run.


Steve Bannon from Breitbart, which he claims to have made the voice of the "alt-right" in this country, is Trump's top advisor.  The words, "alt-right," are a pseudonym for Nazi.  So, tell it like it is.  Bannon is a Nazi and is operation is a Nazi operation.  As one person wrote, "His web site was a clearinghouse for hate speech of all kinds including white nationalism, anti-semitism, immigrant-hatred and misogyny.


Rex Tillerson is looking to be our next Secretary of State.  Tillerson is the CEO of the Exxon Mobil Corp.  Other than heading up one of the world's worst polluters, there isn't much to recommend the guy.  He does have close connections with Russia and Putin, however, and has contracted with the Russian oil company to do joint oil exploration and production.  So far, they've set up 10 projects in Russia to work together.


This brief run-down on Trump's nominees should keep all decent, honest, ethical persons up at night.  Trump's cabinet and cronies give new meaning to the word, "madness."  Already, they Trump team is trying to identify people in the EPA who worked to help stop global warming so they can be fired.


Lingchi, death by a thousand cuts, has begun.  It will be a slow process and it will be painful. The United States has always failed to live up to its promises, but in the past our leadership has at least tried, even if fitfully, to direct the country in the right direction.

Today, whatever light has shone in this country, is dimming.  We no longer represent democracy and decency.  We are now a country led by a psychopathic liar, one of the least decent humans on the planet and his compatriots, all of which are driven by greed or pathological hatred for others and for the notion that the government is in place to assist people reach their dreams.

If there is a god, he or she has forsaken us.

Rethinking Christmas

FAUX News supports a "war" on Christmas every year.  This so-called war is, of course, the fault of them damn libruls who don't believe nothin' and try to take the joy out of the conservatives/reactionaries' celebration of the season.  

Christmas, by god, is the reason for the season.  Keep Christ in Christmas!  

Here's a fascinating tidbit:  The celebration of the birth of the legendary Jesus was not of much interest in the early church.  In fact, it was pretty much ignored for the first 400 years of the church's life.

By then, however the cult of the Virgin Mary had gradually become a factor in the church and the superstitious laity egged on by the ignorant clergy, supported the notion that she was the "mother of god" and deserving of recognition and veneration on her own.  She birthed Jesus so that birth became of interest and importance.

Simultaneously, the cult of Mithras which was fighting Christianity for supremacy in the Roman Empire, had provided Christians fodder for fleshing out their religious beliefs and practices.  For example, while the cult of Mithras was pretty much just for the male members of society, it did include a baptismal rite featuring a symbolic washing in the blood of a bull along with a Eucharist which included the drinking of wine and the eating of bread.  Early Christian fathers, of course, argued that the Mithrans stole those things from Christianity, but their arguments do not hold water.  It was the reverse.

Additionally, Mithrans believed their savior was born of a virgin on December 25 in a cave surrounded by angels, the babe being wrapped in swaddling cloths. It is said that the eve of Mithras birth, December 24, was a time of great celebration in Rome.

Because the birth of Jesus had been of little consequence, no one knew when their legendary, Jesus, was supposed to have been born.  One of the Gospel birth stories speaks of Jesus' birth occurring when shepherds were in the fields with their flocks, which would suggest it was not during the winter.  Most of the Christian leaders didn't give a rip until the middle of 4th century, and there was great disagreement.  Some thought his birth was in the fall, others in the spring. Finally, they chose December 25, which was the day when Mithras, a sun-god, was born.

It was a smart move, because one of the gods most people in Rome worshipped was born on that day so it made for an easy transition from paganism to Christianity.


Today, Christmas is a time when the birth of Jesus gets little attention, except in the churches.  We do hear the words, "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men," but nobody really cares about them and it has become obvious in recent months that for most people in this country that refers only to good, conservative Americans. Everyone else can go to hell.

The most important thing to note about Christmas these days is that our capitalistic country promotes unending purchases of merchandise (most of which is made in China - that damn atheistic commie country) because our retailers have screwed things up so badly their commercial lives actually depend upon ever-increasing Christmas sales.

Some pious folks do go to church.  They enjoy hearing the same old stories regurgitated over and over again.  It is soothing and healing to sing Christmas carols and listen to Christmas bells and soak in the Christmas atmosphere. Seldom do they realize (because the almost never read their Bibles) that only two of the four gospels contain a birth story and they contradict each other dramatically.  They focus on smarthy sentimental stuff like creches and camels, wise men and stars, and angels singing high in the heavens.  Jesus is never presented as a real human being, but as a sprightly little cherub resting in a crib, never crying, never pooping, never sucking on his mother's teat, totally innocuous and totally unrelated to real life.

But it's better that way.  If Christians actually celebrated the life of Jesus instead of the mythical birth they would be compelled to change their ways and who the hell wants to do that.

I mean, really, 81% of the evilgelicals in the U.S. voted for Trump to make America great again. Who needs Jesus?


So maybe we should have a war on Christmas.  We should maybe wage war on the monumental hypocrisy inherent in pledging obeisance to the savior of the world while at the same time acting in ways totally inconsistent with what he taught!  We buy and buy and hassle everybody in sight, drink too much, and spend way too much for no good reason other than to put coins in the coffers of the businesses who could not exist without this unholy holiday.

Christmas today is not about the birth of Jesus or the birth of Christ no matter the pretentious phonies at FAUX News.  And interestingly enough, the apostle Paul cared not a whit about when, where, or how Jesus was born.  He never mentions it in his letters.


Is it possible that the American Atheists have a point?  Going to church on Christmas merely reinforces old myths and old traditions and old patterns of behavior which bring nothing good to the world which the Savior came to save.

Make Christmas great again.  Skip church.  Skip all the nonsense.  Bring families and friends together; renew the ties that bind;  and follow the words of the one who grew into a troublemaker, who challenged the status quo, the religious and political establishments, who said in no uncertain terms that the only thing of importance to god and to the world is that we care for and love one another.

Racism, bigotry, narcissism, egocentrism, hatred and war must be expunged from our lives if we want to make Christmas great again.  Nothing else matters.  And if the church does not help make that possible, then by god, skip church!

Meanwhile, until we figure out how to rightly celebrate Christmas, let us greet one another with the phrase, "Happy Holidays," to show we care for all people and recognize the worth of those who follow different traditions!


One last thought:  If the Church didn't think the birth of Jesus was worth fussing about for 400 years, I reckon we don't need to fuss about it, either.

Greg Palast and the Presidential Recount

The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential Recount Sorry, no Russian hacker hunt by Greg Palast for Truthout Greg Palast investigated vote suppression in the 2016 election for Rolling Stone.  The film of his investigation, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, was released by Cinema Libre Studios in September. There's been so much complete nonsense since I first broke the news that the Green Party would file for a recount of the presidential vote, I am compelled to write a short guide to flush out the BS and get to just the facts, ma'am. Clip from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast Nope, they’re not hunting for Russian hackers To begin with, the main work of the recount hasn't a damn thing to do with finding out if the software programs for the voting machines have been hacked, whether by Putin’s agents or some guy in a cave flipping your vote from Hillary to The Donald. The Green team does not yet even have the right to get into the codes. But that's just not the core of the work The ballots in the electoral “dumpster” The nasty little secret of US elections, is that we don't count all the votes. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—and all over America—there were a massive number of votes that were simply rejected, invalidated, and spoiled. They were simply, not counted.  Officially, in a typical presidential election, at least three million votes end up rejected, often for picayune, absurd reasons. The rejects fall into three big categories:  provisional ballots rejected, absentee and mail-in ballots invalidated and in-precinct votes “spoiled,” spit out by a machine or thrown out by a human reader as unreadable or mis-marked. So, as Robert Fitrakis, lead lawyer for the recount tells me, their first job is to pull the votes out of the electoral dumpster—and, one by one, make the case for counting a rejected provisional, absentee or “spoiled” ballot. Spoiled:  over-votes and under-votes How does a vote spoil? Most fall in the categories of “over-votes” and “under-votes.” In Michigan, the Green team has found a whole lot of people who voted for TWO candidates for President.  These are the “over-vote”—votes that will count for neither candidate. How odd.  While the schools in Detroit are not stellar, its graduates do know that they can only have one president. Then, some folks didn’t vote at all.  They are the “under-voter.” But, Fitrakis and team suspect, many of these under- and over-voters meant to vote for a candidate but the robot reader couldn’t understand their choice. Here’s how it happens.  Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin fill in bubbles next to their choice.  The cards, filled up with darkened bubbles for each race, are gathered and fed through an “optical scanner.” These robotic eyeballs mess up all the time. This is what Fitrakis, an old hand at vote-machine failures (both deliberate and benign), calls “the calibration problem.” Are machines calibrated with a Republican or Democratic bias? No, that's not how it works. But just as poor areas get the worst schools and hospitals, they also get the worst voting machines. The key is an ugly statistic not taught in third grade civics class:  According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified as “spoiled” is 900% more likely if you’re Black than if you’re white. So the Green Party intends to review every single one of the six million bubble-filled cards. They’ll use the one instrument that can easily tell one bubble from two, or one bubble from none: the human eye. As you can imagine, This will require several thousand eyes.  The good news is, Fitrakis reports, that well over a thousand volunteers have already signed up.  Training by Skype begins Tuesday morning.    Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation The team and I are off to Ground Zero:  Michigan. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. To report the REAL story of the recount. I’m also responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. And then it’s on to Washington—to the Department of Justice—while there’s a bit of Justice left.   Join us by Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation Last stop for Democracy Provisional or “placebo” ballots According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), Americans cast 2.7 million provisional ballots in the last presidential election.  About a million were simply discarded.  What?! Yes.  Discarded, not counted.  You show up at your normal polling station and they can’t find your name, or they don’t like your ID, or you’re supposed to vote in another precinct.  Instead of letting you vote on a regular ballot, you fill out a “provisional” ballot and place it in an envelope, sign your name, and under penalty of jail time for lying, affirm you’re a properly registered voter. The polls close—then the magic begins.  It’s up to highly partisan election officials to decide if your vote counts.  Hillary Clinton only won one swing state, Virginia, notably, the only one where the vote count was controlled by Democrats.  She lost all swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida—where the GOP set the rules for counting these ballots and their hacks acted as the judge and jury on whether a ballot should be counted. Wisconsin generally rejects votes cast in the wrong precinct, even if they’re legal voters—and, says Fitrakis, “even if their official precinct was just another table in the same high school gym—and they were mis-directed by poll workers.” (That’s why I sometimes call “provisional” ballots “placebo” ballots.  They let you feel you’ve voted, even if you haven’t.) In Wisconsin, provisional ballots were handed to voters—mostly, it appears, students—who didn’t have the form of ID required under new Wisconsin law. These ballots were disqualified despite zero evidence even one voter was an identity thief. Fitrakis says the Stein campaign will fight for each of these provisional votes where this is clearly no evidence the vote is fraudulent. Mail-in, Early and Absentee Ballots go Absent If you’ve gone postal in this election, good luck!  According to EAC data, at least half a million absentee ballots go absent, that is, just don’t get counted.  The cause: everything from postage due to “suspect signature.” Fitrakis told me that in his home state of Ohio, you need to put your driver’s license number on the envelope, “and if you don’t have a driver’s license and leave the line blank—instead of writing ‘no driver’s license’—they toss your ballot. From Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Ted Rall It’s a “gotcha!” system meant to knock out the ballots the officials don’t want to count.  (Remember, your mail-in ballot is anything but secret.)  Team Green will try to fight for each absentee ballot rejected for cockamamie reasons. If the recount doesn’t change the outcome, can we feel assured the election was honest? Sadly, no.  As Fitrakis says, “If a student is given a provisional ballot because they didn’t have the right ID, or the state simply lost their registration, we can fight for the ballot to be counted.  But most students who voted off campus didn’t know their right to get a provisional ballot and most probably didn’t get offered one. Students and others were discouraged from voting because they lacked the proper ID (300,000 by the estimate of the experts with the ACLU—that’s thirty times Trump’s plurality).  But if you didn’t cast any ballot, provisional or otherwise, no one can fight for it. And final decisions may come down to the vote of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, God forbid.  As Norman Stockwell, the editor of Madison-based The Progressive explained to me, formerly, elections law adjudications were made by a panel of non-partisan judges.  These were replaced by this new commission of partisan shills appointed by GOP Governor Scott Walker. Trump says millions voted illegally. Is he crazy? Crazy like a fox.  There’s a method in his madness that affects the recount. While the media dismisses Trump’s claim that there are "millions of people that voted illegally," they have not paid attention to the details of his claim.  Trump explains that millions of people are “voting many, many times,” that is, voting in two states in the same election. Trump’s claim is based on a list of “potential duplicate voters” created by his operative, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Kobach (a top dog in Trump’s transition team)  directs a program for hunting down fraudulent voters using a computer system called, “Crosscheck.” It’s quite a computer:  Crosscheck identified a breathtaking 449,922 Michiganders who are suspected of voting or registering in a second state, a felony crime, as are 371,923 in Pennsylvania. I spent two years investigating the Trump/Kobach claim for Rolling Stone.  We obtained the “confidential” suspect list of several million citizens accused of voting twice.  In fact, it was no more than a list of common names—Maria Hernandez, James Brown, David Lee—that is, common to voters of color.  Read: Democrats.  A true and typical example: Michael James Brown of Michigan is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Kendrick Brown of Georgia. Page from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (FREE) Comic book penned by Keith Tucker About 54,000 voters in Michigan, five times Trump’s plurality, lost their right to vote based on this nutty double-voter accusation.  In Pennsylvania, about 45,000 were purged. The problem for Fitrakis:  While he eventually plans to file suit against Crosscheck purges, in the meantime, it’s not clear he can challenge someone whose lost their vote because of a false accusation of double voting.  And those who found their names missing and didn’t demand a provisional ballot—there’s no hope at all of recovering their vote. Is Jill Stein going to get rich? Fitrakis laughs at this one.  “The FEC [Federal Elections Commission] has very strict rules on recounts. The donations for the recount are sequestered in a specially designated account and all spending is restricted to the recount.”  The big problem is that the cost is somewhat out of Stein’s control.  Each state will bill the campaign for the “pro-rated salaries and benefits” of its county and state officials working on the recount. To add to the cost and just plain drive the Green team crazy, the Wisconsin Election Board announced on Monday that each separate county elections clerk will decide if they’ll even let the Green volunteers directly view the ballots.  Fitrakis and partners will have to get a court order to get into each county.  How does one recount ballots without seeing them?  (Hmm, is the Wisconsin board, stooges appointed by the GOP Governor, fearful that the viewing the ballots will expose the game?) Hillary joins the fray What will the Clinton camp add to the recount? “Lawyers,” said Fitrakis, though he’s yet to see them.  The Clinton campaign is apparently helping find one voter in each Pennsylvania county, as one is required in each jurisdiction to file for a recount of that state. And what about that hack job? While Fitrakis is not looking for Russkies in the computer code, he says, “We’re more concerned with the private companies that control the keys to the kingdom—to match what’s on paper to the official count.”  The “keys” are the little machines, memory cards and other electronic gewgaws that are used to suck the data from the voting machine—which are carried off to another state for tabulation by a private contractor.  Will these tabulations at each step match what the volunteers find in the on-the-ground recount? One problem is that the tabulation software is “proprietary.”  A private company owns the code to the count—and the privateers will fight fiercely, with GOP help, to keep the ballot counting code their commercial secret. Push and Pray Pennsylvania In the end, the single biggest impediment to a full and fair recount is that 70 percent of Pennsylvania voters used what are called, “Push and Pray” voting machines—Direct Recording Electronic touch-screens.  Push the screen next to your choice and pray it gets recorded. Pennsylvania is one of the only states that has yet to require some form of VVPAT (“vee-pat”) or voter-verified paper audit trail that creates an ATM-style receipt. Therefore, the Keystone State recount will have to rely on hopes of access to the code, statistical comparisons to counties that used paper ballots—and prayer. Maybe it IS the Russians The possibility that a Putin pal hacked the machines was championed by University of Michigan computer sciences professor J. Alex Halderman who proposed, “The attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers…and spread malware into voting machines.” I imagine some squat, middle-pay-scale civil servant in chinos and a pocket protector who works in the Michigan Secretary of State’s office approached, one late overtime night, by some FSB agent in high heels and a slinky dress split halfway up her thigh. The svelte spy would lean against the bureaucrat provocatively and whisper, “My handsome dahling, would you mind sticking this little thumb drive into that big old computer of yours?” Professor Halderman, if you want to help the recount, put down the James Bond novels and pick up some Opti-Scan ballots.  We’ve got a lot of bubbles to read.  End    PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016.

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. Follow Palast on Twitter | Like Palast on Facebook | Forward to a friend  Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter | Podcasts Share this with    Copyright © 2016 Greg Palast, All rights reserved. You are receiving this Newsletter because you are a subscriber. Our mailing address: (Check donations are payable to: SMF (our fiscal sponsor) Memo: Palast Fund Greg Palast 3357 Cahuenga Blvd W, #13 Los Angeles, CA 90068 Add us to your address book

This is not normal...

From Melissa McEwan at Shakesville.

This is not normal.

It is not normal for a president to use his social media account to tweet chilling opinions about Constitutionally-protected rights.

It is not normal for a president to suggest it is reasonable to have one's citizenship revoked or to be jailed for doing something legaljust because he finds it distasteful.

It is not normal to imply that a "year in jail" could be remotely equivalent to being stripped of one’s very citizenship, to be permanently exiled from one's home.

None of this is normal. It is profoundly troubling. And we cannot become inured to such egregious democratic transgressions. This cannot be normalized.

Actually, this is monstrous.  Just about everything he does is monstrous.  His Cabinet picks, in fact all of his choices are monstrous.  He is not a normal human being.  He's a monster.  If you think that's too strong, then I think you need to take another look, a closer look, because there is no other word that describes our next president!

Boycott Trump App

It's difficult to know exactly how one person living in the hinterlands can show his/her displeasure with the orange-headed monster soon to take up residence in the White House.

But there is something we can do with relative ease.  There is now an App for iPhones and Androids that lists all of the businesses that supported Trump's candidacy for prezident.

Go to your phone's app store and enter "Trump Boycott" in the search box. Hopefully, you will find it possible to boycott a number of these businesses and if you do, let them know what you're doing and why.  There's power in numbers and the more people involved, the more effective the boycott will be.

A Tale of Two Presidents

Our current president and his family spent Thanksgiving handing out turkey dinners to retired war veterans, all the while making friendly with these former warriors.

Our prezident-elect had a huge dinner set up in his plush, over-the-top resort, Mar-A-Lago, in Palm Beach, with a 24-course dinner, enough food for a small nation.

150 Secret Service personnel were needed to guard those in attendance.

The cost to the U.S. taxpayer was $7 million!


Thanks to Crooks & Liars for this.

To All My Friends Before The Rise...

Reynard Loki, writing at Alternet, describes how sea rise will have a monumental impact upon our planet.  "And one dramatic effect is going to force humans to relocate."  From 1880 to the present, the seas have risen about 8 inches.  But that's just the start.  From now until 2100, a mere 84 years away, the seas are predicted to rise an additional one to four feet!  And they will continue rising as time goes on.

But I live in Florida and that is the focus of my concern in this essay.  Ben Strauss, "A vice president at Climate Central, which spent two years analyzing the specific threat to the Sunshine State," said "'Rising seas, a population crowded along the coast, porous bedrock, and the relatively common occurrence of tropical storms put more real estate and people at risk from storm surges aggravated by sea-level rise in Florida, than any other state by far.'"

Strauss goes on to note "that in Florida, around 2.4 million people live within just 4 feet of the local high tide line.  That's almost half the national risk right there. In Miami-Dade and Broward counties alone, there are more people below 4 feet than any other state, except Florida itself and Louisiana [...] ...After the Sunshine State, the next three states that will most likely be overcome by rising ocean water are California, Louisiana and New York.

The map above shows dramatically what Florida will look like with a mere one meter rise in sea level.  Everything in red will be under water!

And the Trump administration, built on ideology and not science, plays down climate change and rising seas and is considering dropping out of our international agreements to take action to reverse this situation!   


Please read Loki's entire article HERE.

American Nazis And Fascists and Racists Will Be Defeated

American Nazis and Fascists have finally gotten a place at the table, thanks to Prezident-elect, da Trump.

Trump's senior advisor is a Nazi who for years has operated a white-supremacist/Nazi website.

The Klan is marching again.  Swastikas are appearing all over the country, on signs and banners and defacing public and private buildings.

But, we beat the bastards once, and we'll beat them again.

Other notes this Thanksgiving which, due to Trump's election, there is little for which to be thankful:

* It's costing American taxpayers $1 million per day to provide security for Trump and his family in New York City.

* Rumors are that Ben Carson has accepted or is considering the office of Secretary of HUD. Carson has absolutely no experience in public housing or urban planning and has shown no interest in it. And from what we've seen during the 2016 when he was running for the Repuglican nomination, he's pretty much an ignorant, bumbling fool.

* Trump has chosen Betsy Devos to head up the Education department.  There couldn't be a worse choice.  She and her husband, a billionaire, have devoted their lives to the destruction of public education in favor of privatization and charter schools.  She is an ultra-right wing fanatic Christian who fails to understand that public schools are the foundation of our democracy.

* Trump is a congregation of messes.  His business entanglements make it impossible to function as prezident.  He has business connections in many shaky countries which will definitely compromise his ability to deal properly with their needs or desires.  He owes hundreds of millions of dollars to banks in China and other countries.  The other day while speaking with President Erdogan of Turkey, Trump promoted his business partner in that country, a clear abrogation of his presidential responsibilities!

* Trump's advisor on "Space" wants to defund NASA's climate, i.e. global warming work.

* Although Trump knows nothing about foreign affairs or even how our country works, he is blowing off the daily intelligence briefings offered by our intelligence community.  He's attended two such briefings in the past two weeks. But then he has been busy twitting about his dislike of the cast of "Hamilton," and Saturday Night Live's caricature of him on that show.

* Trump appointed Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN.  Haley, is an ultra-right wing politico with no experience or expertise in foreign policy, the United Nations, or anything else of importance.

* Last, but far from least, is Trump's appointment of Jeff Sessions, the Alabama crackpot, as Attorney General.  Sessions was rejected some years back as a federal judge because of his racism.  He is a bigot extraordinaire and an out-and-out racist.

Enjoy your turkey if you can!

Waiting for the Apocalypse

This is you know
Not a time for
Celebration
For fireworks
Explosions in the sky
Or dry Champagne
It is a time when
Winds of war
Hate and terror
Sweep across
Planet Earth
When compared to
Yesterday nothing
Is the same.

Ironically, crime is down
From Florida to Maine
And all the way to
California
That is if we believe
The media, the police and
The politicians
Not that they would ever
Lie except in an
Emergency or perhaps
If they had a growing need
To put more feathers
In their nest.

One might say
It all began
In the days of Reagan
When a B-grade actor
Became president and
Gave weapons
To our friend
bin Laden so
He could fight the Russians
In Afghanistan
And send them running back
To Russia thereby
Freeing up the land.

Then George the First
Called up the troops to
Fight Iraqis even
Though they'd been our friends
In their fight against Iran
But now he said
They're our enemies
And a danger to Kuwait
Bush owed the
Saudis big time so
He sent our troops to die
To save Kuwaiti oil.

But he left Iraq too soon
Before the job was done
Which left a lot to be desired
And old Hussein in place
Which George the Younger
Thought was bad
And made him
Very mad though it is said
That he was mad
From his youth
And seldom gave a thought
To reason or to
Common Sense.

So George the Younger
Went to war but sent
The young and bold and those
Who had no other options
To spill their blood again
So he could at last avenge
His daddy's dithering
Although he lied of course
About everything
Which wasn't strange at all
To those who knew him when.
Today Iraq's a hole in hell
The Middle East aflame
It might have happened anyway
But Bush is much to blame
For thousands lost their
Homes and lives
Many went insane.

And in the good ol' USA
Instead of going to jail
Bush is given accolades
A "fare thee well" and "Hail"
Sadly too
George left a mess
A country deep in debt
His tax cuts made the rich
Even richer yet
And most folks struggling
To survive.

Then Obama came along
Couldn't catch a break
When he tried to do
The things he couldn't do
With a Congress full of fools
People jeered
Called him a Muslim
And a Marxist too
Republicans attacked
Fought him tooth and nail
While they left the country
To fester and to fail
So they could blame
The president
And set a precedent
Which would get them
Re-elected.

But now we've got to deal
With Trump
That lying hairy burly lump
Who claims that can change
Our fate and somehow
Make our country great
But he's too little, too crazy
And way too late
To turn this thing around
There's just two minutes left
On the Doomsday Clock
Most folks don't really
Seem to care
Politicians run and hide
When asked what they have done
To stop the seething searing
Heat that's scorching
Mother Earth.

The Second Coming you should know
Is nothing but a myth
And Armageddon
Mere nonsense
But don't take that to mean
That we'll survive or
Make it through
The earth's Apocalypse!

New Amazon Prime Commercial 2016 – A Priest and Imam meet for a cup of tea.

The Story of the Theft of the 2016 Election

Here’s what we do now – a personal note by Greg Palast Being right never felt so horrid. “This is the story of the theft of the 2016 election. It’s a crime still in progress.” So opens my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. And on Election night I waited for the returns to make a fool of me. Instead, the returns made the fool a President. And so, my vacation’s cancelled.  My life’s cancelled; that is, a life of anything but sleuthing and exposing the details of the heist of our democracy. What’s at stake? No way around it, this is one frightening moment. Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction.  Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor. But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact:  Donald Trump did NOT win this election. Trump not only lost the popular vote by millions — he did not legitimately win the swing states of the Electoral College. Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio:  every one was stolen through sophisticated, and sickeningly racist vote suppression tactics. If you saw my report for Democracy Now! on election morning, it revealed that Ohio GOP officials turned off anti-hacking software on voting machines, forced Black voters to wait hours in line (while whites had no wait). And, crucially, I confirmed that purged tens of thousands of minority voters on fake accusations they’d voted twice.  I first exposed this bogus double-voter blacklist called Crosscheck, in Rolling Stone. It’s the sick excrescence crafted by Kris Kobach, the Trump transition team's maven who also created the Muslim-tracker software he’s bringing to the Trump administration. What can we do now? I have been INUNDATED with requests for my factual reports and findings by media and, most important, the front-line activist groups preparing for the fierce fight to protect our votes.  Some examples: Rev. William Barber of the NAACP filed a suit based in North Carolina,  hoping to overturn the Trump "victory" — and protect the tiny margin of the Democrat’s win of the Governor’s mansion.  The NAACP cites my discovery of "Crosscheck" — in which North Carolina removed upwards of 190,000 voters on false charges they voted twice.     They now need my facts. Congressmen Keith Ellison and Alcee Hastings of the Congressional Black Caucus, personally presented Attorney General Loretta Lynch with my investigative reports and demanded investigation — "and indictments."  That investigation must kick off immediately.     They now need my facts. The Asian-American civil rights group 18 Million Rising has gathered 50,000 signatures to push the Justice Department to investigate my evidence of a massive attack on the Asian-American vote.     They now need my facts. In Michigan, the ACLU is ready to take action on the purge scheme I uncovered, "Crosscheck," that wrongly gave the state to Trump. In Ohio, voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis is going into court with evidence, much that I uncovered, of racist voting games — from 5-hour-long lines in Black precincts to shutting off ballot security measures on the voting machines.       The team need my facts. I expect to be in Washington at the Justice Dept and meeting with civil rights groups in December before the Electoral College meets. Information—plus film, video, investigative reports And beyond the voluminous files and confidential documents my team has uncovered, we are deluged with requests for our film, videos, writings and more.     And now we have US networks, even major comedy shows, asking for our material and, of course, new investigative findings. Information and facts make a difference With our investigative reports, with our hard and unassailable evidence, we can challenge the legitimacy of the Trump "election."  Most important, we must begin the difficult but necessary work of protecting and restoring voting rights.  The 2018 Election — and the threat of more stolen elections — is upon us. What we need to keep going...   Your extraordinary support and faith in our work funded my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which is now more relevant than ever and being seen by ever more audiences. Now we need your financial support again to keep this fight going. We just did not budget for the GOP's in-your-face steal of the Congress and White House.  All our resources went into raising the alarm before the election.  So, now, I have to re-hire the staff, hit the road again. Ohio, North Carolina, Washington DC and who knows where, retain attorneys—and retain our team of technicians from cameramen to outreach organizers. Can this new work be done? Is there any choice? Honestly and personally, I was hoping for some rest and time off. But a lifetime of your work and mine is now in the balance.   PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016 Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo.   And does an angel have the $8K needed for our Washington work and filming?  If so, flap your wings. I can't thank you enough for all the years of support. Alas... our work is not done. Greg Palast and the Palast Investigations Team

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. Follow Palast on Twitter | Like Palast on Facebook | Forward to a friend  Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter | Podcasts Share this with    Copyright © 2016 Greg Palast, All rights reserved. You are receiving this Newsletter because you are a subscriber. Our mailing address: (Check donations are payable to: SMF (our fiscal sponsor) Memo: Palast Fund Greg Palast 3357 Cahuenga Blvd W, #13 Los Angeles, CA 90068 Add us to your address book

Evangelicals and Evil

The word, evangel, comes from the Greek euangelion, which means "good news."  In the Christian New Testament it refers to the gospel of Jesus Christ which is supposed to be "good news" to the world.

Evangelicals, therefore, are bearers of this Good News.  It applies to all those who claim the title, Christian.  However, some years back it was co-opted by "conservative" Christians who stressed the infalibility of the Bible and certain doctrines which they cherry-picked to suit their inclinations. For example, they chose John 3:16 to be their rallying cry:  people must be "born again" in order to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Conservative Christians thus distanced themselves from more traditional Christianity by giving this verse extraordinary power in their theological tradition.  All persons who have not had a "conversion" experience and been born again are suspect and not "real" Christians.

They also co-opted the term, evangelical.  Because, unlike other traditional Christian groups, they stressed the need to convert everyone and ensure everyone has a born-again experience, they decided that they, alone, were the true evangelicals bringing good news to the world.

And that's why people like Billy Graham and other hucksters travel around the world holding huge rallies designed to do only one thing - convert people to "evangelical" Christianity.


Somewhere along the way, evangelicals became puffed up with pride believing that they alone were doing God's work.  As they became more numerous, they began to force their beliefs on other people.  The more power they had, the more successful they were.

Years ago, I confronted a public middle school principal in Texas about his insistence on reading the Bible during the morning announcements.  When I suggested this was illegal and unconstitutional, he proudly stood his ground as an evangelical Christian and told me to "jump in the lake" or something similar.

I've thought for some time that the good news brought by evangelicals wasn't very good at all.  It was totalitarian, disdainful of other people, and quite often disregarded the rights of non-evangelicals.


According to the latest statistics, 81% of evangelicals in this country voted for da Trampf.  In other words, a huge majority of people who identify as conservative Christians, true Christians, voted for a thrice-married sexual predator, a con man and grifter who is a pathological liar, a man with no government experience, a man with an ego the size of Russia, a man with strong ties to Russia's leaders, a man whose word cannot be trusted, a man who lives his life to make enormous sums of money but gives away very little, a man who is, in every respect, the antithesis of what a Christian should be and who stands firmly opposed to the teachings of Jesus.

Evangelicals today are not bearers of good news; they are the epitome of bad news.  We can understand the 81% voting for da Trampf when we realize they operate and believe the same things da Trampf does.  They are hateful and dismissive of people different from themselves. They are wrapped up in fear of homosexuals, Muslims, liberals, blacks, latinos, and the way the world is moving which they perceive as the wrong direction.

Unfortunately, for Christianity, the evangelicals have despoiled the "evangelical" name and the Christian faith.  They have proven they are not "born again" but are self-serving political creatures who will sell out their Lord for a bigger piece of the pie or for the pie-in-the-sky promises of a fascist demagogue.

They remind me very much of the story in the Christian Bible, where Jesus' favorite disciple, Peter, denies knowing his Lord three times, because he was afraid.

Evangelicals today have lined up with Peter, not with Jesus.  Their shame is palpable and their recovery is doubtful.  Traitors are generally greeted by the words, "Go to hell!"