An Explosion is Coming

Throughout history the arrogant rule of a minority has usually ended badly for those thwarting the will of the people.  The French and Russian Revolutions are but two of the more extreme examples as is the fate of  Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife.  Here in America, one can hope that such violent eruptions never occur, but we are seeing a phenomenon where an increasing arrogant and out of touch Republican Party - thanks in part to gerrymandering and an Electoral College that has failed the intent of the Founding Fathers - is forcing an agenda on the country that is opposed by the majority of Americans. As a piece in New York Magazine notes:

Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of the Supreme Court’s nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent.  

Over the last generation, the Republican Party has moved rapidly rightward, while the center of public opinion has not. It is almost impossible to find a substantive basis in public opinion for Republican government. On health care, taxes, immigration, guns, the GOP has left America behind in its race to the far right.

Thus, the question becomes one of when will the majority say "enough" and fight back?  One would hope that the taking back of the nation from minority control would take place at the ballot box, but given the GOP's gerrymandering of districts and a constitution that grants 2 U.S. Senators to states with tiny populations populations  - Wyoming has a population of less than 600,000 while the cities of Hampton Roads have a population of 1.7 million; Montana has slightly over 1 million residents while New York City has over 8.5 million - electoral efforts for the majority to retake control my be difficult.  Has Mitch McConnell, who represents a state with a population of half of New York City and not vastly larger than that of Los Angeles, and Trump forgotten Ceausescu's fate (I suspect Trump has no idea who Ceausescu was although I suspect Melania does)?   A column in the Washington Post looks at what will hopefully be the coming explosion.  Here are highlights:

Eight years ago, when Congress was about to pass Obamacare, John A.Boehner, leader of a powerless Republican congressional minority, gave a passionate, prescient speech on the House floor. . . . “This is the People’s House, . . . .  you can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.”

This was Boehner’s famous “hell no, you can’t” speech. But the Democrats could. They had the votes, and they passed Obamacare. Boehner was correct in his prediction, though. The Democrats were soon on their way to minority status in the House and would later lose the Senate and the presidency.

Now . . . . We see Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowing to ram through the Senate the confirmation of the decisive fifth hard-right justice on the Supreme Court, quite likely signaling the end of legal abortion in much of the United States and possibly same-sex marriage and other rights Americans embrace, in far greater number, than they ever did Obamacare.

One wants to cry out: Hell no, you can’t! But Republicans can. They have the votes. Democrats can and should fight, but the GOP controls the schedule, sets the rules and already eliminated the procedures that gave the minority a say in Supreme Court confirmations.

If anything, the fury should be far more intense on the Democratic side right now than it was for Boehner in 2010. The Affordable Care Act was the signature proposal of a president elected with a large popular mandate, it had the support of a plurality of the public, and it was passed by a party that had large majorities in both chambers of Congress and had attempted to solicit the participation of the minority.

Now we have a Supreme Court nomination — the second in as many years — from an unpopular president who lost the popular vote by 2.8 million. The nominee will be forced through by also-unpopular Senate Republicans, who, like House Republicans, did not win a majority of the vote in 2016. 

For good measure, the new justice may well join the other four conservative justices in revoking same-sex marriage, which also has the support of two-thirds of Americans. And this comes after the Republicans essentially stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

You can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.Republicans have been defying gravity for some time. . . . they lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. 

Because of partisan gerrymandering and other factors, Democrats could win by eight percentage points and still not gain control of the House, one study found. And the two-senators-per-state system (which awards people in Republican Wyoming 70 times more voting power than people in Democratic California) gives a big advantage to rural, Republican states. 

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has protected Republican minority rule. It gave the wealthy freedom to spend unlimited dark money on elections, while crippling the finances of unions. It sustained gerrymandering and voter-suppression laws that reduce participation of minority voters. And, of course, it gave the presidency to George W. Bush.

Control of the judiciary, and the resulting protection of minority rule, has been the prize for Republicans who tolerated President Trump’s starting a trade war, losing allies while getting cozy with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin, flirting with white supremacists, paying off a porn star and attacking the justice system while his former advisers are indicted and convicted.

The backlash is coming. It is the deserved consequence of minority-rule government protecting the rich over everybody else, corporations over workers, whites over nonwhites and despots over democracies. It will explode, God willing, at the ballot box and not in the streets. You can only ignore the will of the people for so long and get away with it.

Sadly, part of me believes that ultimately, it will explode in the streets. If that happens, McConnell, Trump and others will deserve whatever very harsh consequences befall them. 

Anti -Trump Bombshells: "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House"

Michael Wolff's new upcoming book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, based on interviews with many in Donald Trump's inner circle, details the intrigue, in-fighting, and all-around chaos that swirled around both Trump’s election campaign and his first year in the White House.  The first excerpts of the book have been leaked to The Guardian. Subsequently, New York Magazine published an even more substantive portions of the book that contains numerous bombshells that will be embarrassing at best for Trump supporters and Republican apologists. For the morally bankrupt evangelical Christians who have continued to support Trump, the expose passages on how Trump liked to entrap the husbands and ruin the marriages of women with whom he wanted to have sex (see the image below) underscore that these people have no standing to lecture anyone on morality or anything else.  Two columns in the Washington Post and a piece in Raw Story that catalogs the ten largest bombshells make it painfully clear that Trump is unfit for office and is a danger to the nation.  Take the time to read the Raw Story piece.   The first column in the post by a conservative columnist who makes it clear that none of these bombshells should be surprising.  Here are excerpts:

As excerpts from Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” dribble out, the argument in favor of using the 25th Amendment may improve:

Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise ­— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said [former deputy chief of staff Katie] Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

This is as troubling as it is unsurprising. For a couple of years, it has been apparent to anyone who cared to look hard that Trump was never mentally, emotionally or temperamentally fit to be president. Those who argued that character didn’t matter were both wrong and missing the point. Sanity matters. The book — at least from the excerpts — confirms what dogged opponents of his presidency have always said: He’s an unhinged man-child utterly lacking in the skill needed to be president.

 [T]he book is utterly humiliating for the enablers, the deniers, the Trump-whisperers, the right-wing media and ultimately the voters who put this character in the Oval Office. 

Willful denial explains part of it. But what’s the excuse, now that they know who he is, for allowing him to stay? The book should also inform how the press interviews him. We know he’s unhinged, so acting as his stenographer is not elucidating. Seeing what he knows, how much of a grasp of details he commands, how he reacts when challenged and the degree to which his short-term memory may be off is, it seems, where we should direct our attention.

One of Trump's defenders is Senator Lindsey Graham who once upon a time was a severe critic.  Why the change in course for Graham?  The whispers I have heard suggest that Trump may have the goods to "out" Graham as gay which would not go over well with the knuckle draggers in the South Carolina GOP base. 

The second Washington Post column gets to the issue made famous by the Watergate investigations: what did the president [Trump] know, and when did he know it.?  Here are relevant highlights:

While President Trump’s allies often seem to be striking out randomly in all directions when defending him on the topic of Russia, the underlying theme of their arguments is that the whole scandal is, as the president himself often says, phony, made up, a hoax, fake news. Over time, this claim has grown weaker and weaker.

Two items released today show how much harder it’s going to get for them, because they cast light on a Trump campaign acting like it knew it was doing something wrong.

The first and more colorful one comes from the Guardian, which obtained a copy of a soon-to-be-released book by Michael Wolff based on extensive interviews with Trump associates. Unlike most Trump allies, Stephen K. Bannon makes no excuses for the meeting that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and campaign chairman Paul Manafort had in June 2016 with a group of Russians who had offered up damaging information on Hillary Clinton: 
 The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s–t, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon hasn’t confirmed or denied that he said that rather explosive thing to Wolff, although Breitbart, the website he runs, has reprinted that excerpt without objection.  . . . . Bannon also seemed to believe the scandal was going to get much bigger — and keep in mind, he was telling Wolff these things last summer.

Bannon also identifies money laundering as a key area of vulnerability for the Trump family, which is indeed one of the prime areas of focus for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. When they start asking about money, “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon told Wolff.

If Papadopoulos was blabbing about what he had learned [about Clinton emails stolen by Russian intelligence] to an Australian diplomat, the chances he hadn’t told his superiors on the Trump campaign (whom he was obviously desperate to impress) are probably close to zero. . . . If he did tell his superiors, that would mean the Trump campaign learned Russia was hacking Democrats as early as April 2016 and didn’t inform the FBI. Nor did the campaign inform the FBI in June 2016 when Russians who had been presented to them as representing the Kremlin asked for a meeting to pass on damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

If you’re a Trump partisan, you might explain the campaign’s behavior with the ignorance defense: Perhaps they were so stupid and naive that they didn’t realize there was a problem seeking help in their campaign from a hostile foreign government. Or you might argue, as some have, that because there is no specific crime called “collusion” (even though collusion with Russia very well may have violated one or more of a number of statutes), the campaign did nothing wrong and therefore there was no need to alert the authorities about what Russia was attempting.

The trouble is that when the story of the Kushner/Trump Jr./Manafort meeting broke in the press in June 2017, the president and those closest to him attempted to cover it up. President Trump personally dictated an absurdly misleading statement for Trump Jr. to release to the press . . . . The coming Trump/Bannon feud should be entertaining, but to wrap this all up, I’ll refer you to something else Bannon told Michael Wolff, about the meeting with the Russians:

“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.”

Bannon is guessing here, because he wasn’t there at the time. And he could be wrong. But it’s hard to believe that Trump Jr., who expressed his excitement about meeting the Russians, wouldn’t have kept his father abreast of developments. That matters a great deal, because in the end the most important political question will be the old one from Watergate: What did the president know, and when did he know it?

We don’t know the answer yet, and I’m pretty sure President Trump is hoping we never find out. 

How Has Supporting Trump Worked Out for Russia?

As a piece in New York Magazine states, "We now know with more certainty than we did a couple weeks ago that the Russian government tried to tip the scales in last year’s presidential election toward Donald Trump and that central figures in the Trump campaign were apparently only too happy to accept the assistance."  One goal was to obviously weaken America and discredit the electoral process and on that, Trump seems to be delivering for Putin.  On climate change, China may step into America's former role and come to dominate renewable energy over time as Trump tries to breath life into the almost dead coal industry.  In terms of respect for America, Putin hit a home run as positive views of America plummet to new lows.  There are, of course, other things Putin hoped to achieve which the piece reviews.  Here are some article highlights:

[W]hat did Russian president Vladimir Putin get for his efforts? Has he received a decent return on his investment, or is Trump backfiring on him?

Here’s a look at some of the policy areas in which Putin likely hoped a Trump victory would advance Russian interests and how well Trump has delivered (whether knowingly or unknowingly). Remember, it’s Putin giving the grades here, so high marks don’t necessarily mean a job well-done.

Sanctions

In backing Trump, perhaps no objective was a bigger motivator for Putin and his oligarchic comrades than the easing of U.S. sanctions on Russia. While the impact of the sanctions on Russia’s ruling class has not been as sharp as it’s been for the underclass, a lot of wealthy Russians (including people who are personally friendly with Putin and Trump) would like to be able to travel, spend money, and do business in the U.S. and Europe more freely again. Trump’s people were signaling to Russia that he was willing to give ground on sanctions before he took office — and possibly before he was elected.

So far, no such luck. The Senate imposed new sanctions on Russia in June to punish the Kremlin for its election interference and, being well aware of Trump’s excessive coziness with Putin, took steps to limit his ability to lift them.

Grade: B-

Cybersecurity

If Putin has his way, 2016 won’t be the last U.S. election marred by Russian intelligence interference. It would be a shame if the president he helped us elect turned around and made it harder for him to “participate” in the future. Fortunately, Trump can’t admit that our elections are vulnerable to foreign interference without admitting that it helped him win, which his ego won’t allow, so he’s doing nothing to prevent Russia or other hostile actors from taking further cracks at our political parties’ communications or our election infrastructure. Instead, he’s channeling his energy into hunting down the millions of fraudulent U.S. voters that exist only in the fevered minds of some on the right.

Grade: A+

NATO

Trump’s campaign-trail diatribes against our NATO allies for not paying their fair share of defense costs was music to Putin’s ears, as a NATO weakened by wavering American support would give him a freer hand to reassert Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and particularly in the Baltic countries. Trump alarmed allies, blindsided his own national-security team, and surely set Putin’s heart aflutter when he declined to commit to the Article 5 mutual-defense provision in a speech at NATO headquarters in May — only to backtrack and say he would indeed uphold it in a press conference in Romania early last month. Clearly, his military and national-security staff set him straight in the interim. Meanwhile, other NATO countries are boosting their defense spending this year, for which Trump is taking too much credit. This is looking more and more like one campaign pledge the president won’t be able to fulfill.

Grade: F

Europe

If Putin can’t have a weaker NATO, a fractured European Union might be the next best thing — hence Russia’s (unsuccessful) efforts to help the Euroskeptical rightist Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential election in the same way he helped Trump in ours. On the whole, Trump does not instill much confidence in European leaders: Alienating Europe appears to be among his policy goals, and he now has Germany worried that he will start a trade war. On the other hand, Trump’s hostility to transatlantic cooperation has Europe seeking other partners, such as Japan, and it may be unwittingly making Europe stronger by helping Europeans appreciate the value of their union and the need for self-reliance. He’s also not abandoning the U.S. commitment to European security vis-à-vis Russia, as evinced by his agreement to sell Patriot air-defense missiles to Poland earlier this month.

Grade: C

Syria

Russia’s objectives in Syria remain as they have always been: to keep Bashar Al-Assad in power, Islamists out of power, and the Russian naval facility in Tartus open. Trump’s frustration with the Syrian stalemate and hesitation to oust Assad suited Putin much better than Clinton’s plans for more direct engagement.

After their G20 meeting, Trump and Putin announced that the U.S., Russia, Israel, and Jordan had brokered a cease-fire in southwest Syria, which took effect last Sunday. While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson maintains that the U.S.’s long-term goal for Syria is for Assad to step down, the new Syria strategy that emerged from the meeting would leave him in power, at least for the time being. . . . Critics have called the cease-fire plan unenforceable, have said it ignores Iran’s role in the conflict, and have alleged the plan entails a capitulation to Russia’s agenda from which Iran will emerge the winner. In short, it looks like the shots in Syria are now being called from Moscow, not Washington.

Grade: A

Is Putin Trying To Reprise a Stolen Election in France?

Putin and Le Pen - both enemies of democracy

For the record, I continue to believe that Russian dictator - that is, after all, what he is - Vladimir Putin helped steal the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump and that it is very likely that the Trump campaign cooperated with that effort.  Now, the same effort seems to be taking place in France where on the eve of the presidential run off election a massive dump of hacked documents has taken place with the apparent goal of damaging Emmanuel Macron and throwing the election to neo-fascist Marine Le Pen.  Le Pen has very open ties to Putin and her political party has even received funding from Putin's government and henchmen.  One would hope that French voters will be smarter than many angry white voters were and will see the hacking and document dump for what it is and run screaming away from La Pen.  If not, expect Putin to try to steal Germany's election next.  The irony in all of this is that the would be authoritarian rulers claim that are out to protect traditional values and the common citizen, yet as the House GOP's Trumpcare bill reveals, that is the furthest thing from the truth.  The House GOP's bill basically tells millions to just get sick and die and do the wealthy and the oligarchs a favor by doing so.  The New York Times looks at what can only be a Russian effort to undermine and destroy France's democracy.  Here are excerpts (note that fake documents were mixed in with real ones to dupe voters and lazy journalists):

PARIS — On the eve of the most consequential French presidential election in decades, the staff of the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron said late Friday that the campaign had been targeted by a “massive and coordinated” hacking operation, one with the potential to destabilize the nation’s democracy before voters go to the polls on Sunday.

The digital attack, which involved a dump of campaign documents including emails and accounting records, emerged hours before a legal prohibition on campaign communications went into effect. While the leak may be of little consequence, the timing makes it extremely difficult for Mr. Macron to mitigate any damaging fallout before the runoff election, in which he faces the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who has pledged to pull France out of the euro and hold a referendum to leave the European Union.

The hacking immediately evoked comparisons to last year’s presidential election in the United States, during which American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, ordered an “influence campaign” to benefit the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

Groups linked to Russia, that are also believed to have been involved in the hacking related to the 2016 United States presidential campaign, have previously been accused of trying to breach the Macron organization. Security experts tracking the activity of suspected Russian hackers say they believe those same groups were involved in this latest attack.

In a statement, the Macron campaign said the hackers had mixed fake documents along with authentic ones, “to sow doubt and misinformation.”

The Macron campaign said the documents leaked Friday were stolen several weeks ago after the personal and professional emails of staff members at En Marche, his political movement, were hacked.

It was not the first reported hacking attempt of Mr. Macron’s campaign. In April, a report by the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro said there was evidence that the campaign was targeted in March by what appeared to be the same Russian operatives who were responsible for hacks of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s American presidential election. Mr. Macron’s campaign said the attack was unsuccessful.

Vitali Kremez, the director of research at Flashpoint, a business risk intelligence company in New York, said he suspected the involvement of a Russian-linked espionage operation known as APT28. “The key goals and objectives of the campaign appear to be to undermine Macron’s presidential candidacy and cast doubt on the democratic electoral process in general,” he said.

“If indeed driven by Moscow, this leak appears to be a significant escalation over the previous Russian operations aimed at the U.S. presidential election, expanding the approach and scope of effort from simple espionage efforts towards more direct attempts to sway the outcome,” Mr. Kremez added.

Security researchers who have been tracking APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, say it has been moving aggressively against NATO members and a variety of Western targets using various hacking tools, including so-called spear-phishing attacks, but also through the exploitation of vulnerabilities in technologies that allow hackers to invade their targets undetected by security software.

The National Commission for Control of the Electoral Campaign, a regulatory body, said it was contacted by the Macron campaign on Friday night. The commission, which planned to meet on Saturday about the hacking, urged the news media to be cautious in its reporting.

“It therefore asks the media, and in particular their websites, not to report on the content of these data, recalling that the dissemination of false information is liable to fall within the scope of the law — in particular criminal law,” the commission said.

The Macron campaign appealed to journalists to not do the hackers’ bidding by widely publicizing the contents of the emails.

Given what is known about Russia's involvement and Putin's goals of an ascendant Russia at the expense of Europe and America, I cannot fathom why anyone sane would vote for someone favored by Putin.  

On a different note, criminal hacking is not only occurring in the political realm.  More and more businesses and law firms are targets with the goal being to steal trade secrets and steal monies in trust accounts.  Nationwide, millions of dollars have been stolen from law firm trust accounts through hacked e-mails and altered wire instructions.