Moo-Moo-Mussolini-- Another Fascist Runs For Office

Will Ivanka or Junior run for office someday? Why ask? Well, Mussolini's great-grandson, 51 year old, Argentina-born Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, is running for one of Italy's 73 seats in the European Parliament next month. Sadly, though predictably, Julius Caesar Mussolini was nominated because of-- not despite-- his relationship to gramps and isn't shy to admit that he sees Il Duce as an inspiration.

Mussolini is running for the far right Brothers of Italy Party. Asked if he defines himself as a fascist, he declared fascism dead and said he sees "other dangers. The thought police, globalism, the dictatorship of political correctness, uncontrolled immigration a few small financial groups that control everything, Islamic extremism." The Brothers of Italy was one of the first-- and only-- European political parties to join Steve Bannon's neo-Nazi grouping, The Movement, a transnational alliance of far right populist parties invented by Bannon.

Mussolini is running on a virulently anti-immigrant agenda-- like Trump's-- and has said that equating xenophobia with fascism "is a propaganda exaggeration from the left, which has no other arguments."

About 10 days ago, Newsweek reported that Benito Mussolini's "granddaughter, Rachele Mussolini, is a city councillor in Rome. Her stepsister, Alessandra Mussolini, is an MEP for the Forza Italy party, which is fronted by former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. She was recently thrust into the international spotlight following a Twitter spat with Hollywood actor Alessandra Mussolini tweeted that the Truman Show star was a 'bastard' after he tweeted a drawing of the hanging corpse of Benito Mussolini, who, along with his lover Claretta Petacci, was lynched at the end of World War II in Milan by Italian partisans. Carrey, who has taken to drawing a series of political cartoons, captioned the image: 'This is where facism leads.'"

Ted Cruz Disowns One GOP Nazi... But Not the Nazi Faction In The Party And Not Any Of The Other Fascists Running As Republicans This Year

You know there is an actual fascist wing of the Republican Party-- and since Trump's occupation of the White House, it has been gaining strength. More and more neo-Nazis have been winning GOP primaries, as we saw Friday in North Carolina. The party establishment is embarrassed and would rather hide the connection between overt fascists and the Republican Party, but the hated-talk radio and Fox brainwashed base hears the Nazi campaign rhetoric and recognizes it as pure GOP, but a little more extreme. Republican neo-fascists in Virginia, Illinois, Wisconsin are proudly representing the GOP, leaving the party... uncomfortable.

Ted Cruz is one of the most right-wing Republicans in the Senate and he's running scared as Beto O'Rourke continues to make inroads in his campaign to replace him. This week Cruz decided to draw a line in the sand between the overt Nazis and himself.

Republican primary voters picked a self-avowed Nazi, Arthur Jones, to go up against one of the most right-wing Democrats in Congress, Dan Lipinski, in their Chicagoland district. The crap Jones is spouting in his campaign is a little to close for comfort for Cruz, who felt compelled to tweet to his fans in Illinois to voted for Lipinski rather than Jones. I wonder what Cruz would have done if Jones was running against a progressive-- say Marie Newman, who Lipinski recently beat in a hot primary 48,675 to 46,530, the thanks to the right-wing big money PAC financed by Cruz-backers, No Labels-- instead of Jones. Here's the very dramatic Cruz tweet:

This week, state Republicans let a deadline pass that would have allowed them to run someone as a third-party candidate to provide Republican voters with an alternative candidate to vote for. The GOP said the ballot requirements, including having to collect more than 14,000 signatures, was too burdensome and costly in a district Democrats dominate.

Republicans missed several chances, including in the primary, to challenge Jones or oust him from the ballot. The party failed to recruit a candidate to challenge him in the March primary where he went unopposed, did not draft a write-in candidate in the primary, and failed to knock him off the ballot by challenging his signature petitions.

Jones celebrated his role in sidelining Republicans, telling POLITICO this week: “I snookered them.”

So far Cruz hasn't had anything to say about a Republican from the fascist wing of the GOP running for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, Corey Stewart, who narrowly edged the mainstream conservative, Nick Freitas because another extremist, E.W. Jackson, drew votes away from Stewart.

• Corey Stewart- 136,410 (44.86%)
• Nick Freitas- 131,131 (43.12%)
• E.W. Jackson- 36,537 (12.02%)

Not a peep out of Cruz about Stewart, who might be sitting next to him in the Senate next year. That's odd, since Arthur Jones has no chance to win at all and he's running for a House seat, where Cruz never served. In fact, just yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Corey Stewart’s Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from Virginia has prompted an identity crisis within the state GOP, with some donors and activists saying they are so turned off, they are willing to vote for his Democratic opponent, Sen. Tim Kaine... Stewart almost won the gubernatorial primary last year-- by celebrating guns and Confederate statues, lambasting illegal immigrants, and associating with white nationalist Jason Kessler and Paul Nehlen, a Wisconsin candidate barred from Twitter because of anti-Semitic and racist posts. And, interestingly, Cruz hasn't chimed in on the race to replace Paul Ryan, where one of the leading Republican candidates-- probably second after the Ryan clone (Bryan Steel)-- is fascist Paul Nehlen. There are 6 candidates in the August 14 Republican primary to pick the sacrificial lamb to run against Randy Bryce. and in a crowded primary like that, there is no telling what will happen. Lots of GOP voters want to vote for Jeremy Ryan who they think is Paul Ryan's cousin and could well draw votes away from Steil, who Paul Ryan has endorsed and is helping raise money for. The fascist candidate, Nehlen, is a multimillionaire who has yet to deploy any of his own fortune in the race and has raised $189,613 so far. In 2016 Nelhen raised $1,451,04 from Republican donors sympathetic with his fascist agenda. And, by the way, he and Corey Stewart are allies. Cruz has nothing to say about Nehlen or the Nazi factions within his own party, just about the hapless Arthur Jones in Chicago.

Is Trump Really A Fascist?

Author Clive Irving thinks so. Yesterday he wrote an OpEd for the Daily Beast, It Is Happening Here, Trump Is Already Early-Stage Mussolini. He started by posing a couple of questions: "Is there a moment when a fanatical leader can be stopped before he takes a nation into the abyss? A moment when those with the moral determination to stop him can act before it is too late?" He realizes that "Trump stress tests this republic’s defenses against a demagogue. History has such moments. They need to be heeded... In Italy the moment came on Aug. 16, 1924." Before Mussolini supporters murdered socialist member of parliament Giacomo Matteotti, Mussolini was an elected prime minister and hadn't made himself a dictator. Before he was killed, Matteotti was preparing to give parliament a dossier exposing a series of crimes, including murder and corruption, carried out by Mussolini’s henchmen since he became prime minister.

The murder of Matteotti outraged millions of Italians who, until that moment, had been ready to turn a blind eye to fascist thuggery. For a while a 200,000-strong fascist militia had been used to suppress criticism of Mussolini, who in his regular belligerent public speeches had referred to liberty as “a more or less putrid goddess” who needed to be eliminated.

...Of the institutions that might have stopped Mussolini right then, the monarchy, in the person of the ageing King Victor Emmanuel, (Mussolini called him “physically no more than a half-cartridge”) was ineffectual; the Vatican was fearful of taking sides and strongly averse to the socialists who were seen as godless secularists; the parliamentary opposition, briefly vocal after the death of Matteotti, had reverted to factionalism. Mussolini had already made sure that the newspapers were cowed into blind obedience.

This is not Italy in 1925. Nonetheless there is no comfort to be gained from the gap in place and time. There are too many clear similarities in the Trump administration’s language, techniques and actions.

First, there is the flashpoint issue designed to make populations feel insecure-- and therefore, to justify a draconian response.

Trump has used immigration as that issue from the day of his notorious candidacy-launching “rapists and murderers” speech.

And, like Mussolini, Trump is surrounded by his own hard core of fanatics eager to use that issue to achieve their own ideological purposes.

Mussolini was greatly under the influence of Roberto Farinacci, a lawyer and one of the most unrelenting dogmatists of the fascist movement. Trump has Stephen Miller, under the nebulous title of political adviser, who has for years been in lockstep with Attorney General Jeff Sessions in whipping up fears about the browning of America (which is, in any case, already demographically inevitable).

The ultimate ghastly achievement of the Miller-Sessions axis has been the “zero tolerance” policy for those crossing the Mexican border without permission. In other words, the automatic criminalization of refugees.

All along, Miller and Sessions knew that in Trump they had an easy accomplice. The man who created the birthing smear against Obama and who thought the fascists at Charlottesville were OK was innately racist, and they exploited it.

In fact, “zero tolerance” has the same intransigent tone, the same absolutism and the same indiscriminate cruelty that Mussolini conveyed in his speeches when he used the unrest that he had himself fomented to justify seizing absolute power.

And the language used in attacking immigrants is based on lies used with the same frequency and conviction that was recommended by the original fascist dictum that if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes accepted as fact.

Immigration across the Mexican border has been continually presented as a threat to public safety. Thousands of innocents fleeing from terror in Central America are equated with terrorists. The MS-13 gangs become shorthand for a crime wave that doesn’t exist.

And Trump, as ever an empathy amputee, is still using words like “infest” and “invade” as a catch-all term for thousands of people who are refugees and asylum seekers.

Forced into stopping the separation of children from parents-- albeit when it had become untenable-- Trump pulled a sordid stunt by inviting to the White House a group of people who had lost loved ones to crimes committed by illegal immigrants. This sad and bewildered group found themselves suddenly complicit in sustaining the toxic fiction that nobody is safe when sharing the streets of our cities with illegal immigrants.

Where Mussolini had his militia, Trump has Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. Created in 2003, ICE was a child of the response to 9/11, part of the Bush administration’s plan to reinforce institutions to deal more effectively with terrorism, and it fell under the Department of Homeland Security.

Probably because of the haste of that change-- and the priorities given to anti-terrorist powers-- ICE has suffered from weak oversight. As a result, it has a long record of abusing detainees through both the Bush and Obama administrations and now in the era of Trump it seems alarmingly unfettered.

Last December the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, belatedly responding to disturbing reports about the treatment of immigrants, confirmed widespread cases of the abuse of detainees in ICE jails across the country.

The abuse included strip searches in violation of rules, failure to provide medical care, physical abuse by guards and unsafe and unhygienic conditions. Other reports have indicated systemic sexual harassment and abuse.

Indeed, since the arrival of “Zero tolerance” ICE has shown all the signs of going rogue. It scooped up and bundled off detainees to many parts of the country in the confidence that nobody was looking—until the whole miserable farrago of family separations was suddenly exposed. It remains belligerently opaque in its methods, consistently rebuffing the attempts of lawmakers to inspect its premises.

Not even Mussolini could have imagined concentration camps for babies. But that is where we are.

Trump and the White House are, in theory, constrained by Congress, an independent judiciary, a government staffed by people who are supposed to follow the law and a free press.

Looked at in the context of Mussolini’s Italy, how well are these constraints performing?

The judiciary is yet to be fully tested, but the Supreme Court is looking worryingly complaisant after its blessing of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, shaped indelibly by his splenetic Islamophobia. In contrast, the professionals at the Department of Justice have so far, in spite of Sessions, managed to secure their integrity.

The bureaucracy is far more wobbly. It is already deeply corroded by Trump appointees, most egregiously at the EPA, where Scott Pruitt’s vainglorious excesses and pandering to lobbyists has distressed even some Republicans.

The most obvious failure, though, is Congress. It is, at best, in denial and, at worst, calculatingly supine.

In Mitch McConnell the Senate has a majority leader who has spent years perfecting his impersonation of Uriah Heep, piously lamenting the lack of bipartisan support for any legislation, particularly on immigration, while making sure there is none. He has been typically AWOL during every stage of Trump’s moral depravities.

In the House Paul Ryan, half out the door already, was revealed as spineless long ago and now looks like a beaten man.

At least we still have the free press at the top of its form. But, at the same time, we also have Fox News, serving basically as a state propaganda machine so sycophantic and so malign that Mussolini would have found it exemplary.

Before we descend into hell let’s make sure we recognize the signs of its approach. They are all there now, in plain sight. History does not have to repeat itself.

Oops, Irving seems to have forgotten to mention the congenitally supine nature of the establishment Democrats. They may make a little noise here and there but they are utterly worthless. If that's all we have protecting the country from a fascist take-over, we might as well all start stockpiling food and water and building secret compartments behind bookcases in our homes. Schumer, in fact, is bound to be part of a deal that suspends the Constitution sooner or later. Ultimately-- beyond the theatrics-- he certainly has more contempt for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Alan Grayson than he has for his old campaign donor, Donald J. Trump.

Martin Shkreli Was Arrested But A Far Graver Crime Was Committed In Flint, Michigan-- Will There Be Accountability?

Why isn't Rick Snyder running for the GOP nomination?

The most hated man in America, Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical drug gouger, was just arrested in New York this morning on securities fraud charges, though not on price gouging. Related: Tuesday night's GOP debate was filled with hatred and bombast from a mostly desperate group of ugly Republican politicians striking out irrationally at President Obama and Hillary Clinton on the supposed subject of foreign policy and national security, which was nothing more than a backdrop for their permission to screech unaccountable lies at the moon about the president. Just horrible, deceitful, hackish people. Anna Marie Cox published a wonderful scorecard that compared Mike Huckabee to "grandpa farts," Ted Cruz "a mirror that reflects no light," listening to Carly Fiorina to biting down on aluminum foil and the Republican Party frontrunner and probable nominee for 2016 to "dogshit ground into your living room carpet."

There was nothing discussed related to keeping our country and our families safe-- just a contest of who could tell more gruesome, frightening stories to blame on the Democrats. Nothing about conservative governance principles that are putting the country and the people in such mortal danger on a daily basis. Philadelphia-based reporter and author Will Bunch had this mess in the back of his mind when he tackled the news that the Republican-imposed government of Flint, Michigan had been systematically poisoning it's own citizens-- albeit mostly children-- to save a few pennies on the city's water bill.

Residents began to complain of skin lesions, hair loss, chemical-induced hypertension, vision loss and depression. Finally, a health study confirmed what many parents feared: The number of children in Flint with unsafe levels of lead in their bloodstream has doubled in less than two years.

The new mayor of Flint has declared a state of emergency-- but for thousands of kids in the economically challenged Michigan city, that may be too little, too late. Health experts say that lead poisoning can cause neurological and behavioral problems for children that are irreversible.

Who will keep us safe? More to the point, how did America become a nation that will move heaven and earth to keep hundreds of thousands of kids under lock and key should one email happen to mention ISIS, yet at the same time will feed children rank and obviously polluted tap water and for years ignore a mound of evidence that these kids are being poisoned. Since almost all of the Republicans are running on a platform of slashing both environmental regulations and the size of the EPA (which, stating the obvious, was already MIA in Flint under Democratic President Obama), we probably won't get the answer to that question tonight on CNN.

...It is a serious way to run a country to drop everything-- the lack of working class jobs, the never-ending struggle to get health care to every citizen, the massive debt that's typically required to get a college education, policing policies that leave some neighborhoods feeling like an occupied territory-- to make terrorism our one and only focus?

Too often, we use terrorism, and the fear of being attacked, to not only voluntarily give up some of our freedoms but to also squelch debate on ideas that might reduce some of the massive inequality in America and mean a better life for million of people, using the dozens who might be killed by terrorism as an excuse.

I would ask, who will keep us safe from a system in which-- even with all the hard-fought incremental advances under Obamacare-- some 29 million Americans are still not able to obtain basic health insurance, in which thousands -- become needlessly sick or face medical bankruptcy or even die every year in the world's wealthiest democracy?

Who will keep us safe from a political system in which almost every election and every political candidate is for sale to the highest bidder-- most famously, a billionaire like the host of tonight's "Who Will Keep Us Safe?" debate on CNN, Mr. Adelson-- and in which more and more states are passing laws to make it harder for minorities, seniors and college students to vote? And who will keep us safe from the ravages of climate change-- a topic that had most of the world's attention in Paris but which has seemed to escape the notice of the GOP presidential candidates?

Perhaps most importantly, who will keep us safe from those politics that have created a staggeringly unequal society in which nearly all of the income gains of recent years have flowed toward the top 1 percent and  in which jobless middle-aged, middle-class workers have been stripped of almost all hope.

In 1941, with America less than a year away from joining World War II, Franklin Roosevelt used the State of the Union address to deliver his famous Four Freedoms speech. In it, he did, of course, speak of freedom from fear-- understandably in a time of rising fascism. But he also noted that a successful America requires "freedom from want-- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-- everywhere in the world." If that is ever eliminated from our national debate, we cannot truly be free.

Curt Guyette is one of the best investigative journalists in Detroit and his piece in yesterday's Guardian is worth reading. "It might seem counterintuitive that Flint, Michigan’s declaration that there are dangerously high levels of lead in the city’s drinking water -- and in the blood of the city’s children-- is a positive thing," he began. The contamination of the city’s drinking water is, after all, is a gut-wrenching tragedy. But the declaration about the undrinkable water, made by newly elected mayor Karen Weaver on Monday, is positive in this regard: it is evidence that a semblance of democracy has returned to Flint. Such an announcement would have been unimaginable even six months ago, when Flint was still under the control of an “emergency manager” appointed by Governor Rick Snyder. The state’s usurpation of local power essentially obliterated the kinds of checks and balances that are key to a functioning democracy."

A series of emergency managers, accountable only to the governor who appointed them, held near-dictatorial power over an impoverished city of 100,000 residents-- a majority of whom are African American.

Operating under the most extreme receivership law found anywhere in the United States, these emergency managers had the power to break collective bargaining agreements, abolish city ordinances, fire employees, sell off city assets, and slash the healthcare benefits of retirees. About the only thing Snyder’s appointees couldn’t do was miss a bond payment.

In addition to everything else, these emergency managers held complete power over the duly elected city council and mayor. The emergency manager told these officials what they could and couldn’t do and determined how much, if anything, they would be paid. Any decisions the elected officials made could be overruled.

It was under this autocracy that Flint-- in April 2014-- ended a 50-year relationship with the Detroit department of water and sewerage to begin drawing the city’s drinking water from the corrosive, polluted Flint river. The initial savings to the city were pegged at $5m.

As soon as the changeover occurred though, it became apparent that the decision was a disastrous one. Residents began complaining of water that looked, smelled and tasted bad.

Because of high bacteria levels, a series of boil-water notices were issued. Then came news of dangerously high levels of total trihalomethanes, a carcinogenic byproduct of the chlorine being used in increased amounts to combat the bacteria problems.

As early as February of this year, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the ACLU of Michigan, the US Environmental Protection Agency began raising concerns that the highly corrosive river water, along with everything else, was beginning to eat away at the pipes carrying water to Flint’s 40,000 homes. And of particular concern to residents and the federal government alike was the effect of the corrosive water on an untold number of lead service lines and leaded home plumbing.

Despite mounting evidence that levels of lead in the city’s drinking water were increasing, the state-- and the city officials under their control-- adamantly maintained that the water was safe.

If not for a determined coalition of residents who refused to swallow those false claims in addition to the toxic water provided to them by the order of Snyder’s appointee, the full extent of the problem might never have come to light.

It came to light because the residents went around Snyder's anti-democratic government, appointed to oppress them, and worked directly with water experts at Virginia Tech. The state department of environmental quality, a dumping ground for GOP ideologues, discounted their findings. As Guyette wrote, "What is the likelihood that one gubernatorial appointee is going to announce that a decision made by another gubernatorial appointee is resulting in the widespread, systematic lead poisoning of children? And when the city council voted to return to the Detroit water system, the emergency manager/dictator vetoed it. The emergency manager, Darnell Earley is gone now, but is not in prison, nor has Governor Synder been dragged out of his office and hung from a lamppost. Nor is the Republican Party of Michigan disbanded.

I've always been intrigued by a story my mother's younger brother told me when I was a child. He fought in Italy towards the end of World War II and he told me about how the Italian people in a small village between Milan and the Swiss border, Giulino di Mezzegra, caught the country's right-wing dictator who had brought so much pain and suffering to the nation. On April 27-- three days before Hitler's suicide, Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured near beautiful Lake Como, shot the following day and strung up in a mundane square near Milan, where my uncle and his detachment found their mangled bodies, which had been abused by the crowds. Does Rick Snyder deserve better? Do any fascists?

It's Not About Trump-- It's About His Supporters

We keep getting told not to demean Trump because if you do, you'll be demeaning his supporters. Yeah, so? Isn't that the point? 

No one with an ability to exercise a modicum of critical thought would take Trump seriously for two seconds. Every word out of his mouth is a lie or is so twisted that its relationship to reality is approximately equivalent to the reality on reality TV-- mixed with the prescription drugs that inhabit the tiny brains of the people who drool over Trump's simple-minded nonsense. Watching him in New Hampshire yesterday (see the video above) almost had me feeling sorry for Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and the Republican Party Establishment. Almost-- they created these people and they deserve what they're getting back now.



Bruce Bartlett, a supply-side economist who worked for Ron Paul, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, nailed Trump and his supporters a few days ago:

Oh, I love Donald Trump because he exposes everything about the Republican Party that I have frankly come to hate. It is just filled with people who are crazy, and stupid, and have absolutely no idea of what they are taking about. And the candidates, no matter how intelligent they may be, just constantly have to keep pandering to this lowest common denominator in American politics.

Trump is all manipulation, bombast and bluster. And I imagine his supporters have the collective IQ of a guppy. Even when he's briefed by his advisers and he says something correct-- like Iraq being a colossal error-- he sounds like he has the communication power of an angry, egomaniacal 11-year-old. "And who's better at infrastructure than Trump?" I guess that's based on... the Central Park skating rink?

In his glorification of Douglas MacArthur he went off on a typical Trumping tangent:

I went to the greatest school. You had to be really smart to get into that school. The Wharton School of Finance. You've got to be really smart! And that was before I was Trump! You've got to be really smart. That's like the hardest one.

Forbes lists the top business schools in the country, and Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania, came in at #4 after Stanford, Booth (University of Chicago) and Harvard. The average GMAT score is 720, lower than the 740 at Stanford or the 730 at Harvard. So, there he was, twisting the truth again, for one purpose: self-aggrandizement... which his pathetic supporters just eat up.

Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Dave Weigel spent some time looking at why Trump is legitimately making sense to some voters-- including Democrats-- among hard-hit Michigan workers. Trump is, insists Weigel, "the candidate talking most directly about the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries." He acknowledges that Bernie Sanders "has adopted a similar theme," not bothering to mention that Bernie's entire political career going back several decades has centered on these concerns and that Trump's concerns are ego-driven psychosis, probably because that isn't how disaffected Michigan voters he talked to see it. "Trump's appeal here," he wrote, "captured something that went beyond policy: a brew of impossible nostalgia coupled with a pledge to destroy other countries, most notably China, in negotiations."

“Back when our economy took a dump, I had to go to Afghanistan,” said Bob Parsons, 51. “I had to work there as a product relations manager, just to build our retirement back up. There were no jobs in Michigan to be had. They’re not fair to what’s coming over, as far as the trade goes. For example, 100,000 cars come over here; 5,000 go over there. I like what he says: If they don’t let us send them there, we don’t take their stuff.”

Parsons’s wife, Brenda, who’d been nodding her head, interjected to explain why she trusted Trump.

“He’s a businessman,” she said. “Being a businessman, he knows the ways around. I don’t think he’d go to Congress and ask. I think he’d just do it.”

Bob Parsons explained that Trump could ignore lobbyists. It was lobbyists, hungry to sell out America for a buck, who weakened the trade deals, he said.

“You wouldn’t believe how many young kids I met in Afghanistan who have their degrees but can’t find jobs at home,” he said. “I compare Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan. He lets people know what he’s going to do, not what to ask for.”

When he hit the stage, Trump delivered. He went after China. He played out one of his favorite scenarios, in which he works the Oval Office phones, ignoring the president of Ford-- and his lobbyists-- and wages tax war on his company for shipping jobs to Mexico.

“Ford is building a $2.5 billion plant in Mexico,” he said.

Booooo!

“I’ll actually give them a good idea. Why don’t we just let the illegals drive the cars and trucks right into our country?”

Yaaaaaay!

“I would say, the deal is not going to be approved, I won’t allow it. I want that plant in the United States, preferably here. So then I only have one question: Do they move the plant to the United States the same day or a day later?”

The crowd burst into fresh applause.

What Italian workers saw in Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party in the early 1920s is what Michigan workers like Brenda Parsons see in Trump. Mussolini opposed class war and replaced it with nationalism and a yearning for Rome's glory days as an empire. He demonized Slavs in the same way Trump demonizes Mexicans. In a speech Mussolini gave in 1920, a year before he was first elected to parliament, he told the crowd in Pula:

When dealing with such a race as Slavic-- inferior and barbarian-- we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy... We should not be afraid of new victims... The Italian border should run across the Brenner Pass, Monte Nevoso and the Dinaric Alps... I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians...

Mussolini pursued imperialistic policies in Africa with the same reasoning: Blacks are "inferior."

In 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini to form a government in the hope of avoiding a civil war. A year later Mussolini invaded Corfu, a Greek island in the Adriatic. Italians ate up the cult of the strong man which Mussolini promoted through propaganda. He bragged about how smart he was, what a great athlete he was, a skilled musician and a gifted philosopher. I bet Brenda Parsons doesn't know squat about Mussolini-- if she's even ever heard of him.



Trump was at the Iowa State Fair Saturday-- for a few minutes. Philip Bump wrote about it for the Washington Post and summed up the press conference in a couple of lines:

Donald Trump loves Iowa. He loves children. He'll spend as much as it takes, up to a billion dollars. He'll bend Congress to his will as he bent the New York City Zoning Commission. Jeb Bush is a puppet of lobbyists and Scott Walker ran Wisconsin poorly.

All bullshit-- other than the last line.

The guy who wrote the song "Ahab the Arab" in 1962, Ray Stevens, thinks all Mexican "illegals" should be forcibly removed from this country. He didn't mention undocumented immigrants from other countries. But he's been telling anyone who will listen that he thinks Trump is the only one who can get America back on track. And speaking of tracks, this is the last one he released: