Not Yummy-- Republican Stew

Recall when Lev and Igor were caught laundering Russian money into the Trump campaign and the campaign of dozens of Republicans in Congress? Yesterday, Christian Berthelson reported that Lev-- one of the Giuliani criminal associates was handed a million bucks from Putin in September "a month before he was charged with conspiring to funnel foreign money into U.S. political campaigns. The DOJ-- though obviously not William Barr-- is asking the courts to withdraw his bail and throw Lev in the clink, technically for understating his income and assets. Their filing with the court: "Parnas failed to disclose, in describing his income to the government and pretrial services, the fact that in September 2019, he received $1 million from a bank account in Russia into Account-1. The payment raises provocative new questions about the nature of the work Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were doing and who they were doing it for. Much about the nature of their work remains unclear."

Greg Olear reminds us that the House has already found William Barr in contempt of Congress. Now he is urging Congress to "take him into custody until he 1) releases the full Mueller documents to the House Intelligence Committee and 2) allows all the president’s accomplices to honor their subpoenas... Trump, with Barr as his first mate, has steered the country into uncharted territory. It’s time for the good guys to take back the helm." From Prevail, Olear's blog, this morning: "He seems so nice. Unlike Paul Manafort, who presents as the mobbed-up asshole he is, or Roger Stone, who arrayed himself like a comic-book villain, or Corey Lewandowski, who comes across as the drunken lout rooting for the other team behind you at the game, Bill Barr doesn’t look like a bad guy. He has a kind face, gentle eyes, a full head of hella-good hair, bookish glasses, and an avuncular manner. His pleasing plumpness is more Kris Kringle than Jabba the Hutt. In a word, he’s cuddly. But make no mistake: the once and current Attorney General is the most dangerous man in America. He may well be the Devil himself."

The third and most effective of Trump’s Attorneys General follows the same pattern. The man who leads the Department of Justice does not believe in justice—at least, not the American version of it. Indeed, Barr does not seem to believe in democracy at all. “Might makes right” is his credo. And he has made it his mission to ensure that the president’s might rivals that of a Saudi king, medieval Pope, or Roman emperor. He is, at best, a monarchist, and at worst, a raging Fascist. He is not just a traitor. He is an apostate, rejecting completely the prevailing faith of his countrymen—our American faith in democracy.

Donald Trump is a monarchist, too, in that he sees himself as some sort of king. But that is a function of his own narcissism and insecurity, not a coherent worldview. Barr is different. In a nation founded by revolutionaries, by patriots, he is a Tory-- a redcoat. It is not difficult to imagine him dolled up in white wig and fancy get-up, grovelling before George III.

His treachery is so obvious as to be indisputable. But Barr is unique among the Trump loyalists for two reasons: First, he’s competent. Second, his motives are more opaque.

OK, now I want you to add something else to a brew you can probably already tell is going to be very toxic. Wednesday deranged Texas Trumpist, Louie Gohmert publicly named the whistleblower during a Judiciary impeachment hearing, illegally endangering his life.

Three faces of today's Republican Party

Next ingredient: As of Friday since his defeat, outgoing-- as in defeated-- Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin granted 428 pardons and commutations to typical Republicans, like one convicted of raping a child, another who hired a hit man to kill his business partner and a third who killed his parents. But the big news was how Bevin pardoned Republican Patrick Baker who was convicted of reckless homicide, robbery, impersonating a peace officer and tampering with evidence-- whose family threw a fundraiser for Bevin and raised him $21,500 towards retiring his campaign debt. Commonwealth’s Attorney Jackie Steele, who prosecuted Baker and other defendants for the 2014 death of Donald Mills, noted that "two of Baker’s co-defendants are still in prison. 'What makes Mr. Baker any different than the other two?' he asked. Answering that question, he said he believes Baker was pardoned while the others remain locked up because Baker’s family has given generously to Bevin. State records show that Victoria Baker, who lives at the same Corbin address where the fundraiser was held, donated $1,000 in 2015 and that Kathryn Baker gave another $500 to Bevin’s reelection in March"... Bevin commuted his sentence to time served and gave him a pardon."





Yes, I'm concocting a recipe for today's GOP. And it would be a big mistake to not include Fox in that recipe-- a more than key ingredient. In an e-mail to his supporters, Florida garden variety Democrat Lois Frankel wrote that 47% of residents in her D+9 South Florida district watch Fox News, "more than in any other congressional district in the entire country." She whined that "wth Fox News ramping up their propaganda efforts in our district, we need your help" to reelect her. "Republicans are raising big money to defeat Democrats in Florida, and with the Fox News propaganda machine on their side, it’s going to take a real grassroots effort to fight back."

Wired went much further, noting that Fox News is now a threat to national security. Garrett Graff reported that "the network’s furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous."

Sean Hannity, who had long trumpeted the forthcoming inspector general report and expected a thorough indictment of the behavior of former FBI director James Comey and other members of the “deep state,” had a simple message for his viewers during Fox’s Monday night prime time: “Everything we said, everything we reported, everything we told you was dead-on-center accurate,” he said. “It is all there in black and white, it’s all there.”

Except they weren’t right and it wasn’t there. But Fox News’ viewers evidently were not to be told those hard truths-- they were to be kept thinking that everything in their self-selected filter bubble was just peachy keen.

Over on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs said the mere fact that the IG found no political bias in the FBI’s investigation of Trump and Russia in 2016 was de facto proof of the power of the deep state.

John Harwood, long one of Washington’s most respected conservative voices in journalism, summed up Fox’s approach Monday night simply: “Lunacy.”

It’s worse than lunacy, though. Fox’s bubble reality creates a situation where it’s impossible to have the conversations and debate necessary to function as a democracy. Facts that are inconvenient to President Trump simply disappear down Fox News’ “memory hole,” as thoroughly as George Orwell could have imagined in 1984.

The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia’s Internet Research Agency or China’s Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own-- and I, a paid contributor to its competitor CNN, may appear a biased voice anyway-- but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America’s democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer.

The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it’s clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America’s foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.

In the impeachment hearings, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill and other witnesses made clear how those who, like Fox News hosts and the president, advance the false narrative that Ukraine meddled in the US election are serving the Kremlin’s interests. Russia is playing a weak hand geopolitically-- its economy is sputtering along and its population shrinking-- and so its greatest hope is to stoke internal discord in the West. Robert Mueller warned of this; James Clapper has warned of it; and now Fiona Hill has done the same. “Our nation is being torn apart,” she said. “Truth is questioned.” Yet Fox, and the GOP more broadly, has warmly embraced almost every twist of Kremlin propaganda, up to and including the idea that Russia never meddled in the 2016 election to begin with.

Fox’s clear willingness to parry the wingnuttiest ideas in service of the president, long-term implications to the United States be damned, should worry all concerned about the state of the United States. The Ukraine myth is hardly the only example; for years, it has repeated false conspiracies about the murder of Democratic staffer Seth Rich, a conspiracy literally cooked up by Russian intelligence and fed into the US media. (To say nothing of Fox’s long-term commitment to undermining and questioning climate science, leaving the US both behind in mitigating the worst effects of climate change and also ill-equipped to face the myriad security consequences of a warming planet.)

...[A]s the year has unfolded, Fox’s evening talk shows and its presidentially endorsed morning show have proven to be a particularly egregious and odious swamp of fetid, metastasizing lies and bad faith feedback loops that leave its viewers-- and, notably, its Presidential Audience of One-- foaming at the mouth with outrage and bile.

It’s hard not to think that the increasingly odd behavior and untethered-to-reality pronouncements of the president’s two top lawyers-- Attorney General Bill Barr and personal defender Rudy Giuliani-- have not been deeply influenced by the filter bubble on the right created, fostered, and fertilized by Fox News. As Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey tweeted after Barr set out on his Quixotic quest to prove the deep state was behind the FBI’s 2016 investigation, “The Attorney General is a fully-committed Fox News conspiracy theorist.”

The network’s pantheon of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, and the rotating couch-cast of Fox & Friends’ morning show dunces-by-choice together represent a level of ill-informed demagoguery that would make Father Coughlin and Huey Long wince.

More than simply embarrassing themselves by spouting obvious falsehoods, though, Fox News’ incendiary, fanatical rants serve to delegitimize to its viewers the very idea of a political opposition. Every Democrat is evil. Every person who disagrees with President Trump is an enemy of the state. Every career federal employee is a member of a deep state opposition.

As writer Gabe Sherman, who authored a history of Fox News, tweeted over the weekend, “Been thinking a lot about why Trump will survive impeachment when Nixon didn’t. For 20+ years Fox News (and rightwing talk radio) has told GOP voters that Democrats are evil. As lawless as Trump is, Republicans believe Dems are worse. That’s the power of propaganda.”

These pronouncements-- uttered around the clock on weekdays and doubled down on weekends by hosts like the president’s favorite, Jeanine Pirro-- are an attack on the very ideals and foundations of the American experiment.

The founders settled on political parties as a mechanism to institutionalize channels for ongoing debate. As historian Joseph Ellis wrote in American Creation, political parties “eventually permitted dissent to be regarded not as a treasonable act, but as a legitimate voice in an endless argument.” It is that willingness to view opponents as legitimate that has long allowed America to hold together even under trying political times and to deal with political disagreements in the political arena, rather than resorting to violence against national leaders. For all of Fox News and President Trump’s daily declaration of coups and attempted coups against the administration, American history has actually been shockingly free of actual coups.

...That tradition and idea of American politics as an ongoing conversation, an endless argument, is key to preserving our democratic experiment. The idea that you will be in power sometimes, and out of power other times, is what preserves norms and traditions, and curbs the worst abuses and impulses; politicians traditionally understand that actions taken in the majority could serve to bite them if and when they return to the minority.

Donald Trump, who rose to prominence trumpeting the very “birther” falsehood that McCain once batted away, seems bent on undermining that tradition; he has proven he’s perfectly willing to burn down political norms for short-term gain. Fox News seems intent on helping him-- and on a daily basis, they’re telling their viewers he’s right and anyone who disagrees with him is less than human. Trump’s lies are the one constant and consistent position of his presidency (13,000 and counting!), and Fox News has gone all in.

We, as a democratic society, cannot survive such consequences-be-damned, winner-take-all, facts-don’t-matter politics. Fox News has upended Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous proclamation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Its daily programming seems driven by the idea that everyone might be entitled to their own facts, but that there is only one correct opinion: President Trump’s.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote his imagined dystopian regime “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” but Fox News has actually figured out a tactic even more pernicious: Fox News’ own masters of Orwellian doublespeak, its Hannitys, Carlsons, and Doocys, the ones who smugly declare down up and up down, aren’t even bothering to tell their viewers to ignore their eyes and ears, because the truth never even approaches their airtime.

Let’s hope that Fox News today, unlike in Orwell’s world, doesn’t manage to succeed in transforming our country from a functional democracy into an authoritarian cult.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Today's meme is a "special" gem. It's total FOX "News" Channel bullcrap. I was in elementary school in the 1950s. We never had one iota of "firearms safety" instruction. No one I've talked to since FOX "News" spewed out this insane lie 4 years ago ever experienced such instruction in the classroom, regardless of what part of the country they were from. In my little conservative Republican town, we didn't even receive such instruction after a local 7-year-old tragically got his dad's gun out of a safe and shot and killed a 6-year-old playmate in the family living room, right in front of his other playmates, including the victim's sister. We did get the old "duck and cover" to protect us from atomic bombs though. Brilliant. The only firearms instruction I ever personally received was as a teen at summer camp and on weekends when I competed in target shooting, as an NRA member by the way. Maybe in a very few places around the country kids got proper instruction in their schools but such a thing was in no way, not even close, "standard curriculum" as FOX "News" would have us believe. But, that's GOP-TV for you.

That FOX "News" has always existed to warp perceptions of reality is a known despicable fact of this nation's history. After all, it's creator, Roger Ailes called it GOP-TV when he first presented the idea of FOX "News" to Richard Nixon. It was designed to mimic TASS and Pravda, the old Soviet state news operations (propaganda operations) that would tell the world, with a straight face, gems like Russia invented baseball and that those living in East Germany were much happier than those living in West Germany due to the glorious successes that communism had brought to East Germany. In fact, they often said, things were so good in East Germany that they had to build a wall to keep the rest of the world out. I was reminded of this in 2012 when, during his campaign, republican Mitt Romney visited a Chinese factory and stated that conditions for the all but completely enslaved workers were so good that the wall around the factory was to keep the onslaught of people who wanted to also work there, under the same miserable conditions, out. FOX "News" reported Romney's statement as truth. Why wouldn't they? -GOP-TV.

So now we have Rudy Giuliani literally spitting and drooling out his nightly lunatic ravings to the applause of brainwashed lunatics across America, cheered on, in fact, employed by the biggest raving lunatic of all, the big orange freak who wants to be president for life, all with the support of seemingly his entirely subversive Republican Party who, to a man and woman alike, run to the FOX "News" microphones at every opportunity that presents itself. Gotta reach those lunatic voters! -GOP-TV.

"Truth Isn't Real." That's the motto of GOP-TV. It's the opposite of "The Truth Will Set You Free" aka the motto of the CIA, adapted from the words of Jesus as stated in the Bible (Book of John) when he spoke of the power of learning, understanding and knowledge. So, it's no wonder that FOX "News" attacks the intelligence community in the service of Russia and any other enemy of America 24 hours a day. Hell, why not, FOX "News" attacks the very concept of intelligence period. And to think that Republicans will throw their own twisted version of the Bible at you at the drop of a hat, just like any Muslim terrorist would do with the Koran, such irony! FOX "News" will even attack the science that brings the airwaves of their bullshit into American homes. -GOP-TV.

"What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." "Alternative facts." -GOP-TV.

Remember your George Orwell: "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." -GOP-TV.

Why Don't People Like Trump Personally?

The new Quinnipiac poll asked people if they "like" Señor Trumpanzee as a... um, person. Only 31% do. (59% do not.) Let's break that number down among various demographic groups. They reported on how much each of these groups like him as a person:

• Republicans- 66%
• Democrats- 8%
• Independents- 24%
• Men- 36%
• Women- 27%
• Whites with college degree- 28%
• Whites- 34%
• Blacks- 24%
• Hispanics 19%
• 18-34 year olds- 28%
• 35-49 year olds- 30%
• 50-64 year olds- 36%
• people over 65 years old- 31%

"There's a lot of corrupt that went on both in the campaign and in the White House," said Omarosa. "And I'm going to blow the whistle on all of it." That may be a reason when people don't like him. She also asserted that he knew the content of the stolen (hacked) e-mails before wikileaks released them. That's stunning.



There are lots of reasons for Americans to dislike Trump. The Daily Beast came up with another one yesterday, an Orwellian situation straight out of 1984: Chinese Cops Now Spying on American Soil. And that's more than icky. Start with as many as a million Uighursand other ethnic minorities-- maybe more-- held in concentration camps in northwest China.

As part of a massive campaign to monitor and intimidate its ethnic minorities no matter where they are, Chinese authorities are creating a global registry of Uighurs who live outside of China, threatening to detain their relatives if they do not provide personal and identifying information to Chinese police. This campaign is now reaching even Uighurs who live in the United States.

...At the same time, Beijing has been constructing an experimental high-tech totalitarian regime in Xinjiang. They’ve lined the streets with security cameras equipped with facial-recognition software, created a region-wide DNA database of all residents, and implemented a rating system encoded in every person’s ID card, categorizing the individual as “safe” or “not safe” based on criteria including how often the person prays.

These technologies, first tested on Uighurs and other ethnic minority groups, are now being exported to countries like Pakistan as part of China’s “safe cities” project.

As a result of the growing oppression, many Uighurs have tried to flee abroad. But Beijing has launched an unprecedented global campaign to get them back, or to monitor them where there are. China has used its geopolitical clout to repatriate, forcibly if necessary, Uighurs living or studying in countries from Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, and even the United States. Of those who returned to China, many immediately disappeared, presumably into one of the camps. China also recruits Uighurs living abroad, as detailed in a Buzzfeed report in July.

Now, Beijing is seeking to create a detailed database of those who haven’t returned.

“The reason that Uighurs are a canary in a coal mine,” explained Millward, “the reason that everyone should pay attention to this, even if they aren’t concerned about the fate of this ethnic group, is that these are tools of control that are now being employed by the CCP and are easily applied to other individuals as well.”

“The totalization and securitization of information in China, and then the globalization of that reach, is most apparent with regard to the Uighurs but is by no means limited to Uighurs,” he said.

The growing human rights crisis in Xinjiang, and China’s expanding campaign of control and harassment abroad, has attracted growing attention from U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups. On July 26, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China held a hearing on the crisis there, and lawyers and activists are pushing for the U.S. government to levy sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act on the Chinese officials directly responsible for the concentration camps.

For Uighurs living in the United States, demands from Chinese police thousands of miles away serve as an unwelcome reminder that nowhere, not even the United States, is free from the long arm of the Chinese state.

Things Politicians Want To Achieve-- Trump's Real Spy-Gate

It was easy to back candidates Ted Lieu, Pramila Jayapal, Mark Pocan, Keith Ellison, Judy Chu, Jamie Raskin, Karen Bass... They had all been in state legislatures where they had created records that showed how awesome they would be in Congress. None of them have disappointed. This cycle, candidates like Jared Golden (ME-02), Lisa Brown (WA-05), Ellen Lipton (MI-09) and Kaniela Ing have built tremendous records of accomplishment in their state legislatures, each one demonstrating an ability to put forth successful cutting edge efforts on progressive policy initiatives. And each one a leader beyond just voting well, of course.

What do I mean? Let me give you a simple example. Earlier this year, the Honolulu Star Advertiser gave a perfect and very typical instance in a report by Kevin Dayton-- State official wants study of government 'jobs for all'. If you guessed that state official is Kaniela, pat yourself on the back. He's proposing (House Bill 1992) a state task force to study whether Hawaii's state government can provide a job for everyone who needs one. That's a good way to signal constituents and to move worthwhile and cutting edge proposals forward.

The Trumpanzee Regime has a very different perspective on what to move forward. How about the Trump Regime moving ahead with its Orwellian-- i.e., fascist-- plans? The Department of Homeland Security has just announced that it intends to compile a comprehensive list of hundreds of thousands of "journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.," and collect any "information that could be relevant" about them.  Something tells me that conservatives are going to be as unenthusiastic about this as progressives. This is something that will separate the fascists from the conservatives. Neo-Nazis like Devin Nunes R-CA), Diane Black (R-TN), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Brian Babin (R-TX) might get excited about this kind of thing but mainstream conservatives will be pulling out their hair by the roots.

So if you have a website, an important blog or you are just very active on social media, the Department of Homeland Security is going to put you on a list and will start collecting information about you.  The DHS has already announced that it will hire a contractor to aid in monitoring media coverage, and they will definitely need plenty of help because it is going to be a very big job…

As part of its “media monitoring,” the DHS seeks to track more than 290,000 global news sources as well as social media in over 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, for instant translation into English. The successful contracting company will have “24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.” in order to “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.”

“Any and all media coverage,” as you might imagine, is quite broad and includes “online, print, broadcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, local sources, national/international outlets, traditional news sources, and social media.”

If this sounds extremely creepy to you, that is because it is extremely creepy.

...Freedom of speech is one of our most foundational rights, and many are concerned that “monitoring and tracking” are initial steps that could lead to a significant crackdown on Internet activity. Just check out what is about to happen over in Europe.  The Internet has made it possible for ordinary people to communicate with one another on a massive scale, and any efforts by national governments to interfere with that must be greatly resisted.

Unfortunately, it appears that this new Department of Homeland Security program is moving ahead rapidly.  In fact, it is being reported that seven different companies have “already expressed interest” in participating…

Seven companies, mainly minority- or women-owned small businesses, have already expressed interest in becoming a vendor for the contract, according to the FedBizOpps web site.

All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to be nothing. Please spread word about this creepy new surveillance program to everyone that you know, because what they are doing is not right.

If you've spent any time reading DWT, you'd know I ran right to Alan Grayson with this. And he was ready. "There is a phrase," he told me, "that is already widespread in Europe, and codified in European law: the 'right to be left alone.' We’ll see how long it takes before we here wake up and realize that that’s our right, too."

Fear Keeps Us All In Line

I haven’t heard Roger Waters’ new album— his first in 25 years, released last week— Is This The Life We Really Want?, yet, just the title track… which I urge you to listen to too. Sonically, the resemblance to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, will make you feel comfortable— and make the austere, even chilling, message, easier to digest and grapple with. I’ve been reading an anthology of essays, edited by Lori Perkins, 1984 In The 21st Century, which put me right in the proper head space for Waters’ music.

In his essay, How 1984 Can Decode Trump’s First 100 Days, attorney and self-described hacker with a Dali mustache, Alexander Urbelis, wrote of “the linguistic assault on, and blatant disregard for, the truth and rational thought by senior Trump administration officials and the President himself.”

We are now fighting a battle over who controls the very notion of what is real and fake, true and false. We cannot afford to mince words: President Trump and his staff have used and will use lies and deceit to create a false perception of reality that suits their political agenda.

They have espoused as truth unsupportable and untenable falsehoods on a daily basis, and it has become the near-full time responsibility of the media to call out the fictions of the administration. If we do not continue the struggle for basic honesty, we are warned by Orwell that uncorrected lies will be "passed into history and [become] truth."

1984 is a menacing tale about the fictional state of Oceania. It exists in a state of continuous and seemingly never-ending war, its institutions are notoriously revisionist and manipulative of public perception with no regard for historical facts or truth. Overseeing law and order and guarding against even minor rebellion is overt and omnipresent government surveillance; and in the seat of power directing all functions of state is Big Brother, a cult of personality demanding of the most intense personal and political loyalty.

Orwell's lessons, cautions and predictions have in my life never been more real and more serious than they are now. Those lessons and parallels merit serious consideration.

Much has been written about newspeak, the fictional language of Oceania, with its deliberately limited and constantly diminishing vocabulary, and how its assaults on truth and reason parallel Trump administration practices. The idea behind newspeak is that by reducing vocabulary it is also possible to constrict personal thought and the freedom of expression.

In Orwell's world, there is no such thing as the word "bad," it is instead "ungood." But could this very surface-level comparison between newspeak and Conway's characterization of Spicer's blatant lies as "alternative facts" really be spurring such a resurgence in interest in the 1984? Of course not. There is more.

In everything from his Cabinet appointments to the rationale for destabilizing executive orders, President Trump appears to have taken a cue directly from 1984’s fictional ministries, whose purposes are diametrically opposed to their names. Orwell's Ministry of Truth ("Minitrue" in newspeak), for example, had nothing to do with truth but was responsible for the fabrication of historical facts.

In that vein, President Trump has provided us, in the name of security, with a travel ban on immigrants and refugees from countries whose citizens have caused the terrorism deaths of no Americans, while leaving out countries whose citizens have caused the terrorism deaths of thousands of Americans.

He has provided us with Betsy DeVos, a secretary of education nominee who is widely believed to oppose public education, and who promotes the truly Orwellian-sounding concept of "school choice," a plan that seems well-intentioned but which critics complain actually siphons much-needed funds from public to private education institutions.

Andy Pudzer-- named to head the Labor Department, which is charged with promoting and protecting the welfare of wage earners-- has a checkered past with workers' rights and has actually praised the efficiency of robots over humans on account of automatons' inability to take vacation and file discrimination complaints.

And we cannot fail to mention that Scott Pruitt-- nominated to head the Environmental Protection Agency, which has responsibility to protect health and the environment-- as Oklahoma attorney general devoted his office to battling the EPA, actively sought deregulation of air pollution requirements, and spearheaded the attack on Obama's efforts to reduce global warming, the Clean Power Plan.

What is truly terrifying is that President Trump and his people refuse to recognize the contradictory nature of their positions, which is the condition perfectly described in 1984 as doublethink. "[T]o hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them," is doublethink. And most germane: "To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed," is doublethink.

Going hand-in-hand with the concept of doublethink was the notion of blackwhite: "a loyal willingness to say that black is white when party discipline demands." Blackwhite, however, is more sinister, in that it "means also the ability to believe that black is white ... to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed to the contrary."

We saw this firsthand when President Trump addressed staff members at the CIA. As he recalled his mental impressions of the inauguration crowd, he said, "I looked out, the field was-- it looked like a million, million and a half people." And I do not think he was lying. I believe that President Trump believed this because he had to believe it: The revision of events one day prior to his speech was necessary because it was the only way he could assert legitimacy to control the present moment. The worst, however, is not that Conway and Spicer so easily and willingly followed suit with their own acts of blackwhite, but that they really believed that we-- the media and the people-- would in turn do the same.

Perkins chose to lead off her anthology with David Brin’s George Orwell And The Self-Preventing Prophecy. “One of the most powerful novels of all time, published fifty years ago, foresaw a dark future that never came to pass,” he wrote. “That we escaped the destiny portrayed in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may be owed in part to the way his chilling tale affected millions, who then girded themselves to fight ‘Big Brother’ to their last breath. In other words, Orwell may have helped make his own scenario not come true.”

[In] Big Brother — Orwell showed us the pit awaiting any civilization that combines panic with technology and the dark, cynical tradition of tyranny. In so doing, he armed us against that horrible fate. In contrast to the sheep-like compliance displayed by subject peoples in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it seems that a ‘rebel’ image has taken charge of our shared imaginations. Every conceivable power center, from governments and corporations to criminal and techno-elites, has been repeatedly targeted by Hollywood’s most relentless theme... suspicion of authority.

…History is a long and dreary litany of ruinous decisions made by rulers in all centuries and on all continents. No convoluted social theory is needed to explain this. A common thread weaves through most of these disasters; a flaw in human character— self-deception— eventually enticed even great leaders into taking fatal mis-steps, ignoring the warnings of others.

The problem is devastatingly simple, as the late physicist-author Richard Feynman put it. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself— and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Many authors have railed against the cruelty and oppression of despots. But George Orwell focused also on the essential stupidity of tyranny, by portraying how the ferocious yet delusional oligarchs of Oceania were grinding their nation into a state of brutalized poverty. Their tools had been updated, but their rationalizations were essentially the same ones prescribed by oppressors for ages. By keeping the masses ill-educated, by whipping up hatred of scapegoats and by quashing free speech, elites in nearly all cultures strove to eliminate criticism and preserve their short-term status... thus guaranteeing long-term disaster for the nations they led.

This tragic and ubiquitous defect may have been the biggest factor chaining us far below our potential as a species. That is, till we stumbled onto a solution.

The solution of many voices.

Each of us may be too stubbornly self-involved to catch our own mistakes. But in an open society, we can often count on others to notice them for us. Though we all hate irksome criticism and accountability, they are tools that work. The four great secular institutions that fostered our unprecedented wealth and freedom— science, justice, democracy and market— function best when all players get to see, hear, speak, know, argue, compete and create without fear. One result is that the “pie” we are all dividing up keeps getting larger.

In other words, elites actually do better— in terms of absolute wealth— when they cannot conspire to keep the relative differences of wealth too great. And yet, this ironic truth escaped notice by nearly all past aristocracies, obsessed as they were with staying as far above the riffraff as possible.

Orwell saw this pattern, perhaps more clearly than anyone, portraying it in the banal and witless justifications given by Oceania apparachniks.

How have we done with his warning? Today, in the modern neo-west, even elites cannot escape being pilloried by spotlights and scrutiny. They may not like it, but it does them (and especially us) worlds of good. Moreover, this openness has helped prevent the worst misuses of technology that Orwell feared. Though video cameras are now smaller, cheaper and even more pervasive than he ever imagined, their arrival in numberless swarms has not had the totalitarian effect he prophesied, perhaps because— forewarned— we act to ensure that the lenses point both ways.

This knack of holding the mighty accountable, possibly our culture’s most unique achievement, is owed largely to those who gazed at human history and saw the central paradox of power— what’s good for the leader and what’s good for the commonwealth only partly overlap, and can often skew at right angles. In throwing out some of the rigid old command structures— the kings, priests and demagogues who claimed to rule by inherent right— we seem to be gambling instead on an innovative combination: blending rambunctious individualism with mutual-accountability.

Those two traits may sound incompatible at first. But any sensible person knows that one cannot thrive without the other.

…Criticism is the best antidote to error. Yet most humans, especially the mighty, try to avoid it. Leaders of past cultures crushed free speech and public access to information, a trend Orwell showed being enhanced by technology in a future when elites control all the cameras. In part thanks to Orwell's warning, ours may be the first civilization to systematically avoid this cycle, whose roots lie in human nature. We have learned that few people are mature enough to hold themselves accountable, but in an open society, adversaries eagerly pounce on each others' errors. To preserve our freedom, we must not try to limit the cameras— they are coming anyway and no law will ever prevent the elites from seeing. Instead, we must make sure all citizens share the boon— and burden— of sight. This is already the world we live in. One where the people look hard at the mighty, and look harder the mightier they are.

Orwell's dark future can’t come true if confident citizens have a habit of protecting themselves by seeing and knowing… Despite repeated efforts by our own hierarchs to justify one-way information flows, the true record of the last generation has been an indisputable and overwhelming dispersal of knowledge and the power to see. People are becoming addicted to knowing.

A new poll from the Associated Press shows that most Americans think Señor Trumpanzee “has little to no respect for the country’s democratic traditions.” 65% of Americans think he doesn’t have much respect for the country’s democratic institutions and traditions or has none at all. “Nearly a third of Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican party think Trump has little to no respect for the country’s democratic institutions, and a quarter disapprove of the job he’s doing as president. Nine in 10 Democrats and 6 in 10 independents say the same.”

I’ll just leave you with a paragraph from Marc Polite’s essay, Controlling The Present: How “1984” Predicted “Alternative Facts And “Fake News.” He reminded his readers that “In our political discourse soon after the inauguration of Donald Trump, a very curious term slipped into the lexicon. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, in defense of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer giving out false statements about the size of the crowds at the inauguration, said that he was giving out ‘alternative facts.’ Not lies, but ‘alternative facts.’ The term Orwellian applies her aptly.”

Remember the Ingsoc Party slogan: “Who controls the past, controls the future… who controls the present, controls the past.” Why not listen to Roger Waters’ song again?

In A Trumpf Regime, Will You Be A Thought Criminal?

A few days ago, we mentioned in passing that fans of Herr Trumpf are "looking for a fuehrer, a caudillo... end of story." It isn't the first time we've attributed Trumpf's rise in popularity-- despite his obvious short-comings-- to this need for a powerful daddy figure among-- I hate to say it-- life's losers. Buffeted by economic and cultural stresses, utterly brainwashed by the twisted faux-reality of Hate Talk Radio and Fox News, millions of Americans are ready to give up on democracy. Many aren't comfortable with-- or even capable of-- abstract thought. Jeb might think of them as uncouth. Trumpf is offering simple "solutions" in simple language. We've compared him to Willy Loman, P.T. Barnum, Benito Mussolini and, like many others, to Adolf Hitler. Even Ohio Governor John Kasich was comfortable making the connection between Trumpf and Hitler in an ad. And today, John Wayne's daughter, in endorsing Herr, didn't extol his character or his agenda-- just "we need a strong leader... like John Wayne." She used the word "strong" 3 times in less than one minute.

Do you think it is more important to raise a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. University of Massachusetts-based academic Matthew MacWilliams asserts that respondents who picked the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian, and make up the core of Trumpf supporters. "Trump," he wrote, "has already captured 43 percent of Republican primary voters who are strong authoritarians, and 37 percent of Republican authoritarians overall. A majority of Republican authoritarians in my poll also strongly supported Trump’s proposals to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, prohibit Muslims from entering the United States, shutter mosques and establish a nationwide database that track Muslims. And in a general election, Trump’s strongman rhetoric will surely appeal to some of the 39 percent of independents in my poll who identify as authoritarians and the 17 percent of self-identified Democrats who are strong authoritarians."

Sunday, MacWilliams, writing for Politico claims to have "found [that] a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump-- and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism. That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow."

He wrote that his research shows "that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter."

Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.

Not all authoritarians are Republicans by any means; in national surveys since 1992, many authoritarians have also self-identified as independents and Democrats. And in the 2008 Democratic primary, the political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. But Hetherington has also found, based on 14 years of polling, that authoritarians have steadily moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party over time. He hypothesizes that the trend began decades ago, as Democrats embraced civil rights, gay rights, employment protections and other political positions valuing freedom and equality. In my poll results, authoritarianism was not a statistically significant factor in the Democratic primary race, at least not so far, but it does appear to be playing an important role on the Republican side. Indeed, 49 percent of likely Republican primary voters I surveyed score in the top quarter of the authoritarian scale-- more than twice as many as Democratic voters.

...[T]he number of Americans worried about the threat of terrorism is growing. In 2011, Hetherington published research finding that non-authoritarians respond to the perception of threat by behaving more like authoritarians. More fear and more threats—of the kind we’ve seen recently in the San Bernardino and Paris terrorist attacks—mean more voters are susceptible to Trump’s message about protecting Americans. In my survey, 52 percent of those voters expressing the most fear that another terrorist attack will occur in the United States in the next 12 months were non-authoritarians-- ripe targets for Trump’s message.

Take activated authoritarians from across the partisan spectrum and the growing cadre of threatened non-authoritarians, then add them to the base of Republican general election voters, and the potential electoral path to a Trump presidency becomes clearer.

So, those who say a Trump presidency “can’t happen here” should check their conventional wisdom at the door. The candidate has confounded conventional expectations this primary season because those expectations are based on an oversimplified caricature of the electorate in general and his supporters in particular. Conditions are ripe for an authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity. And the institutions-- from the Republican Party to the press-- that are supposed to guard against what James Madison called “the infection of violent passions” among the people have either been cowed by Trump’s bluster or are asleep on the job.

It is time for those who would appeal to our better angels to take his insurgency seriously and stop dismissing his supporters as a small band of the dispossessed. Trump support is firmly rooted in American authoritarianism and, once awakened, it is a force to be reckoned with. That means it’s also time for political pollsters to take authoritarianism seriously and begin measuring it in their polls.

Too horrible to contemplate? It is that horrible but we had all better start contemplating it before it's too late. And sooner or later it will be too late. I recommend tapping on the thermometer and giving generously.

We Need Privacy From Big Brother, Not Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush And Chris Christie Sprying On Us

Several of the GOP's Deep Bench were on the network gasbag shows yesterday advocating doing away with whatever small amount of constitutional authority to prevent domestic spying on American citizens is still left. After all, they argued passionately, we're in mortal danger from evil Eurasia, I mean evil Eastasia... oops... no, no... ISIL or ISIS. Marco Rubio's or Chris Christie's Ingsoc will protect Airstrip One if we just give them the power to read our e-mails and listen to our phone calls. Is it possible these Republicans don't listen when Rand Paul (R-KY) and Justin Amash (R-MI) try to remind them of the prescient Benjamin Franklin quote above? Or do these two supremely unaccomplished mental midgets believe they are smarter than our Founding Fathers? Well, of course they do! Alan Grayson (D-FL) reminded me this morning that there's some compelling evidence not to go along with Rubio's, the Jebster's and Christie's hysteria. He emphasized that "The President appointed a panel to study the effect of domestic phone surveillance, and the panel found that not a single terrorist attack had been thwarted because of that program. If that doesn't convince you of the pointlessness of pervasive military surveillance of innocent Americans, then nothing will. Oh, and there is that other thing . . . the Fourth Amendment.

It shocked me last week when the Republicans allowed another sensible amendment to pass by Alan Grayson that protects the privacy of American citizens. The Republican chairman praised Grayson's amendment to his bill and recommended it to the House and it passed unanimously (voice vote). As Grayson put it to his supporters over the weekend, "this week, I struck a massive blow against anyone who wants to spy on American consumers." And he did.

Americans have a fundamental, constitutional right to privacy. Period.

End of discussion, right? I understand that. You understand that. But the voyeurs, spies and identity thieves don’t. They want to know what you’re up to, whether you like it or not.

That’s why this week I introduced, and passed, an amendment to establish and enforce privacy standards for the “smart meters” that monitor your home.

Today, smart meters report your energy usage to your utility company through cell phone system or the internet, without the need for a meter reader to visit your home. That information may or may not include personal account information, like your social security number.

Right now, that data is unencrypted. So anyone who drives by your home with the right equipment can read it.

Bad enough already? It gets worse.

Manufacturers and builders are starting to place chips with internet IP addresses into appliances, medicine cabinets, etc. They can (and will) be connected to your smart meter. (This is part of the so-called “internet of things.”) And manufacturers also are placing tiny, cheap RFID (radio frequency) tags on food, medicine, and other household items. Once it’s all networked, your fridge will be able to order whatever you just ate from Amazon, and have it restocked the next day.

Which is very, very cool. Unless anyone who drives by your home with the right equipment can find out what you eat, and what medicines you take. From your smart meter. That’s not cool at all.

So my amendment requires encryption. And I got it passed on Wednesday.

...This amendment still needs to work its way through the Senate, and it may require another vote in the House... You’ve done nothing wrong. So no one should monitor your telephone calls. No one should know which websites you visit. No one should photograph your mail. No one should know what you buy. And no one should know what you eat. Your right to privacy is crucial, and I’m ready to fight to protect it.

For three years in a row, Grayson has passed more legislation in a Republican-controlled House than any other Democrat, not by adopting the right-wing agenda the way Blue Dogs and New Dems do, but by finding points of common interest and then convincing all the relevant parties that not everything is partisan and that some things are just good for the country, including their own constituents. That's why there were no voices raised against Grayson's amendment, not even the worst of the corporate water-carriers, like Steny Hoyer, Patrick Murphy or Paul Ryan. By the way, you can support Grayson's Senate campaign here and elect someone willing and capable of doing the hard work it takes to actually look out for ordinary American families who don't hire their own lobbyists.

Has The American Mass Media Turned Itself Into An Arm Of A Government Propaganda Machine?

One month ago, to the day, we looked at a fascinating bit of interaction, billed as a HARDtalk interview, between Glenn Greenwald and a British government stooge who broadcasts propaganda on the BBC, Stephen Sackur, the voice of Establishment Group Think. You can hit that link above and watch the interview if you'd like because Greenwald refrerred to it Friday in a German computer conference, Hamburg's 30th annual Chaos Communication Congress on Friday. Greenwald's keynote address accused the media establishment of being "guilty of failing significantly with respect to accomplishing its most crucial role: keeping governments in check." Obviously Greenwald and the other journalists who took part in the Ed Snowden whistleblower episode strayed far from the propaganda role the mainstream media has been drifting into.

“It really is the case that the United States and British governments are not only willing but able to engage in any conduct no matter how grotesque,” Greenwald said. Nevertheless, he added, journalists tasked with reporting on those issues have all too often been compliant with the blatant lies made by officials from those governments.

...“[A]t one point I made what I thought was the very unremarkable and uncontroversial observation that the reason why we have a free press is because national security officials routinely lie to the population in order to shield their power and get their agenda advanced,” recalled Greenwald, who said it is both the “the goal and duty of a journalist is to be adversarial to those people in power.”

[Sackur:] “I just cannot believe that you would suggest that senior officials, generals in the US and the British government, are actually making false claims to the public,” he remembered being told on-air.

“It really is the central view of certainly American and British media stars, that when-- especially people with medals on their chest who are called generals, but also high officials in the government-- make claims that those claims are presumptively treated as true without evidence. And that it’s almost immoral to call them into question or to question their voracity,” he said.

“Obviously we went through the Iraq War, in which those very two same governments specifically and deliberately lied repeatedly to the government, to their people, over the course of two years to justify an aggressive war that destroyed a country of 26 million people. But we’ve seen it continuously over the last six months as well.”

From there, he went on to cite the example of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who earlier this year made remarks to Congress that were quickly proved false by documents leaked to Greenwald by Mr. Snowden. The very first National Security Agency document he was shown, Greenwald said, “revealed that the Obama administration had succeeded in convincing court, a secret court, to compel phone companies to turn over to the NSA every single phone record of every single telephone call.”

Clapper “went to the Senate and lied to their faces...which is at least as serious of a crime as anything Edward Snowden is accused of," Greenwald added.

But DNI Clapper aside, Greenwald said that the established media continues to reject the notion that government officials spew lies. Snowden’s NSA documents have exposed those fibs on more than one occasion, he noted, yet reporters around the world continue to take the word of officials as fact rather than dig from the truth.

“Their role is not to be adversarial. Their role is to be loyal spokespeople to those powerful factions that they pretend to exercise oversight,” Greenwald said.

But as the US, UK and other governments continue to feed the media lies, Greenwald said their operations are far from being single-pronged. The US “knows that its only hope for continuing to maintain its regiment of secrecy behind which it engages with radical and corrupt acts is to intimidate and deter and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and transparency activists from coming forward and doing what it is that they do by showing them that they’ll be subjected to even the most extreme punishments and there’s nothing that they can do about it,” he said. “And it’s an effective tactic.”

...The NSA’s goal, Greenwald said, is to “ensure that all forms of human communication... are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies.”

I just happen to be reading Stephen Kinzer's great new book on John Foster and Allen Dulles, The Brothers and Kinzer provides ample examples throughout the chapters dealing with Allen Dulles' role as CIA director of how he inaugurated the policies of subverting and coopting the media. Thursday we saw how he was able to get a NY Times reporter fired for reporting the inconvenient truth about Guatemala, just as the CIA was about the launch a covert war against that country and replace the democratically-elected president with a brutal fascist dictator more in line with CIA ideals. As Kinzer explained, the Dulles brothers, under the protection of President Eisenhower, were able to create "a nexus of power unmatched in American history."

Law prohibited the CIA from operating within the United States, but Allen interpreted it loosely. He sought to shape coverage of world events in the American press through calls to editors and publishers... Perhaps the most imaginative media operation was taking control of the animated film version of George Orwell's anti-totalitarian classic Animal Farm. The book's ending, in which animals realize that both ruling groups in the barnyard are equally corrupt, is a trenchant rejection of the binary worldview. Allen realized that this message implicitly contradicted much of what the United States was saying about the Cold War. By investing in the film and influencing its content through a team of operatives who included E. Howard Hunt... he arranged for the film version to end quite differenty. Only the pigs are corrupt, and ultimately patriotic rebels overthrow them. Orwell's widow was disgusted, but the film reached a wide audience. The United States Information Agency distributed it around the world.

Republicans always seek to fight totalitarianism-- or at least the kind that endangers American corporate profits-- with... what elese? totalitarianism. The Dulles brothers may have made it standard operating procedure for the American government, but Obama sure isn't doing anything to ameliorate a problem that got very much out of control under the Cheney-Bush administration.

Orwell Updated-- In An Infiniti Q50 TV Ad?

Or maybe it was Aldous Huxley's 1931 dystopian novel, Brave New World that the creators of Infinity's new television ad for the Q50 ("Factory of Life") based the new ad on. The blue chip advertising company, TBWA\CHIAT\DAY (part of the edgy and "disruptive" Omnicom marketing group) was also responsible for Apple's classic "1984" campaign for the newly introduced Macintosh (below) thirty years ago! That ad was conceived of by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas and Lee Clow at Chiat/Day, in Venice, California and directed by Ridley Scott, who had just directed Blade Runner, based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, the year before.

Lee Clow, formerly Chief Creative Officer of TBWA/Worldwide, is now Chairman and Global Director. Advertising Age says he's the advertising industry's "art director guru. With his low-key, casual manner belying his hard-work ethic, the bearded adman-in-flip-flops' leadership style has brought TBWA/Chiat/Day virtually every national and international award and honor." Clow earned a 2-year degree from a community college, Santa Monica. He's obviously read 1984 and seen Blade Runner. I have no idea if he's ever heard of Huxley's Brave New World, but I'd bet he has and that the team that did the Infiniti ad has as well.

Huxley, who was living in Mussolini's fascist Italy when he wrote the book (set in London in the year 2540), has told people he was influenced by H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods, although there is some controversy over whether or not Huxley also drew from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Fascism, corporate tyranny, behavioral conditioning and America's growing role in the world are all interwoven into the novel. He's not a fan of fascist, anti-Semitic American car manufacturer Henry Ford. Neil Postman contrasted the world's of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Postman added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

Special Monday afternoon DWT bonus: my favorite song by The Feelies: