Category: Uncategorized

Republicans win by fraud.

Think about it: of the last 8 times a Republican won election or re-election to the presidency, 6 of them were won with fraud. That’s 5 of the last 6 elected Republican presidents. And that’s only what we know of—we didn’t find out about Nixon and Vietnam until recently, and there may be a lot more.

1968: Nixon illegally derails the Paris Peace Talks, which could have swung the election back to the Democrats.

1972: Nixon embarks on massive fraud campaign of “dirty tricks,” including bugging the Democratic National Headquarters, leading to the Watergate scandal and his eventual resignation.

1980: Reagan colludes with Iranians to delay the release of US hostages; Iran cooperates, releasing then only after Reagan took office. Reagan then illegally sold arms to Iran, leading to the Iran/Contra scandal which nearly derailed his second term in office.

2000: Katherine Harris fraudulently expanded the Florida felon’s list to illegally disenfranchise tens of thousands of Democratic voters, leading to a razor-thin victory for Bush in Florida, thus stealing the election for Bush.

2004: Aside from the beginnings of voter suppression laws, a fraudulent “speed boat” campaign, and the highly questionable nature and behavior of eminently hackable voting machines in swing states managed by a company whose owner actively campaigned for Bush—the Bush administration actively abused the nation’s national security mechanism to generate false “terror warnings” (the nation was still in a state of fear and shock following 9/11) at exact, carefully-chosen moments in the election where John Kerry was beginning to gain momentum. The fraudulent warnings served to derail Kerry’s momentum and bring attention back to Bush.

2016: Aside from now massive voter suppression now built into many key states’ laws, Russian collusion and hacking, and the extreme abuse of Republicans’ authority in Congress to carry out non-stop fraudulent “hearings” and “investigations” of anything and everything that they could throw at Hillary Clinton—the Republican Director of the FBI, James Comey, 11 days before the election, released a bombshell that he was re-opening the investigation into Clinton’s emails, based on flimsy evidence. Comey claims he had to release or “conceal”—but he had no problem concealing the far more significant ongoing investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Comey’s decisions derailed what was considered a sure win for Clinton.

Note that 3 of the 6 cases of fraud included collusion with foreign powers—Vietnam, Iran, and Russia. Quite a team of allies the GOP has there.

Again, this is only what we know about—there could be more. It undeniably establishes a pattern of fraud in U.S. elections on the part of Republicans that spans the last half century.

Republicans win by fraud, pure and simple.

So, let’s see: the Republican “health care” plan would cut $880 billion from health care for the poorest Americans, but only save $337 billion from the budget; it would destroy coverage for 24 million Americans and savagely cost people in their 50s and 60’s thousands of dollars a year extra in premiums, but give wealthy people and corporations $600 billion in tax cuts.

Someone please explain to me: how is this a “health care” plan? Of course, it’s not. It’s illness and death for the poor and the middle class plus a cash bonus for the wealthy.

The takeaways:

1. 24 million cut from health care means approximately 52,000 Americans would die each year who would not if the Republicans let the ACA alone. Going by the number of people kicked off their coverage over time (17 million by 2018, 21 million by 2020, and 24 million by 2026), that comes out to roughly 464,000 Americans dead over the next ten years, and more than half a million dead Americans every decade after that.

2. Poor people could see their premiums rise by as much as $13,000 a year, one reason why so many would lose coverage; those who maintain coverage would still be financially devastated, depressing their spending power and thus the economy.

3. The budget would be cut by no more than $34 billion per year, a fraction of what the deficit totals. Trump plans to hike the already bloated military budget by $54 billion. If Trump raised that by only $20 billion instead, the relative cost of the ACA would be covered.

4. Rich people get rewarded. I am not sure exactly how this fits into a health care plan. An alternative way to pay for the ACA would be to hike their taxes by only half of what Republicans want to cut from them.

This isn’t a health care plan. It’s an abattoir for the poor which profits the rich. It is a design by someone with literally no human conscience. It is, literally, malevolent.

Last Friday, a protester was shot at a protest outside a speech made by alt-right Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos. It appears that the man who shot the protester is alt-right himself—according to his Facebook page, a Trump supporter, a Yiannopoulos supporter, and a member of the NRA.

Right now the details are not all in yet, but reportedly the shooter claims, via a Facebook message to Yiannopoulos himself, that he was “sucker-punched,” apparently not so hard as he referred to the alleged assailant as “limp-wristed,” and lost his “Make America Great Again” cap. Reportedly this happened about an hour before the shooting event.

The victim was Josh Dukes, a Wobbly who is anti-racist and anti-fascist; reportedly his function at the event was to de-escalate any potential violence.

Video of the event taken from a slight distance shows the two separated; the shooter takes several steps forward, looking intently at someone. Dukes strides towards the man and just before he arrives, still not looking at Dukes, the man raises his hand, in which he is holding a cloth or something covered with a cloth. Dukes arrives in time to push away the shooter’s hand, and they enter into a struggle. Between eight and ten seconds later, Dukes is shot by the man, who then flees the scene.

When the shooting occurred, the speech indoors was temprarily halted; when Yiannopoulos retook the stage, one report has him saying, “If I stopped my event now, we are sending a clear message that they can stop our events by killing people. I am not prepared to do that.” The alt-right crowd rose and cheered. Yiannopoulos, styling himself as a journalist, apparently knows much less about collecting facts and making statements of fact than he does about jumping to conclusions and blaming the opposition as a knee-jerk reaction.

Here’s the element that many people, surprisingly many of them self-identifying as gun enthusiasts, appear not to understand about carrying firearms in public: if you bring a gun to a situation, you have a heightened level of responsibility. When armed with a weapon designed to kill someone, it is up to you to avoid confrontation that rises to the level where the gun is necessary.

But here, the gunman brought his weapon to a highly-charged situation, one which he approached and then strode into. That violates a primary rule of any citizen carrying a loaded weapon in public: avoid conflict at all costs. This man, carrying a loaded gun, went directly into one. Indeed, by his own claims, he had already been assaulted, and then, armed, waded back into the fray.

That alone makes him more responsible for what happened than almost anything else. It made George Zimmerman more responsible when, against strict instructions by police, he approached Trayvon Martin with his gun, and it made Rodney Peairs more responsible when he left his home to confront two youths with a gun, shooting one of them dead.

One thing made clear in the video: the gunman was never in danger of life or limb. He was in a struggle, and possibly could have gotten hurt, but serious injury or death was highly unlikely.

Either way, whoever this shooter is, he bears the highest level of responsibility in the shooting.

The victim was in critical condition after the shooting, but his status was changed to “satisfactory” and he is now recovering. The shooter reportedly turned himself in to police several hours later; The police released him and did not charge him with a crime.