Green Eagle

So we all know that freedom consists in businesses and their rich owners being able to do whatever they damned please, right?  And we have a classic example of how freedom helps the people of Texas live the good life that their Conservative overlords have promised them, in return for not caring about pollution, global warming and all those other meaningless obsessions of those dumb libruls. Today's example comes in the form of the city of Houston, the largest city in the nation that has no zoning regulations, because who has a right to tell someone what they can do with their own money, on their own land, amirite? And what does zoning have to do with the recent floods that have a good part of Houston under water?  Well, a couple of things.  First of all, zoning regulations in sane cities require that when an area is developed it has sufficient roads in and out of it so people can get out in an emergency.  No need for that kind of evil Government tyranny in Texas!...

To destroy any sense of truth that remains in the American political system.  This time, an anti-tax "rally" in Denver, featured in this article from Daily Kos: "Pathetic turnout for 'grassroots' tax reform rally funded by billionaire Koch brothers "Lavishly-funded conservative activist group American For Prosperity-Colorado promoted the hell out of today’s No More, Uncle Sam! Reform the Tax Code! rally in Lincoln Park across from the Colorado State Capitol...despite nearly 3 million residents and the promise of free BBQ for attendees, it appears roughly two dozen residents turned out. No telling how many are the caterers and AFP staff." Americans for Prosperity- one of the maze of phony organizations funded by the Koch brothers.  And here is a picture of the crowd which all of the Koch brothers' money and publicity generated: About two dozen, and that doesn't take into account how many of them are Koch staffers or the caterers of ...

What crime did Arpaio commit, after all?  He used his legal power to select people based on their ethnicity, and then place them in what he himself called concentration camps. You may want to argue about exactly what a person needs to do to be classified on the same degraded level of humanity as Nazis, but this is certainly it.  Arpaio then defied judicial rulings to stop this hateful behavior; it was for this that he was found guilty. Trump, in pardoning Arpaio, declared openly, if not is so many words, that it is okay to place people in concentration camps because of their ethnic origin, regardless of what the law says. That is Nazism pure and simple.  That is why Trump's pardon represents an open embrace by the President of the United States of the most degraded form of government the world has ever known. The fact that he still resides in the White House, after this incident is a horrible condemnation of his own party, which is the only agency with the power t...

Here's a little compilation of a few tweets from the last couple of days: This is what we are up against in this country.  There are no laws against stupidity and hatred.

From today's article in the New York Times by Glenn Thrush: "Hurricane Harvey was the rarest of disasters to strike during the Trump presidency — a maelstrom not of Mr. Trump’s making, and one that offers him an opportunity to recapture some of the unifying power of his office he has squandered in recent weeks.   In announcing his trips, he used the dulcet, reassuring and uplifting language of prior presidents. His rhetoric was strikingly different from his much-criticized pronouncements at a news conference this month when he equated the actions of leftist protesters in Charlottesville, Va., with the violent, torch-wielding alt-right activists who hurled anti-Semitic and racist epithets." He's pivoting!!! He's Presidential!!! One press conference in which he didn't make a colossal fool of himself, and combine that with thinly disguised promotion of fascism and hatred!  One press conference in which he didn't burst forth in irrelevent, vicious inv...

How many times have we heard the last year or two that the Democratic party is a pack of elitists who don't stand for anything?  Of course, that is a preposterous lie brought to us by the mainstream press, with a big helping hand this time around from the Berniebots.  Hillary had detailed proposals on just about everything, in contrast to Trump's platform of hatred, greed and racism, but the mainstream press just ignored it all.  Well, anyway, all of this idiotic carping led me to spend a few minutes writing out the bones of a platform for the Democrats, or to speak more plainly, a collection of Green Eagle's lunatic ideas about how to run our government, and here it is.  I hope you enjoy it, if you are persistent enough to actually take a look at it: A Platform for the Future A General Statement "Government of the people, by the people and for the people" The government must openly acknowledge that the interests of the overwhelming majority of its peopl...

Green Eagle has spent most of the morning cooking, and watching the hurricane coverage from Corpus Christi on the TV. In the now well established American tradition of caring about nothing but yourself, Green Eagle is pleased to report that no hurricane damage is expected at Corpus Christi College, where he was a graduate student long ago. Although, in all fairness, Green Eagle must admit that no category III hurricane is known to have hit Cambridge at least since the founding of Corpus Christi College, in 1352. I don't know where all of the pictures of the horrible weather now on TV are coming from.  Must be from the bad side of town.

So the headline says, just in time for another Republican President to be running FEMA. Maybe God does hate us.

From PPP Polls: "… Trump voters say they would rather have Jefferson Davis as President than Barack Obama 45/20." And let's just face an obvious fact here:  Trump voters don't know one God damned thing about Jefferson Davis except that he was for slavery- that he led a four years long murderous, treasonous rampage in order to keep having slaves.  That's it.  These people want black people returned to slavery, period.  I don't want to ever hear a single person claim that this means anything else.  They are for slavery, and for the subjugation of all non-whites, and that is why they are for Trump. Nazis had and worked to death hundreds of thousands of slaves, but even they did not openly brag about it.  In some way, what these people promise to bring us is worse than the Nazis were.  Deal with that, America.

As is my usual practice, I want to fairly quickly post some information about the attendance at Donald Trump's rally in Phoenix today, and the people who turned up to protest it.  I do not have the heart yet to comment on the utterly repugnant content of Trump's remarks, so I will stick to crowd size, first noting that Trump bragged as usual about the alleged huge size of his rally, and the small number of protesters outside. Well on to the evidence.  Here is the  most common view of the crowd inside the arena while Trump was speaking: If this was a view of the entire crowd, I think you would be justified in saying that there were less than four thousand people there, in fact, perhaps less than three thousand.  And in fact, this is pretty much the whole audience.  Here are two views from the back of the room: You can see that behind the viewpoint of the carefully cropped crowd picture above, there is almost nobody.  A miserable showing, ...

This time in Boston, where they showed up in typical numbers for  a laughingly named "Free Speech" rally this afternoon.  From Fox News (no link for them, sorry): "...dozens of rallygoers gathered at the historic Boston Common and were met with thousands of counterprotesters who had marched peacefully through downtown Boston...Only a few dozen conservatives turned out to the Boston rally, in stark contrast to the estimated 15,000 counterprotesters... an organizer has said he expected up to 1,000 people to attend. And here they are; first the "protesters:"  And then the counterprotesters:   Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said Friday that 500 officers -- some in uniform, others undercover -- were deployed to keep the peace Saturday. " They could have just assigned five policemen to every wingnut to protect them, or to keep them from driving their cars into the counterprotest, I guess. I loved some of the ways this was covered in th...

So what do we expect for Trump without Bannon?  I am positive that we are going to be bombarded over the next week or so with mainstream pundits' claims that Bannon has been radicalizing Trump all along, and now that he is gone we need to shut up and wait for Trump to pivot to being a reasonable President.  I am wondering today, however, if the exact opposite may be the case. Bannon is a real ideologue and cares a hundred times more about advancing his white supremacist, fascist agenda than Trump could ever care about anything but himself.  I wonder if Bannon has not been working constantly to keep Trump focused on Bannon's ideological goals, and has prevented him from spinning off into total lunacy on an almost daily basis.  Now that Bannon is gone, we will get another chance to just Let Trump Be Trump.  And that could be a spectacle far more horrible than anything we have seen so far.

Even now, after all we have seen, they will not speak the truth.  Today's example: Gail Collins at the New York Times: "Admit it — during the campaign you did not consider the possibility that if a terrible tragedy struck the country involving all of our worst political ghosts of the past plus neo-Nazism, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would know the appropriate thing to say but Donald Trump would have no idea." Even now, the miserable tools that get paid to write this garbage for the New York Times cannot bring themselves to admit the truth.  I can point you toward numerous left-leaning websites, like my own, which stated plainly all along who Trump was and what he was up to; plenty of people considered "the possibility" of what a Trump Presidency would mean, and far more importantly have been pointing out for years that it is not  Trump's goal alone, but the goal of the whole Republican party at least since Reagan- to erase the last vestiges of democracy in ...

Listen, those of us with any sense have known what has been going on both with Trump and the rest of the Republican party for a long time now, but I think it is safe to demand that, with one single thing Trump said in his God-forsaken tirade yesterday, we need never sit still for the pretense that there is a thing decent about him.  And this is the remark, which utterly strips any pretense from what they are really about: "Okay, what about the alt-left that came charging at us – excuse me – what about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?" Us.  There it is- Trump and the Nazis are "us."  With this unguarded remark, Trump admitted that he is one with the Nazis that inhabit this country.  Let there be no second thoughts about this; this was not a mere slip of the tongue but an ugly view right into his own heart.  We are presided over by a Nazi.  From here out, he is going to act like a Nazi...

And let's not pretend that anyone with a shred of sense didn't know that all along: "members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private." And not that private either, because plenty of us knew what he was up to all along, and knew, for that matter, that it has been the intent of the Republican party for forty years to reduce this country to an oligarchic dictatorship.  They may not have expected someone this crude to grab the reins and go galloping off into the sunset, but where he is headed is exactly where they have been headed for decades. And as of today, not one major Republican figure has dared to criticize him by name, because in the end, it is just his animalistic means that bother them, not the goal. So, today, orders went out from the White House to all Republicans that they had better tow the line, or perhaps end u...

Nothing to be learned here, I guess. Here are pictures of the various executives who have quit Trump administration panels in recent days due to his behavior:  Brian Krzanich, Intel  Elon Musk, Tesla  Ken Frazier, Merck  Kevin Plank, Underarmor  Klaus Kleinfeld, Arconic  Mario Longhi, US Steel Mark Fields, Ford In only one of these cases, did Donald Trump decide to attempt to publicly humiliate the executive in question; that would be Ken Frazier.  I wonder what made him different in Trump's eyes than all the others.

Just like the Republicans and the mainstream press have been promising us for a year now, today Donald Trump pivoted! He pivoted!!!!!!! Oh, not to being President.  He didn't pivot to that.  He pivoted to being Reich Chancellor. Almost as good, right?

I must say, I tried a couple of times the last few weeks to see if I shouldn't be writing another Wingnut Wrapup, but every time I quickly gave up, because what's the point in repeating what a bunch of right wing morons have to say, when our President is saying the same thing every day, and no one seems to care enough to shut him up?  But with the escalation of the right wing plan over the weekend, I think that it is important to see how these jackasses are going to try to rationalize away their ever-less-disguised hatred.  Ready or not, here we go: Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer, memorializing the victim of the white supremacist terror murder this weekend:  "She was Fat and a Drain on Society. Despite feigned outrage by the media, most people are glad she is dead, as she is the definition of uselessness. A 32-year-old woman without children is a burden on society and has no value.   Due to female privilege, and the fact that they do virtually nothing their enti...

I am interested in the large number of commentators that are so quick to compare the right wing terrorist who drove his car into a group of peaceful protesters this weekend, to the several associates of ISIS who have done the same thing in the last couple of years.   Nobody seems to have enough memory, however, to make the following obvious comment: You know, just about anyone on earth can get their hands on a car or a truck, and drive it into a crowd.  It's not high tech terrorism. A few years ago, ISIS was an actual state.  It had a government, it controlled a number of fairly large cities, it had a standing army, it had oil wells and refineries from which it derived a large income as well as powering itself, it handled many of the functions of a normal government. Then an international coalition led by (remember this guy?) Barack Obama began a systematic effort to destroy this malignant state.  A couple of years later, the best they could do was incite a few...

The Washington Post should be deeply ashamed of itself for having been bullied into publishing the screeds of the notorious right wing liar Hugh Hewitt under any circumstances, and never more so with Hewitt's comments today on the racist terrorist murder in Charlottesville yesterday: "The Charlottesville driver isn’t the only one who should lawyer up... The Commonwealth of Virginia is, of course, governed by Brandenburg and also has a felony homicide statute that provides that the “killing of one accidentally, contrary to the intention of the parties, while in the prosecution of some felonious act...is murder of the second degree and is punishable by confinement in a state correctional facility for not less than five years nor more than forty years.” it seems to me that a great number of people are at risk of being charged with felony homicide beyond the driver of the car that killed one person during Saturday’s protests. Anyone who incited the driver, indeed anyone wh...

Refuse to use the words "Radical Christian Terrorism?" Huh?  That's what I want to know.

Given the way things are going in this country, there is going to be more and more talk about parallels with the rise of the Nazis. Unfortunately, about 90% of what I read about them is false or at best partially true, so I want to recommend to anyone who is really interested in the subject, the three volume history of the rise and rule of the Nazis written by Cambridge Professor Richard Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich The Third Reich in Power The Third Reich at War This is a long read, but is by far the most authoritative history of the subject in English, and is widely available.  Evans wrote this in the late nineties, and a good part of it, particularly the last two volumes, is based on millions of pages of documents that had been kept in East Germany, and were unavailable prior to its collapse.  You will learn an immense amount that you didn't know about the Nazis.  From then on, when you say "this is like the Nazis," you will know what you are talking...

Whooppee!! The Nazis who form a large part of Trump's younger followers are on the march in Charlottesville, in what is universally described as the largest gathering of "white nationalists" in decades!  The press is out in force to declare them to be a real force in American politics, whose "issues" (i.e. white people's right to kill and hate) must be addressed, or the Democratic party will disappear off the face of the earth! Here's a picture from last night's demonstration: I will have more to say, I am sure, after today's march, which they promise will be EVEN LARGER!!!!  But until then, just for comparison, here is a reminder of the Women's March in just one city, Los Angeles, a few months ago: This march was, as I remember, worthy only of being forgotten as soon as possible. UPDATE:  Well, after a morning filled with various acts of petty violence, and chanting of "Jews will not replace us"* and the good old standby ...

From right wing convicted felon (and therefore admired leader of the wingnuts) Dinesh D'Sousa, another strike against the truth, in the form of this new book: Yes, it is the contention of this hateful monster that it is the American left, not the right, that is actually the real cousin of the Nazis. D'Sousa seems to forget the years-long campaign by the Democrats, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to get the United States to take a stand against the Nazis; a campaign that took years because it was viciously opposed every step of the way by a large number of Republican politicians, who violently fought even aiding Britain in its struggle against Hitler, let alone our joining in too.  He parrots the nauseating lie that the Nazis were left wingers, despite the incredible, detailed historical record, including the text of large parts of Mein Kampf, proving that the Nazis opposed not just Communists, but Socialists, liberals and even centrists, and the fact that the Nazis join...

We learn this important piece of information from Fox News uber-pundit Charles Krauthammer today: "Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer called the idea of impeaching President Trump "a catastrophic mistake" on Thursday...Krauthammer warned that impeaching Trump would cause millions that voted for him to question the stability of American democracy." No word about whether allowing a corrupt tool of a foreign dictator to steal the Presidency might cause the other 81% of us to "question the stability of American democracy."

A headline today from the Associated Press: "Trump set to embark on 1st vacation since inauguration" How can anyone even begin to tell a lie like that?  What in God's name has happened to our country where someone can write that and not be fired immediately? Can our country survive this sort of thing? Trump set to embark on 1st vacation since inauguration

I have been meaning to write a post about the twin towers of right wing lunacy in this country for some time now.  Not, by the way, that these are the only rotten foundations on which Republican electoral success is built; am not, for example, going to mention racism very much below.  What I want to suggest, however, is that these are the two enablers of the Republican impetus to breed an ignorant, hate filled, out of control base that votes on the basis of evil passions, not reasoning or even self interest. What pushed me over the line to write this post was Paul Krugman's column this week.  Here is an excerpt: "The Republican health care debacle was the culmination of a process of intellectual and moral deterioration that began four decades ago, at the very dawn of modern movement conservatism... A key moment came in the 1970s, when Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, embraced supply-side economics — the claim, refuted by all available eviden...

We hear this news out of the White House: "The door to the Oval Office used to be wide open, with favored officials drifting in and out — even in the middle of meetings — to kibitz with Trump. Now, the door is closed. Gen. John Kelly, the new White House chief of staff, has taken control in dramatic fashion, and is already imposing unmistakable signs of order after just a few days on the job: Even POTUS appears to be trying to impress his four-star handler, picking up his game by acting sharper in meetings and even rattling off stats. Meetings are shorter and stick to their scheduled topic. Everyone — even uber-aides Jared and Ivanka, and economic adviser Gary Cohn — is being deferential to Kelly." Do I even need to say the following?  Kelly is not making the White House run better; he is running it himself, and the fear of God has been implanted in Trump to prevent him from ruining everything with his usual behavior. This is not efficiency, it is a coup. Kel...