Living Large In Carson City: Helter Skelter/Look Out, ‘Cause Here She Comes Beatles Edition

Posted on by technoscribe50: Gary Brady-Herndon

Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. William Butler Yeats

The time is now. Helter skelter. Charles Manson

Maybe it is a sign of the times when one of the world’s greatest poets and one of history’s most vile madmen can be quoted together and the outcome makes perfect sense. As Americans face a long, lonely haul before the end of the coronavirus outbreak can even be accurately predicted, all patriotic citizens should take a moment to reflect. Working through the haze of self quranteening, furtive early morning runs to Costco in search of the elusive toilet paper roll, and late night cocktails and snacking, most of America is too stupefied to take note of the state of the U. S. government, much less make sense of it. Such are the times.

Ground zero at my house is relatively calm, if not, with a fine pall of worry and concern hanging over our humble estate about how this is all going to play out.  Nevada is ranked number 23rd in the nation with just over a 1,000 cases diagnosed and 17 deaths. Of course, most people don’t understand just how lopsided the population concentration is across the state. Consider at this time, the megapolis of Las Vegas accounts for 753 of the diagnosed cases and 15 of the 17 deaths. The numbers are growing, of course, with yesterday accounting for 48 of the diagnosed cases since Monday, March 30. I digress.

Underneath all of the folderol and wacky miscommunication coming out of Washington and Trump’s mouth, serious shit is happening. Serious shit that the president and his minions would be happy for the rest of the country to ignore. In case America has forgotten, there is a presidential election coming up in November, and ready or not, the federal government and the states need to be prepared for it. This is where it gets complicated and nasty.

For all my life, there has been one truism that has held true through every election, presidential or otherwise: Republicans will do everything in their power to suppress the vote, which skews the election in their favor. Of course, over history there have been times when the issue swung to the other side like during the Jim Crow era, but in our modern world, Republicans have been the culprits. It doesn’t matter if was the Poll Tax, tricked out gerrymandering, throwing people off the voter rolls for no apparent reason, or simply, as we see today, closing down polling places at the last minute leaving voters to fend for themselves. The poor are disproportionately affected by this in a negative way, well hell, all Americans are to some degree.

Considering Trump’s manic thirst for power, the states need to take the lead on this pronto. Since there is no way to predict when the coronavirus will abate, or that it might go away during the warm summer months only to rekindle in the fall, the November 3 election date is iffy at best. Conventional wisdom holds that given Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, it isn’t a stretch to see him executing an executive order cancelling the election in light of the virus’s toll on the economy and the country.

The only way to possibly avoid such an action is for mail-in voting to be in place when November rolls around. The problem is that state’s are going to be cash strapped for the conceivable future due to outpouring of funds to prop up the medical profession as the virus takes its toll. Normally, the states could turn to the federal government to subsidize a project like this, but not in Trump world. Hell, he’s reluctant to send funds and equipment to state’s whose governors he sees as as not being appreciative enough of his actions.

For Trump, the virus is a wet dream that not even he could have imagined. In it he will see the perfect excuse to cancel the election and declare himself the grand poobah for four more years. Does anyone think that a court challenge wouldn’t go all the way to the Supreme Court? Does anyone have faith in the justices coming to  a fair and impartial verdict that puts the country first ahead of Trump’s wishes? I don’t think so.

In an article titled “How the coronavirus pandemic could soon explode into a constitutional crisis” by Cody Fenwick writing for Alternet, Fenwick quotes Davie Daley author of the new book UNRIGGED: How Americans Are Battling to Save Democracy who is sounding the alarm about just what could happen if conservative Republican governors follow Trump’s lead to suppress the vote later this year. Here he talks about recent events in the Democratic primary in mid-March,

. . . it gets harder and harder to imagine how a normal election might take place. As the crisis was ramping up, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced that he was canceling the March 17 election, in which Democratic primary voters were primed to go to the polls. He made this announcement the day before in-person voting was to take place, citing the danger posed by the outbreak, only to be ordered by a judge to proceed with the vote. He defied that order and kept the polls closed anyway. RawStory

Speaking of the polls, the article goes on to point out some obvious and serious concerns. Fenwick notes that the virus is especially hard hitting when it comes to seniors. Seniors are the primary source of people power that run most elections. What if there just aren’t enough poll workers to open the polls, or they are too frightened to show up at an event where hundreds if not thousands of people file in off the street to stand three feet away from them as they get their ballots. Fenwick also points out, how will voters exercise safe distancing when standing in line while queueing up to vote. Daly says it best,

“There are solutions, which all revolve around early voting, expanding vote by mail, expanding drop off centers and no-excuse absentee balloting,” said Daley. “All of this needs to be done in an effective way, and all of it costs money.” RawStory

Why are Republicans so afraid of mail in voting. Well, first of all, they can’t control the turnout. Second, if they can’t control the turnout, they can’t inhibit onsite polling places from dismissing voters as they show up to vote. This would mean they would have to turn to more nefarious means of suppressing the vote, further exposing their underhanded actions to skew the will of the American people. Old folks, minorities, and disabled voters would suddenly become a force to be reckoned with. In their own words, the issue comes down to this,

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia State House Speaker David Ralston became the latest GOP official to warn about the perils that vote-by-mail initiatives would have on his party.

“This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia,” he said. “Every registered voter is going to get one of these. … This will certainly drive up turnout.” RawStory

And now famously, Mad King Donald,

Trump earlier this week similarly told “Fox & Friends” that Democrats were pushing for initiatives that would generate “levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”RawStory

And so it goes.

Wacko of the Week Award

On Tuesday afternoon, a train engineer named Eduardo Moreno, apparently with great deliberation, derailed the freight train he was manning in Southern California, nearly killing occupants of three nearby cars. His target? The USNS Mercy, a Navy medical ship that’s been assisting nearby hospitals with COVID-19 patients.

“I had to. People don’t know what’s going on here,” Moreno reportedly told the officer who arrested him. Apparently, Moreno believes in a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus crisis is a hoax being deployed to cover for a shadowy takeover of the government. RawStory

Living Large In Carson City: What Will It Take? Edition

Posted on by technoscribe50: Gary Brady-Herndon

“In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”
Napoleon Bonaparte

And the hits just keep on coming . . . Week two of the public impeachment inquiry and things just keep getting more bizarre. Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan are playing tag team inquisitors, a role neither man seems qualified to fulfill, let alone intelligent enough to pull it off. Late last week,  Roger Stone was found guilty on all seven counts brought against him stemming from the Mueller probe. As the evidence mounts, there just doesn’t seem to be much that can go right for the Republican Party and the merry band of idiots who lead them.

Then there is Donald Trump who took to Twitter to malign former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch during her live questions calling her a failure wherever she was posted and coming perilously close to committing witness tampering, or at the least, intimidation. This is nothing new for the president, nor is it surprising. Considering how the Republicans have thus far controlled the national political narrative through lies and avoidance of the truth, which has allowed them to create a chaotic atmosphere across the nation, witness tampering is just one more egregious act from a corrupt presidency.

The real question is just how long the Republicans can continue playing ball in what is blatantly obvious a sham administration bent only on stroking the Orange One’s massive, if not pathetic, ego. Certainly, there is a plethora of Always Trumpers like his rabid base and useful idiots like Nunez and Jordan. Mitch McConnell has made it clear that impeachment proceedings will be dead on arrival, or at best, a truncated event meant only to give lip service to an already determined favorable outcome for the president.

One has to wonder, however, if there aren’t some within the Republican fold who want to see Trump gone as badly as the Democrats. Obviously, up until now, Trump’s real power lies not in his cherry personality or suave ability to lead and command, but in the fear he strikes into the heart of vulnerable Republicans up for reelection. The “primary” threat he tosses about as easily as he spews venom from his mouth carries real world weight when the rabid base is factored into the equation. That was then, however, this is now.

With the live impeachment hearings daily causing the Republicans headaches and bad cases of acid reflux, the tide of power may already be shifting. Suppose that a group of Senators read the mounds of evidence against Trump and decide to ban together to vote for impeachment. This would kill two birds with one stone. First, the fear of Trump’s power to influence primaries against recalcitrant Republicans would evaporate, but it would also bump the president from office where he would slither back under whatever rock he came from back in 2016. It defies logic that every member of the Republican Party is willing to knuckle under Trump’s power at the expense of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Americans, however, have seen even more outlandish occurrences. Who among sentient Democrats were not caught flat footed when the election results came in favorably for Trump back in 2016? Then it seemed like a bad acid trip gone horribly wrong even for a bad acid trip. Yet, four years later, the country has polarized even further than it was when Trump got elected. Yet, the facts bear out that much of that polarization is based, not on Trump solidifying and expanding his position, but rather, a growing exodus of disenchanted Independents and moderate Republican coming to their senses and forsaking the president. Recent electoral gains by the Democrats in state elections tell a story of awakening in the American heartland that will hopefully last through the 2020 election.

While the impeachment sideshow continues to gain the lion’s share of headlines, Trump and his band of pranksters continue dismantling the American democracy. He has to date confirmed 150 right wing radically, opinionated judges. His most recent, Steven  Menashi, is a former White House council who served under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. He had a hand in denying students remittance from for profit colleges that landed his boss DeVos in hot water for ignoring orders to move forward to negate the student’s loan debts. Susan Collins crossed party lines to vote against the nominee stating,

“Mr. Menashi was so poorly qualified, he lacked the basic temperament for this position that I voted not even to proceed with debate on his nomination,” she said. “His past writings, particularly about LGBTQ individuals and advocates, about women, about diversity raise questions whether he would rule fairly.” USNews 

And this from Chuck Schumer,

Democrats’ concerns extended beyond Menashi’s work with Devos. In particular, they lamented that he’s helped guide the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda alongside Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president.

“His record on race, women’s equality, LGBTQ rights and the rights of immigrants should be disqualifying,” Schumer said. “At the Department of Education, he helped cook up an illegal scheme to use the Social Security data of students swindled by for-profit colleges in order to deny them debt relief.”

“A candidate for a judgeship should show respect for the law,” he said. “That’s the lowest possible bar.” USNews

And most of theses judges are appointed for life. Yet, judges are only a small part of a larger equation of subversion and annulment of basic American rights. The aftermath of the impeachment inquiry and possible articles of impeachment will have a far reaching effect on the American psyche for decades to come. The Republican Party faces a very real prospect of sliding into ignominy across the country. If the Democrats can pull their shit together and actually mount a real and viable campaign to drive the Trump administration out of office, still, it will take a huge win in the popular vote.

A win of  that magnitude would surely further divide Always Trumpers and the rest of the country to the point of straining our country’s ability to survive.  America would survive, but at what cost. The prospect of living again in a Trumpless world is tantalizing beyond belief for most Americans. Yet, America can’t expect there not to be repercussions from radicalized white people afraid for their continued relevance in a multiculturally changing United States. Evangelicals, contrary to their god’s teachings, are spreading rumors of civil war and the doom of god’s wrath being rained down on everyone’s heads who refuse to back Trump and his mission of failure.

If the stakes weren’t so high and important, the situation America finds itself in on the cusp of 2020 is comically ridiculous beyond belief. Who would believe that the America Barack Obama left us has been pissed into the wind so quickly and with unbridled enthusiasm under the Republicans’ reign of mediocrity? Granted, Obama wasn’t everything the country needed or wanted, but at least, he took responsibility for his actions. Trump seems incapable of owning his mistakes, or admitting that they are even mistakes.

As the live impeachment hearings continue to roll out official after official implicating Donald Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors, America waits. There seems little anyone can do but weather the storm and hope for sunlight on the other side. If not sunshine, at least some form of cleansing from the past four years that will make the phrase “Proud to be an American” a true statement again. Is there anyone who doesn’t think that will be a heavy lift? Where is Arnold when you need him?