Nobody is Above the Law

If you aren't aware that Robert Mueller was appointed to be special counsel to investigate the Trump Russia Affair then you really need to pull your head out of your ass and Google it. 

The Republican Party has been running interference for Trump.  The Dallas News has an article describing the campaign donations made by Russian oligarchs to Republican campaigns. We also know that the Republican National Committee was hacked by Russia in 2016 and unlike with the DNC hack the Russians never released the data.  So we don't know what the Russians got.  We know they got something.  The RNC presumably knows what they got.  So what did the Russians do with the information they harvested from the RNC servers?  We know that the Republicans took money from Russian oligarchs and we know they are running interference for Trump in the Russia Affair.

So what we know is that we should not expect any support from the Republican Party in safe guarding Robert Mueller's investigation.  Mueller has now indicted four people associated with the Trump campaign and he's moving forward.  Fox News and the Republican Party have increased attacks on Robert Mueller.  Robert Mueller who served as a combat soldier in Vietnam and spent a lifetime in public service.  The types of attacks are setting the stage for Trump to fire Mueller. If Mueller is fired and Republicans do nothing it would mean that Donald Trump will not be held to rule of law. 

Nobody is above the law. 

The Republican majorities in Congress and the Senate can't be trusted to act when Trump fires Mueller.  That leaves the people.  When Trump fires Mueller we the people need to shut this country down.  We need to fill the town and city squares.  We need to be loud and we need to be visible and we need to not go away. 

Moveon.org has started organizing for an emergency response. Coordinators across the country are organizing to have local demonstrations ready to go.  Here's Moveon.org's basic guideline:

• If Mueller is fired BEFORE 2 P.M. local time —>  events will begin @ 5 P.M. local time
• If Mueller is fired AFTER 2 P.M. local time —> events will begin @ noon local time the following day

We need to be organized and we need to be ready.  When Trump fires Mueller we need to know where to be and when and we need to be there.

Some Thoughts on the NFL

I'm an NFL football fan. I'm the type of person who would plan their Sunday based on which games were playing and then would camp out in the living room from 1:00pm to 7:30pm every Sunday for the season.  The playoffs have traditionally been akin to holy days and the Super Bowl a major holiday.  That was me for twenty years and then last year something started to change.  Last year I cut my consumption down to only one game a week and sometimes not even that and then all the games in the playoffs.  This year I've watched only a portion of one game on Thanksgiving.  I have no interest in watching the playoffs or the Super Bowl this year.  I keep up on the sport via articles and sports talk radio.  I just don't feel a need to actually watch a game anymore.  So I'm one of those missing viewers. 

I'll state straight off that I support the players who are taking a knee during the national anthem.  They are practicing a quiet and respectful form of protest.  And I agree with the position they are supporting. 

There are other reasons that I've stopped watching and a lot of it has to do with the league itself.  The NFL itself is hard to continue supporting.  When the league decided to be morality police and penalize players for things that happened outside the game and off work hours I found it to be a negative.  In a lot of cases the league has penalized people for being accused of something even when they aren't found guilty by a court or even officially charged.  The league hires it's own investigators and lays down penalties based off closed room decisions by executives.  I really don't like the idea of employers punishing employees for things that happen outside the workplace and that's exactly what the NFL is doing.  It's a slippery slope between what the NFL does and another corporation firing someone for private behavior.  It sets a bad precedent and I don't like supporting an organization that does that. 

The league itself isn't likable.  You have 32 billionaires all scheming on how to extract public money to build stadiums and take stadium revenue for their own bank accounts.  You have teams playing communities against each other in order to see which will provide the largest kickback to the owner.  The NFL provides a profit sharing to each team of over $200 million a year, but the owners also want free stadiums.  I'm not a fan of corporate welfare and the NFL owners are the worst of the bunch.  They spend years building a fan base in a community and then leverage that fan base against elected officials and communities in order to extract payments or they threaten to leave and go somewhere that will offer them a bigger kickback.  These are supposed to be billionaires, but for some reason they act like they need public charity in order to be solvent.  If your business isn't profitable on it's own then you should go out of business.  Stop extracting rent from the community. 

I'm also not a fan of how jingoistic the league has become. In a lot of respects they have have become a public relations outfit for the US military. 

I guess my last major issue with the league is the rules and instant replay.  The rules in the NFL have gotten so bloated that they aren't understood by anyone including the referees.  Instead of allowing some ambiguity into the rules and allowing the referees some ability to interpret some things they've decided to codify everything.  No one really knows what a catch is in the NFL anymore because there are so many rules that define a catch.  And then you have the replay system.  No one can celebrate a score anymore because the New York office may decide that it sees something in a score and then require the referee to review it.  The referee then scrutinizes the play in fine detail and oftentimes overturns the original ruling.  Touchdowns and catches get overturned regularly for things that aren't clear on the video.  The officials in the NFL are a major part of the game and often a game will hinge on the officials instead of the players. 

At the end of it all I'm not watching the NFL because of the NFL.  I still like the game.  I like the players and they do an admirable job in a demanding sport.  They put their bodies into incredible stresses in order to perform at a level that a very small sliver of a percentage of the human populace can achieve.  The game itself and the players are worthwhile, but the NFL is a problem.  Football is no longer about the players of the play on the field.  Football is about the owners and the league.  The games are secondary and I'm not really interested in the NFL as an institution.  I don't see that being addressed and until it does I'm not that interested in contributing to their bottom line. 

The Trump Voter

I'm tired of stories about the Trump voter.  I'm tired of stories about people who voted for Trump and now have misgivings.  I'm tired of the journalists who feel the need to go on a pilgrimage to Nowhere, Middle America to seek out the Trump voter.  I don't need to read anymore of this.  Every story that I've read has a common theme.

Trump voters were fine when he was going to hurt someone else.  They aren't so fine when he's going to hurt them.

Trump voters are the kids in the schoolyard who toadied up to the bullies.

That's it.  I didn't need ten thousand words, but then again I don't get paid to do this.  All I needed was a bit more space than Twitter allows.

First They Came for Gawker

Back over the summer the online news site Gawker got shut down.  It was sued by Hulk Hogan for showing an authorized video of him having sex.  The video had been stolen and handed over the Gawker.  Gawker then got sued and lost big and went bankrupt.  Gawker was pretty reprehensible in it's behavior and very indefensible.  So no one defended then and few people mourned them.  What it did was to prove out the process for driving a media company out of business.  Sue then into submission and eventually they'll fold.

This week Buzzfeed posted an unverified document that has been circulating in Washington DC for a few months.  I read a lot of news and I've heard whispers of this on various sites since October.  The Buzzfeed article simply posts that which has hinted at for a while.  The document claims that the Russian Government has compromising information on Trump.  In particular sexual perversions that involve Russian prostitutes.  I haven't bothered reading the article.  I don't need to since I have many other reasons to actively dislike Donald Trump.  But given that this information is something that has been hinted at in Washington, has been passed around by insiders and from what I'm lead to understand has been handled by politicians it's perfectly acceptable for Buzzfeed to post this material even if it's not verified.  Insiders are talking about it, so why shouldn't the general public get to see it?  So I'm fine with Buzzfeed's decision.  It's in the public interest.

CNN also ran a story about an unverified report that the Russian's have a file of compromising information on Trump.  They didn't post their document.  They just ran a story that it existed.

So what does this have to do with Gawker?  Well as I said Gawker proved out the process for destroying an offending media company.  Donald Trump yesterday commented that there would be consequences for Buzzfeed.  The lawyer who went after Gawker is associated with Trump.  So my expectation is that Trump and his enforcers are going to use the Gawker model to go after Buzzfeed.

And then what does CNN have to do with this?  Well, because they ran a story that spoke of the document Trump went after them too.  Referred to CNN as fake news.  At the press conference at Trump Tower on Wednesday a CNN reporter tried to get a question in and Trump refused and then Trump got down right annoyed at repeated requests.  Trump's press secretary then told the reporter if he did that again he would be ejected from a press conference.

When a politician goes after a news outlet it's a chilling event.  This is the United States.  We have a First Amendment citing freedom of speech which was designed to allow the press and the people to raise questions against their government.  When the government tries to shut them up it's a violation of not only the Constitution, but also the democratic tradition.  I've written before that I consider Trump a fascist and so isn't his administration.  This is all part and parcel to fascism.  This only gets worse from here.

First they came for Gawker and no one spoke out because Gawker was reprehensible.  Then they came for Buzzfeed and no one spoke out because they were unverified.  Then they came for CNN and the press was completed cowed to the government.  

Resist

Time for some additional reading:

From The Atlantic.  Emma Green writing.  The Ideological Reasons Why Democrats Have Neglected Local Politics.

From Vox. Theda Skocpol writing. A guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party, from the ground up.

From Indivisible.com.  This last one is a group effort of former congressional staffers.  Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.