From my Facebook feed ~ when DT declared his candidacy, I was convinced he was just spewing to differentiate himself and get more publicity for himself ~ but now it's increasingly impossible to not recognize the similarities ~ ~ Sooz

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it's probably a POS in disguise... or a red-arsed baboon with a bad combover.

This man has captured not only my brain but my heart too ~ ~ Sooz

Robert Reich: Fix the Supreme Court
Start by telling your senators to do their job.
By Robert Reich / RobertReich.org / March 17, 2016

The Constitution of the United States is clear: Article II Section 2 says the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint … judges to the Supreme Court.”

It doesn’t say the President can’t appoint in the final year of his term of office. In fact, a third of all U.S. presidents have appointed a Supreme Court justice in an election year. Yet many Republicans argue that no appointment can be made in the election year.

And the Constitution doesn’t give the Senate leader the right to delay and obstruct the rest of the Senate from voting on a President’s nominee. Yet this is what the current Republican leadership argues.

In refusing to vote or even hold a hearing on the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, the GOP is abdicating its constitutional responsibility. It’s not doing its job.

Senate Republicans are trying to justify their refusal by referring to a comment Joe Biden made when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1992, urging then-President Bush to hold off on nominating a Supreme Court justice until after the election. But Biden was speaking hypothetically – there was no nominee before the Senate at that time – and he concluded by saying that if the President were to nominate someone he was sure the Senate and the President could come to an agreement.

This fight has huge implications. A new Supreme Court justice might be able to reverse “Citizens United” and remove the poison of big money from our democracy. It might reverse “Shelby v. Holder,” and resurrect the Voting Rights Act.

And think of the cases coming up – on retaining a woman’s right to choose, on the rights of teachers and other public employees to unionize, on the President’s authority to fight climate change, and the rights of countless Americans with little or no power in a system where more and more power is going to the top. That’s the traditional role of the Supreme Court – to protect the powerless from the powerful.

Which is exactly why the Republicans don’t want to fulfill their constitutional responsibility and allow a vote on the President’s nominee.

So what can you do? There’s only one response – the same response you made when Republicans shut down the government because they didn’t get their way over the debt ceiling: You let them know they’ll be held accountable.

Public pressure is the only way to get GOP senators to release their choke hold on the Supreme Court. Public pressure is up to you. Call your senators now, and tell them you want them to do their job.


http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-fix-supreme-court

Only 7? I'm aware of 14:

The 14 Defining
Characteristics Of Fascism
Free Inquiry
Spring 2003
5-11-3

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:
1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed
to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

http://www.rense.com/general37/fascism.htm

How do all those points not apply to most Republicans, not just Trump.

The thing is that no one - including Trump - seems to have the ambition and drive as a Hitler. I'm not saying this could never happen, but Trump acts like someone who entered the election because he has nothing else to do, not because of some strong political drive to change the nation.

And other Republicans are more about an ideology that benefits the wealthy and multinational corporations than the average citizen.

In other words, it's about controlling the wealth of the country.

I think the Republicans created the environment that makes the rise of a person like Trump possible. Bill Maher said it a few nights ago. Speaking to the Republican Party on his show, he said "You made the deal with the devil and now your chickens are coming home to roost." A mixed metaphor but it makes the point.

No mixed metaphors there, sid. I've always known the devil was a chicken.

While true, this isn't the real problem.

Republicans started using issues like abortion and "welfare queens" to stir up the people and get their support. That goes back at least as far as Reagan.

As I see it two things then began to happen. Far-right Christian extremists began running as Republicans. That how we got people like like Bachmann and Cruz and so many others. Not just in Congress but in state governments.

All the while that was happening, we had the trickle-down, anti-union, lower taxes on the wealthy and corporations crowd making progress.

Trump is like the part of the iceberg that's above the water. The real danger is what few are talking about, what lies below the water. That's almost every Republican and some Democrats too. And that is what will sink our ship.

Yes.

The entire system has been corrupted and if it doesn't change it'll be civil war. Maybe it's already started in a way. Police became militarized and were allowed to become judge and jury in the streets. Now the streets are shooting back. How many law enforcement people have been shot in the past couple or 3 years compared to 20 years ago?

I generally trust Robert Reich's instincts ~ but I'm having a tough time deciding if I see this as possible/probable or impossible/improbable ~ ~ Sooz

How the Peoples Party Prevailed in 2020
Monday, March 21, 2016

Third parties have rarely posed much of a threat to the dominant two parties in America. So how did the People’s Party win the U.S. presidency and a majority of both houses of Congress in 2020?

It started four years before, with the election of 2016.

As you remember, Donald Trump didn’t have enough delegates to become the Republican candidate, so the GOP convention that summer was “brokered” – which meant the Party establishment took control, and nominated the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.

Trump tried to incite riots but his “I deserve to be president because I’m the best person in the world!” speech incited universal scorn instead, and he slunk off the national stage (his last words, shouted as he got into his stretch limousine, were “Fu*ck you, America!”)

On the Democratic side, despite a large surge of votes for Bernie Sanders in the final months of the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s stable of wealthy donors and superdelegates put her over the top.

Both Republican and Democratic political establishments breathed palpable sighs of relief, and congratulated themselves on remaining in control of the nation’s politics.

They attributed Trump’s rise to his fanning of bigotry and xenophobia, and Sanders’s popularity to his fueling of left-wing extremism.

They conveniently ignored the deeper anger in both camps about the arbitrariness and unfairness of the economy, and about a political system rigged in favor of the rich and privileged.

And they shut their eyes to the anti-establishment fury that had welled up among independents, young people, poor and middle-class Democrats, and white working-class Republicans.

So they went back to doing what they had been doing before. Establishment Republicans reverted to their old blather about the virtues of the “free market,” and establishment Democrats returned to their perennial call for “incremental reform.”

And Wall Street, big corporations, and a handful of billionaires resumed pulling the strings of both parties to make sure regulatory agencies didn’t have enough staff to enforce rules, and to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Establishment politicians also arranged to reduce taxes on big corporations and simultaneously increase federal subsidies to them, expand tax loopholes for the wealthy, and cut Social Security and Medicare to pay for it all. (“Sadly, we have no choice,” said the new President, who had staffed the White House and Treasury with Wall Streeters and corporate lobbyists, and filled boards and commissions with corporate executives.)

Meanwhile, most Americans continued to lose ground.

Even before the recession of 2018, most families were earning less than they’d earned in 2000, adjusted for inflation. Businesses continued to shift most employees off their payrolls and into “on demand” contracts so workers had no idea what they’d be earning from week to week. And the ranks of the working poor continued to swell.

At the same time, CEO pay packages grew even larger, Wall Street bonus pools got fatter, and a record number of billionaires were becoming multi-billionaires.

Then, of course, came the recession, along with bank losses requiring another round of bailouts. The Treasury Secretary, a former managing director of Morgan Stanley, expressed shock and outrage, explaining the nation had no choice and vowing to “get tough” on the banks once the crisis was over.

Politics abhors a vacuum. In 2019, the People’s Party filled it.

Its platform called for getting big money out of politics, ending “crony capitalism,” abolishing corporate welfare, stopping the revolving door between government and the private sector, and busting up the big Wall Street banks and corporate monopolies.

The People’s Party also pledged to revoke the Trans Pacific Partnership, hike taxes on the rich to pay for a wage subsidy (a vastly expanded Earned Income Tax Credit) for everyone earning below the median, and raise taxes on corporations that outsource jobs abroad or pay their executives more than 100 times the pay of typical Americans.

Americans rallied to the cause. Millions who called themselves conservatives and Tea Partiers joined with millions who called themselves liberals and progressives against a political establishment that had shown itself incapable of hearing what they had been demanding for years.

The rest, as they say, is history.

http://robertreich.org/post/141437490885

USians had better hope the revolution happens at the ballot box and not in the streets. Either way, it will happen.

Daaaaamn, I love this man's mindset! ~ we should be strengthening the commonality amongst us rather than focusing on the differences ~ or, more simply and as I still try to live by: live and let live ~ and peace, love, and rock 'n roll! ~ Sooz

Thursday, Apr 21, 2016 03:00 AM CST
Robert Reich: The populist left and right are on the same side
Both vehemently oppose crony capitalism and corporate welfare. Americans have much more in common than they think. VIDEO
Robert Reich, ROBERTREICH.org

The old debate goes something like this:

‘You don’t believe women have reproductive rights.”

“You don’t value human life.”

Or this:

“You think everyone should own a gun.”

“You think we’re safer if only criminals have them.”

Or this:

“You don’t care about poor people.”

”You think they’re better off with handouts.”

Or this:

“You want to cut taxes on the rich.”

“You want to tax everyone to death.”

But we’re seeing the emergence of a new debate where the populist left and right are on the same side:

Both are against the rich to spend as much as they want corrupting our democracy.

Both are against crony capitalism.

Both are against corporate welfare.

Both are against another Wall Street bailout.

Both want to stop subsidizing Big Agriculture, Big Oil, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Both want to close the tax loophole for hedge fund partners.

Both want to ban inside trading on Wall Street.

Both want to stop CEOs from pumping up share prices with stock buy-backs … and then cashing in their stock options.

Both want to stop tax deductions of CEO pay over $1 million.

Both want to get big money out of politics, reverse Citizens United, and restore our democracy,

If we join together, we can make these things happen.


Salon

The sad thing is... maybe the ship sinking is what's needed for all those people to wake up and truly see what they've been supporting all this time.

From my "saved to read/maybe post later" file ~ I will vote for whomever is the Dem candidate, because I see the likely opportunity to nominate 3 or 4 USSC justices as so critical to our own future and for following generations ~ but I confess I'm VERY nervous if Hillary is the candidate ~ even tho she has never been convicted or proven guilty of anything thrown at her, she's carrying a LOT of baggage into this campaign ~ ~ Sooz

The Endgame of 2016′s Anti-Establishment Politics
Sunday, April 24, 2016

Will Bernie Sanders’s supporters rally behind Hillary Clinton if she gets the nomination? Likewise, if Donald Trump is denied the Republican nomination, will his supporters back whoever gets the Republican nod?

If 2008 is any guide, the answer is unambiguously yes to both. About 90 percent of people who backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries that year ended up supporting Barack Obama in the general election. About the same percent of Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney backers came around to supporting John McCain.

But 2008 may not be a good guide to the 2016 election, whose most conspicuous feature is furious antipathy to the political establishment.

Outsiders and mavericks are often attractive to an American electorate chronically suspicious of political insiders, but the anti-establishment sentiments unleashed this election year of a different magnitude. The Trump and Sanders candidacies are both dramatic repudiations of politics as usual.

If Hillary Clinton is perceived to have won the Democratic primary because of insider “superdelegates” and contests closed to independents, it may confirm for hardcore Bernie supporters the systemic political corruption Sanders has been railing against.

Similarly, if the Republican Party ends up nominating someone other than Trump who hasn’t attracted nearly the votes than he has, it may be viewed as proof of Trump’s argument that the Republican Party is corrupt.

Many Sanders supporters will gravitate to Hillary Clinton nonetheless out of repulsion toward the Republican candidate, especially if it’s Donald Trump. Likewise, if Trump loses his bid for the nomination, many of his supporters will vote Republican in any event, particularly if the Democratic nominee is Hillary Clinton.

But, unlike previous elections, a good number may simply decide to sit out the election because of their even greater repulsion toward politics as usual – and the conviction it’s rigged by the establishment for its own benefit.

That conviction wasn’t present in the 2008 election. It emerged later, starting in the 2008 financial crisis, when the government bailed out the biggest Wall Street banks while letting underwater homeowners drown.

Both the Tea Party movement and Occupy were angry responses – Tea Partiers apoplectic about government’s role, Occupiers furious with Wall Street – two sides of the same coin.

Then came the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in “Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission,” releasing a torrent of big money into American politics. By the 2012 election cycle, forty percent of all campaign contributions came from the richest 0.01 percent of American households.

That was followed by a lopsided economic recovery, most of whose gains have gone to the top. Median family income is still below 2008, adjusted for inflation. And although the official rate of unemployment has fallen dramatically, a smaller percentage of working-age people now have jobs than before the recession.

As a result of all this, many Americans have connected the dots in ways they didn’t in 2008.

They see “crony capitalism” (now a term of opprobrium on both left and the right) in special tax loopholes for the rich, government subsidies and loan guarantees for favored corporations, bankruptcy relief for the wealthy but not for distressed homeowners or student debtors, leniency toward corporations amassing market power but not for workers seeking to increase their bargaining power through unions, and trade deals protecting the intellectual property and assets of American corporations abroad but not the jobs or incomes of American workers.

Last fall, when on book tour in the nation’s heartland, I kept finding people trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump.

They saw one or the other as their champion: Sanders the “political revolutionary” who’d reclaim power from the privileged few; Trump, the authoritarian strongman who’d wrest power back from an establishment that’s usurped it.

The people I encountered told me the moneyed interests couldn’t buy off Sanders because he wouldn’t take their money, and they couldn’t buy off Trump because he didn’t need their money.

Now, six months later, the political establishment has fought back, and Sanders’s prospects for taking the Democratic nomination are dimming. Trump may well win the Republican mantle but not without a brawl.

As I said, I expect most Sanders backers will still support Hillary Clinton if she’s the nominee. And even if Trump doesn’t get the Republican nod, most of his backers will go with whoever the Republican candidate turns out to be.

But anyone who assumes a wholesale transfer of loyalty from Sanders’s supporters to Clinton, or from Trump’s to another Republican standard-bearer, may be in for a surprise.

The anti-establishment fury in the election of 2016 may prove greater than supposed.

http://robertreich.org/post/143348763760

Are write-ins considered destroyed ballots in US presidential elections?

I don't have any idea ~ I'll try to find some info on this question in the morning ~

Sooz

Even tho Reich repeats himself with #s 2 and 5, this summary of what the "newly moderate" DT would do in his first 100 days as potus should be required reading ~ ~ Sooz

"Repeal the affordable care act"?

Can a President do that?

No.

A narcissistic/egotistical GOP/TP prez with a GOP/TP Senate and a GOP/TP House could/would try ~

Sooz

and piss off millions and millions of potential voters.

How did Democrats lose the white working class to Republicans, and now to Donald Trump?

One answer is for years Republicans have skillfully played the race card (“welfare queens, “Willie Horton” the battle over affirmative action). The bigotry spewing forth from Donald Trump is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters.

But this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and controlled Congress for four of those years. In that time they've scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class.

In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but let millions of underwater homeowners drown. Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics.

What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class.

Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift?
In part, because they bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.

Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America. But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.

Will they? Could they? What do you think?

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1214505015228759

They're hooked.

Hillary Clinton said yesterday that if elected president she’d put Bill Clinton “in charge of revitalizing the economy … because, you know, he knows how to do it.”

The announcement suggests several things:

1. Hillary Clinton is no longer touting the successes of the Obama economy, or even linking herself to it. “Revitalizing” the economy is a clear acknowledgment the economy is still lousy for a majority. She’s right about that.

2. In linking herself to the successes of Bill Clinton’s economic policies she also risks linking herself to the failures of those policies. I’m proud to have been part of his economic team, but those failings weren’t insignificant. Among them:

(1) Bill Clinton's decision to embrace deficit-reduction as the administration’s major economic goal;

(2) His decision to widen free trade through NAFTA and then, more broadly, through the World Trade Organization and to push for China’s accession to the WTO – which resulted in a huge increase in imports from China, and an incentive for American manufacturers to outsource abroad;

(3) His decision to sign the Republican's welfare bill that subsequently forced millions into poverty because it limited welfare to five years in a recipient’s lifetime,

(4) His decision to repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and refusal to give the Commodity Futures Corporation authority over financial derivatives – both of which opened the floodgates to Wall Street’s excesses, and,

(5) When the budget moved into surplus, his decision to urge that those surpluses be used to “rescue” Social Security (which didn’t need rescuing) rather than for infrastructure, education, and other public investments.

What do you think?