elections

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authoritarian regimes, Biden Administration, China, Dictatorship, Donald Trump, elections, Fascism, House of Representatives, Joe Biden, Justice Department, propaganda, Rule of Law, Senate, U.S. Congress October 10, 2021

Democrats refuse to indict Trump. Biden stumbles. Republicans gear up to steal elections. The fascist threat grows.

The Democrats refuse to prosecute Donald Trump. Moreover, they enforce a conspiracy of silence under which not even the question of whether Trump should be prosecuted can be discussed, or even raised.

Meanwhile, Trump, who appears to have committed numerous felonies in full public view, is left free to hold rallies and breathe air into a growing fascist movement led by the Republican party and his supporters

President Joe Biden continues to stumble, to blow the opportunities his and the Democrats’ narrow victories in 2020 have afforded him.

Neither Biden nor the Democratic leaders seem to understand that fascist threat.  

The country faces a fascist challenge supported by 35-40 million voters living in a propaganda universe, an alternate universe where facts and the truth do not hold sway, plus perhaps another 20 million cynical fellow travelers.

Nowhere are their leaders with the courage to stand up and defend our democracy by taking bold actions, such as indicting Trump.

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authoritarian regimes, Biden Administration, Capitol Insurrection, demonstrations, Dictatorship, Dimming Vision of World Affairs, Donald Trump, elections, Fascism, Germany, Gleichschaltung, History, House Democrats, internal supporters of human rights, January 6 Capitol Insurrection, Joe Biden, Justice Department, Nazism, Neo-Nazis, Nobel Peace Prize, propaganda, Republican Senators, Rule of Law, syria, Trump Coup d'état, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution, U.S. news coverage, Ukraine, war crimes August 6, 2021

The dog days of August and the Olympic Games: Time to act on Trump and the Republican fascist threat

See Jonathan Freedland, “Trump may be fading away, but Trumpism is now in the American bloodstream; He left in disgrace, yet all signs point to…

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Biden Administration, Capitol Insurrection, coverage of foreign events, Dictatorship, Donald Trump, elections, Fascism, House Democrats, Impeachment Trial, internal supporters of human rights, January 6 Capitol Insurrection, Joe Biden, Justice Department, Nazism, Neo-Nazis, propaganda, Rule of Law, Trump Coup d'état, U.S. Congress August 5, 2021

The indictment of Trump: The Democratic wall of silence begins to break

See, 1) Laurence H. Tribe, Barbara McQuade and Joyce White Vance, “Here’s a roadmap for the Justice Department to follow in investigating Trump,” Washington Post,…

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authoritarian regimes, Biden Administration, Capitol Insurrection, Donald Trump, elections, Fascism, House Democrats, Joe Biden, Justice Department, Nazism, Neo-Nazis, propaganda, Rule of Law, Trump Coup d'état, U.S. Congress, U.S. news coverage August 2, 2021

Should Trump be indicted? REVISED — A comprehensive evaluation of the arguments

A fundamental norm of a democratic state governed by law is that the authors of serious crimes must be prosecuted and sent to prison if found guilty. This rule should apply no matter who they are.

Both President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have solemnly stated (Garland under oath) that they would not let political considerations influence Department of Justice decisions on whether or not to prosecute individuals.

Both Biden and Garland have violated these promises, in a most egregious and blatant manner, by refusing to prosecute Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.

There appears to be an iron-clad agreement between President Biden, Attorney General Garland, and Democrats in Congress, not to raise this issue, that is, not to even talk about it.

What, indeed, might be the arguments against prosecuting Trump and his Republican co-conspirators?

As there has been virtually no public discussion of the reasons that have led the Democrats to refrain from indicting Trump and his co-conspirators for their apparent crimes, the disadvantages of this course of action have not been articulated or discussed seriously in the media.

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Afghanistan, Biden Administration, elections, Intelligence, Joe Biden, Taliban, U.S. news coverage July 5, 2021

The Afghan government could fall quickly

A thousand Afghan military have crossed over into Tajikistan, seeking asylum. They were fleeing the Taliban, who have cut off access to Badakhshan province, including access to the regional center of Konduz in the North. The Washington Post’s Berger reports:
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It looks like Biden, unless he changes course on Afghanistan, will, like Lyndon Johnson, be remembered for his disastrous military and foreign policy decisions, and not for his domestic accomplishments.

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Biden Administration, Capitol Insurrection, Donald Trump, elections, Fascism, FBI, House Democrats, Joe Biden, Justice Department, Nazism, Neo-Nazis, propaganda, Rule of Law, Trump Coup d'état, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution, U.S. news coverage, United States June 21, 2021

IMPUNITY: The biggrest and most important story no one will cover

IMPUNITY: The biggrest and most important story no one will cover

When will Trump be indicted?

Why are we asking this question five months after Democratic President Joe Biden has been in office?

A Pulitzer Prize is waiting for the Newspaper or Magazine that will field a news team to take this story on.
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The Biden administration and Merrick Garland’s Justice Department have not convened grand juries and indicted Donald Trump and his Republican co-conspirators for the many electoral crimes and other crimes they committed in what amounted to a vast Republican conspiracy to overthrow the election and the Constitution.
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All the attention has been diverted to the Capital Insurrection on January 6 and the violent demonstrators who seized the Capitol. Attention of the media has focsed on the foot soldiers, and not the generals who sent them into battle. Trump and his Republican co-conspirators commited many acts of intimidation of election officials, and other acts of obstruction of justice. Why have Biden and Garland not prosecuted these crimes?
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It as if some foreign country that is an enemy of democracy had launched a massive missile attack on the United States that unleashed a tasteless, odorless gas on the entire population, causing total amnesia regarding certain tenets of democracy and the rule of law.

One such bedrock principle of the rule of law is that crimes must be punished, suspected criminals must be indicted and tried, and, when found guilty, sent to prison.
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If Trump gave us the Normalization of the Unthinkable and the Normalization of the Unforgivable, President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have given us the Normalization of Impunity.

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Which newspaper or magazine or news team will go after the Pulitzer that is just sitting there, like on a table, waiting for someone to pick it up?

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Biden Administration, Capitol Insurrection, Donald Trump, elections, Impeachment, Impeachment Trial, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Nazism, Neo-Nazis, propaganda, Republican Senators, Rule of Law, Trump Coup d'état, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution, U.S. news coverage June 20, 2021

REPRISE: When will Trump be indicted?

Putting all of these actions together, it appears that Donald Trump led a vast conspiracy, in which he enlisted the support and cooperation of Republican federal, state, and local legislators and officials, to overthrow the results of the November 3 presidential election and, consequently, the Constitution of the United States.

Why have we heard virtually nothing about federal or state grand juries investigating these alleged crimes?

There have been only a few exceptions, such as the grand jury in Atlanta where a courageous prosecutor is investigating a blatant case of apparent election interference for which there is recorded and public evidence.

Why indeed has former President Donald Trump not yet been indicted for the many crimes he has apparently committed?

When will he be indicted?

Moreover, when will his many Republican co-conspirators and accomplices in these apparent crimes be investigated and themselves indicted?

What is going on?

We are all tired of thinking about Trump and his crimes. However, democracy is a very fragile flower, and we have just seen how close we can come to losing it. If America’s first fascist president, and the many members of the Republican Party who engaged in a vast conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution, are not held accountable before the courts for the very numerous crimes which they committed, the lesson of political impunity will not be lost on others.

Americans who are too cowardly to defend American democracy by prosecuting, and insisting on the prosecution of, those who have committed criminal acts in furtherance of the Republican conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution, will have only themselves and their own passivity to blame if it is lost.

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authoritarian regimes, Biden Administration, Capitol Insurrection, Dictatorship, Donald Trump, elections, Fascism, History, House Democrats, Impeachment, Impeachment Trial, Joe Biden, Justice Department, Nazism, Neo-Nazis, propaganda, Republican Senators, Rule of Law, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution, U.S. news coverage June 6, 2021

America has become a Country of the Absurd

Reprinted, with permission, from ABSURARAMA! June 6, 2021. In the United States, perhaps 50-70 million voters, including a vast majority of Republican voters and almost…

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authoritarian regimes, Biden Administration, Capitol Insurrection, corruption, Donald Trump, elections, Fascism, House Democrats, Impeachment, Impeachment Trial, January 6 Capitol Insurrection, Joe Biden, Justice Department, Nancy Pelosi, Nazism, Neo-Nazis, propaganda, Republican Senators, Rule of Law, Trump Coup d'état, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution May 28, 2021

The U.S. doesn’t need investigations or commissions. It needs prosecutions.

Republicans have done the Democrats and the ciountry a huge favor by blocking the creation of a special joint commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. ..
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No, we don’t need any further commissions of inquiry to distract us from the real issues and stakes in American politics today.

What we need is a Justice Department Task Force to launch and coordinate the prosecutions of Donald Trump and his Republican co-conspirators who committed many serious felonies in their efforts to overthrow the election and the Constitution in 2020-2021. Trump should also be prosecuted for his many egregious crimes in office, including the instances of obstruction of justice detailed–with a summary of the evidence–in the Mueller Report, and the many instances of obstruction of justice through witness tampering and retaliation against witnesses for truthfully testifying in impeachment investigations.

The rule of law is at stake here.

Congress, and in particular the House, has an important role to play. Instead of spinning their wheels in yet another congressional inquiry into the insurrection on January 6, the Democrats in the House should be holding hearings into why the Justice Department has not proceeded with prosecuting Donald Trump and his co-conspirators for the many crimes he and they committed in office, including the rash of election-related crimes committed after November 3, 2021.

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authoritarian regimes, Deutschland, Dictatorship, Donald Trump, elections, Fascism, Germany, History, January 6 Capitol Insurrection, Joe Biden, Justice Department, Neo-Nazis, propaganda, Trump Coup d'état, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution May 6, 2021

Liz Cheney and the Republican “Gleichschaltung”

There is a movement afoot in the House of Representatives to strip Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) from her post in the House Republican Leadership. Her opponents are furiously trying to remove her because she has refused to endorse the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the November election, and that it was stolen from him by massive fraud. Cheney survived a similar challenge a few weeks ago, but she has apparently lost the support of House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and is being challenged by a proponent of the Big Lie and everything Trump. Cheney says she will not tell lies to keep her position. The whole development reminds one of what took place in Germany in the 1930’s.

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Barack Obama, Biden Administration, Department of State, Dictatorship, Donald Trump, elections, internal supporters of human rights, Iran, Joe Biden, Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, Nuclear Proliferation, Taliban, U.S. Military, use of force March 27, 2021

Afghanistan: Biden’s Achilles Heel

More fundamentally, his failure to replace Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as head of the peace negotiations reveals he is inclined to continue Donald Trump’s “cut and run” policy, embodied in the February 29, 2020 surrender and withdrawal agreement in Doha, Qatar with the Taliban.

The Agreement does not provide even the slightest fig leaf to conceal the abject nature of the surrender to the Taliban.

By proceeding with the May 1, 2021 withdrawal date established in the Doha Agreement, or even postponing it by months, Biden would fail to recognize that the Taliban have not seriously engaged in “intra-Afghan” negotiations aimed at a peace settlement, and establishing a viable cease-fire, as called for in the Doha Agreement.
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Biden is the prisoner of his 2009 thinking. He doesn’t recognize that conditions have changed. He doesn’t recognize that the current U.S. force posture and mission is essentially what he was arguing for in Barack Obama’s 2009 Afghanistan policy review.

If Biden continues on Trump’s “cut and run” course, he will be responsible for Afghanistan becoming another Iran, with the people–including those we have nurtured as advocates of democracy and the rule of law for the last 20 years–living under the harsh dictatorial rule of Islamic religious extremists, as in Iran.

Moreover, surrender in Afghanistan is not likely to enhance his negotiating position with Iran.

Biden must replace Khalilzad immediately, and conduct a fresh and new review of U.S. military and policy options in the region. He should listen to his democratic allies and, above all, to the people of Afghanistan as represented by their elected leaders.

He needs to develop a policy based on the facts on the ground today, and set aside the idea that the U.S. goal should be just to get out of Afghanistan.

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cancel culture, Caronavirus, Culture and Communication, demonstrations, Donald Trump, elections, freedom of speech, Impeachment, propaganda, Rule of Law, Satire, television, U.S. Constitution, U.S. news coverage March 15, 2021

Gov. Cuomo–Democracy and rule of law, or cancel culture: We must choose

The current campaign to force Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign may lead to his impeachment, but is not likely to lead to his conviction and imprisonment for a crime.

Instead, he is the latest object of a phenomenon in the United States, and some other places, which seeks to bypass legal and constitutional processes to achieve the immediate objective of a frenzied mob, often made possible or strengthened through the internet and social media. Non-public and dark forces may be behind some of these campaigns.

In the United States, at least three different “mobs” have contributed to what is often termed “cancel culture”, the abuse of power to achieve goals without due process and without following legally-established procedures for determining the truth of allegations, and determining appropriate and proportionate sanctions for crimes or infractions that may be found to have occurred.
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(T)he critical distinction between predatory sexual conduct–the coercion of a woman by a man to engage in sexual intercourse or other sexual conduct, on the one hand, and sexually inappropriate speech or other conduct (measured by contemporary standards), such as touching or verbal comments, on the other, has frequently been lost.
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The Democrats, and their cancel culture mobs, are serving up a powerful cultural wedge issue for the Republicans to exploit.
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So, small-minded and cynical Democrats are now endorsing mob action and circumvention of rule of law procedures to not only ascertain the veracity of the allegations against Cuomo–including those concerning nursing home death statistics, but also the nature of the punishment that would be proportionate and appropriate for the alleged infractions, should he be found guilty as charged.