Would That Our Prime Minister Had the Courage of this Irish Senator.

Senator Aodhan O Riordain says what we should be hearing from our own government.

Has Anyone Else Seen This?

An anonymous commenter mentioned that cherry trees have come into blossom in Victoria at the south end of the island. Has anyone else seen such a thing in that area?

The Arctic's Death Spiral

It's that bastard, Rossby. Blame Rossby.

The Arctic is again overheating a lot like last year. Winter is setting in except it's not, not really.

Something is totally off. The Arctic is super-hot, even as a vast area of cold polar air has been displaced over Siberia...“It’s about 20C [36 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer than normal over most of the Arctic Ocean, along with cold anomalies of about the same magnitude over north-central Asia,” Jennifer Francis, an Arctic specialist at Rutgers University, said by email Wednesday.

Up until October, things were relatively normal—at least, as normal as they can be in the era of record-shattering climate change. In mid-October Arctic temperatures suddenly flattened and then rose, instead of continuing downward as winter progressed. What happened?

“The Arctic warmth is the result of a combination of record-low sea-ice extent for this time of year, probably very thin ice, and plenty of warm/moist air from lower latitudes being driven northward by a very wavy jet stream.” Francis has published research suggesting that the jet stream, which travels from west to east across the Northern Hemisphere in the mid-latitudes, is becoming more wavy and elongated as the Arctic warms faster than the equator does.

Mark Serreze, who heads the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., agrees that something odd is going on....What’s happening, he explains, is sort of a “double whammy.” On the one hand, there is a “very warm underlying ocean” due to the lack of sea ice forming above it. But, at the same time, kinks in the jet stream have allowed warm air to flow northward and frigid Arctic air to descend over Siberia.

Those wavy jet stream things, they're called Rossby Waves. They plunge down toward the tropics, carrying freezing temperatures far to the south, and then soar up into the Arctic, carrying warm air to the polar region.

Last winter's Arctic heatwave triggered cyclonic winds that caused the sea ice to thin about 10 cms. or 4 inches. That meant an earlier spring/summer melt, more exposed ocean water, more heat absorption, a warmer Arctic ocean, a delayed winter freeze - you probably get the idea that this has become a vicious circle, what's being called the Arctic's death spiral. And that, kids, is what's called a natural feedback loop - the very thing we're supposed to be slashing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid triggering. Only it's already well underway.

Did Vote Rigging Let Trump Win the White House?

Veteran American investigative reporter, Greg Palast, says the vote was rigged and it handed Trump the presidency. He writes that the polls that all favoured Hillary weren't wrong - not on voter intention. They didn't predict the outcome, however, because they couldn't predict the votes deliberately disqualified from the count.


Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls solve the problem.

But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.” In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton.

So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?

Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”

...And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud! Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!”

Now there’s a new trope to explain away the exit polls that gave Clinton the win. Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say they voted for Trump. Really? ON WHAT PLANET? For Democracy Now! and Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states. In Ohio, yes, a Black voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered, “Hillary.”

This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on. It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

A Question of Time We Don't Have

The last line came with a jolt unexpected from a Guardian article:

At the risk of losing objectiveness but keeping candor, we are fucked.

That from John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences and a very busy climate monitor.

I admit that after Trump’s election victory, I secretly hoped and even though that his rhetoric was worse than its bite. He only said those crazy things during the campaign to get elected. He wouldn’t really follow through on his plans to completely gut the US commitment to keeping the Earth habitable. Oh how naive we were. Trump’s plan to fill positions in his administration shows things are worse than we could have ever feared.

According to recent reports, Trump has picked long-time climate denier and spokesperson for the fossil fuel industry Myron Ebell to head the Environmental Protection Agency transition. This basically means the EPA will either cease to function or cease to exist. It also appears that the US will pull out of any agreements to limit greenhouse emissions.

It means we have missed our last off-ramp on the road to catastrophic climate change. That may sound hyperbolic, but I study the rate that climate change is happening – the amount of heat accumulating in the Earth’s system. We didn’t have any time to waste in implementing Obama’s aggressive plans, and Trump will result in a decade of time lost.

If there has been one failure worse than all the others in the climate story we get from our mass media, it's been their near total failure to convey the time factor, the urgency in shutting down the fossil energy industry before the window closes on us for good.

Our leaders, Canada's included, act as though we're still in the 80s. That's why so much of their climate change narrative is preposterous, utter fantasy. Trudeau's EnviroMin, Dame Cathy, bleats about holding global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's over. We've already locked in 1.5C. The GHG, greenhouse gases, that will propel us through 1.5C are already in the atmosphere and every gigatonne of GHG we emit from here on in will only increase that 1.5C.

Did I mention that atmospheric CO2 is persistent? It lasts a very long time and just continues warming the atmosphere until it finally dissipates. How long? The stock answer is somewhat more than a hundred years. A recent article in Nature, contends that the lifetime is a few centuries but 25% essentially lasts, and warms, forever.

We all know the line about how, if you want to get out of a hole, the first rule is to stop digging. When it comes to catastrophic climate change, we're already in a very deep and difficult hole and we have to get out fast. But we're still in digging mode and we're making that hole deeper by the day. The deeper we dig this hole the harder it is going to be to get out if we can get out in time. Which is the way you have to start thinking of Canada as a petro-state and our governments, federal and provincial, so insistent on speeding up their shovel work.

Maybe professor Abraham is right. Maybe with Trump headed for the White House we are well and truly fucked. 

Young Scientists Call "Bullshit" on Trudeau

Remember when Justin Trudeau said that his government's decisions would be evidence based and follow scientific knowledge - unlike the Harper government?

Many of us who have been watching the Trudeau government's decisions and policies have been left to wonder what happened to that bold promise? It just didn't seem to hold water.

Apparently we lay-folks weren't alone. Our skepticism and concerns, as it turns out, are widely shared by Canada's scientific community.

Now 1,500 have signed an open letter to the prime minister asking that he keep his word.

By early afternoon on Tuesday, some 1,500 scientists across the country had signed on to the letter, urging the federal government to deliver on its promise to make decisions based on evidence. This at a time when there are signs — such as its recent approval of a controversial gas terminal in British Columbia — that the Trudeau government is doing the opposite.

Aerin Jacob, a post-doctoral fellow based at the University of Victoria who studies tradeoffs in conservation planning and sustainable development, was one of six scientists who helped spearhead the letter. She said they restricted the signatories to early career researchers, which are people within a few years of completing their PhDs or post-doctoral studies. None of them have permanent jobs and so they are putting themselves at risk by speaking out.

Jacob said that young researchers are sometimes told by their supervisors to "put their heads down and not rock the boat" which makes it all the more impressive that more than a thousand across Canada have volunteered to sign on.

They called on the government to take five actions to “help rebuild public trust in robust, open and fair decision-making” in government:

1. Seek and act on the best available evidence

2. Make all information from environmental assessments permanently and publicly available.

3. Assess cumulative environmental effects from past, present, and future projects and activities across multiple scales.

4. Work to prevent and eliminate real, apparent, or potential conflicts-of-interest by requiring public disclosure.

5. Develop explicit decision-making criteria and provide full, transparent rationale of factors considered.

The case of the [LNG]gas terminal is one of a series of recent examples of the government restricting access to federal experts who can explain decisions in an open and transparent way:

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency declined an interview request from National Observer to speak with one of its scientists about its assessment of the Pacific NorthWest LNG project. It also declined to answer questions about how it reviewed evidence and its methodology used to evaluate the environmental impacts of the gas terminal project, explaining that it now faced legal proceedings about the decision on the LNG project and that it would respond to those in court.

Environment and Climate Change Canada has used similar reasoning to prevent its engineers from talking to reporters about their work in reviewing the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal that has resulted in billions of dollars worth of sanctions in the U.S., but no immediate punishment yet in Canada.

The National Energy Board, the federal agency that regulates pipelines and electrical transmission lines, has frequently declined requests from National Observer to answer questions about pipeline safety as well as to grant interviews with experts on topics such as its economic forecasts.

The Trudeau government is doing better than Harper's government at following science, at least where that doesn't get in its way, but that's setting the bar ridiculously low. The five recommended conditions ought to be where the bar is reset, a threshold.

Trudeau promised more. It's time he kept his word.

How the Leader of the Free World Became the Leader of the Global Right Wing.

AmeriKa's president, Donald Trump, will not be the leader of the free world. He will, however, be the leader of the global right wing. Across Europe, the radical right is embracing the next US leader as one of their own. Donald Trump validates their ugly bigotry, racism and xenophobia. He is one of them. It's no accident that he's also warmly received by the radical right Netanyahu government in Israel.

In the Middle East, the strongman thugs who rule with iron fists in the post-Arab Spring era couldn't be happier.

He will be a bit of both but radically different, too, predicts Theodore Karasik, a senior adviser with the Washington-based Gulf State Analytics, who has discussed the future of the region with Trump’s advisers in recent months. Trump’s chief priority, he said, will be to fight the Islamic State, while outsourcing the rest of the region’s security to Russia and to Arab states.

Words like “moderate” and “democracy” won’t feature in a Trump administration’s Middle East vocabulary, he added. “We are now engaged in realpolitik.”

For the region’s strongmen, most of whom had fraught relations with the Obama administration, that is welcome news. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyep Erdogan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi have hailed Trump’s election as a chance to reset their badly frayed relationships with Washington.

Hold onto your hats. With ideology this rancid driving AmeriKa's foreign and military policy, we could be in for a very sharp and wild ride.

Steve Bannon - Every Demagogue Has One

Think of him as the guy who will toss the red meat to the Gullibillies. Steve Bannon, Trump's lead strategist designate and former Breitbart chief, has a lot of people very, very nervous.



Vice News calls Bannon a right-wing Rottweiler. The Bannon/Breitbart juggernaut has inroads to the radical right across Europe and Israel, pretty much any place capable of supporting white supremacists. Breitbart's London organization is considered to have played an instrumental role in nudging Farage's UKIP to an upset victory in the Brexit vote.

That Didn't Take Long. Is This Assange's Reward?

Is Julian Assange getting an early Christmas present? A week after Donald Trump's election victory and six years after Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, a Swedish prosecutor went to the British capital to visit Assange in the embassy.

Assange's team said he agreed to the interview "in part to ensure the Swedish authorities have no further excuse not to discontinue their investigation".

Swedish assistant prosecutor Ingrid Isgren was present at the interview, which was conducted by an Ecuadorian prosecutor.

The fact that Swedish prosecutors were present but not the Swedish defence counsel was "incredibly problematic", [Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson] said – but they had decided to proceed anyway.

"We have been offering his testimony since 2010 and the Swedish prosecutor has refused to hear his side of the story until now."

It's amazing how the wheels of justice can suddenly free up and I'm sure the election result and a grateful president-elect had absolutely no bearing on it.

Will Trump Embolden Bigots in Canada?

Yesterday we read Kinsella's post about a white power, Alt.Right handbill posted in his neighbourhood. Today we have an account from CBC Ottawa of a woman, Anna Maranta, a rabbi no less, who awakened in the early hours of Tuesday morning to find a swastika and the word "kike" spray painted across the front door of her Glebe home.

"I went to bed a little later than usual and woke up in the middle of the night, around 2:30, and as I was walking back to my room coming down the hall I saw a reflection on my front door, which is a glass window door, that kind of startled me," she said.

"I knew right away it was a swastika."

Rabbi Maranta raised the obvious concern:

"It's one thing to be marching down the street and be yelled at from the sidelines," she said. "This is somebody who came onto … my property, onto a lit porch, somebody who knows my routine, and so it's likely somebody … I know in this neighbourhood, and that hurts me even more."

Maranta believes the election of president-elect Donald Trump could be related to the racist graffiti on her door.

"My first thought is that this is an example of what happens when you allow somebody who is in a position of power to speak openly racist, bigoted, misogynistic language and don't censor [it] in any way," Maranta said.

"It allows other people to express their feelings, to express their hatred, and to feel like they've been given permission to do so because no one has effectively silenced that."

Is this an early glimpse into an AmeriKan contagion creeping across our border? Maybe, maybe not. That said we have to treat it as a threat not just to targeted people of colour, immigrants, Muslims or Jews. It's a threat to our society, to what in part distinguishes us from the sometimes narrow, intolerant bigotry that now seems to flourish elsewhere whether in the US, Britain, continental Europe, South Asia, the Middle East - pick a corner of the world. If we don't want that ugliness in Canada we have to choose to reject it. We have to get serious about hate crimes and reinforce minority protections. We have to realize that America can no longer be our beacon which means we can no longer outsource our economic, military and foreign policy to Washington. We have to chart our own course something we once were pretty good at doing when we had this leader named Trudeau.

Eisenhower saved his departing speech to warn Americans of the dangerous rise of what he termed the "military industrial complex." The warning went unheeded and that complex as it was in the 50s has metastasized throughout American society, the US economy and the nation's body politic. What will Obama have to say as he vacates the premises for his successor? He's given hints in statements during his farewell tour of Europe.

Barack Obama has warned of a "rise in a crude sort of nationalism" following the Brexit and US presidential votes.

Speaking in Greece on his final foreign trip, he said: "We have to guard against... tribalism built around an 'us' or a 'them'."

He said the US was painfully aware of the danger of divisions "along lines of race or religion or ethnicity".

Mr Obama said the UK's vote to leave the EU and the US vote showed that people generally were now "less certain of their national identities and place in the world" and that had produced populist movements both on the left and the right.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald, has a report on how Trump's victory has traumatized school children, especially kids of colour, in the United States.

Stiglitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to America's President-Elect

Donald Trump has promised to "make America great again." That was his whole shtick and he rode it to an upset win over the odds-on favourite, Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately Trump was feeding his Gullibillies a diet rich in horseshit. Now that they're used to the taste he has to deliver. How to make America great again, how?

Former World Bank chief economist and Nobel laureate, Joe Stiglitz, has the answers - if Trump is interested (hint: he's not).

Over the past third of a century, the rules of America’s economic system have been rewritten in ways that serve a few at the top, while harming the economy as a whole, and especially the bottom 80%. The irony of Trump’s victory is that it was the Republican party he now leads that pushed for extreme globalisation and against the policy frameworks that would have mitigated the trauma associated with it. But history matters: China and India are now integrated into the global economy. Besides, technology has been advancing so fast that the number of jobs globally in manufacturing is declining.

Trump's Great "Jobs Scam"

The implication is that there is no way Trump can bring a significant number of well-paying manufacturing jobs back to the US. He can bring manufacturing back, through advanced manufacturing, but there will be few jobs. And he can bring jobs back, but they will be low-wage jobs, not the high-paying ones of the 1950s.

If Trump is serious about tackling inequality, he must rewrite the rules yet again, in a way that serves all of society, not just people like him.
The first order of business is to bolster investment, thereby restoring robust long-term growth. Specifically, Trump should emphasise spending on infrastructure and research. Shockingly for a country whose economic success is based on technological innovation, the GDP share of investment in basic research is lower today than it was a half-century ago.

Trump the Inequality Slayer - (Giggle)

...A comprehensive approach is also needed to improve America’s income distribution, which is one of the worst among advanced economies. While Trump has promised to raise the minimum wage, he is unlikely to undertake other critical changes, such as strengthening workers’ collective bargaining rights and negotiating power, and restraining CEO compensation and financialisation.

Regulatory reform must move beyond limiting the damage that the financial sector can do and ensure that the sector genuinely serves society.

Trust Busting, Teddy Roosevelt Style

In April, President Barack Obama’s council of economic advisers released a brief showing increasing market concentration in many sectors(pdf). That means less competition and higher prices – as sure a way to lower real incomes as lowering wages directly. The US needs to tackle these concentrations of market power, including the newest manifestations in the so-called sharing economy.

Dismantling America's Home Grown Tax Havens - For the Rich

...An obvious target should be to eliminate the special treatment of capital gains and dividends. Another is to ensure that companies pay taxes – perhaps by lowering the corporate-tax rate for companies that invest and create jobs in America, and raising it for those that do not. As a major beneficiary of this system, however, Trump’s pledges to pursue policies that benefit ordinary Americans are not credible; as usual with Republicans, tax changes will largely benefit the rich.

...Much has changed since President Ronald Reagan began hollowing out the middle-class and skewing the benefits of growth to those at the top, and US policies and institutions have not kept pace. From the role of women in the workforce to the rise of the internet to increasing cultural diversity, 21st-century America is fundamentally different from the America of the 1980s.

...The agenda I have just sketched is not only about the economy, it is about nurturing a dynamic, open, and just society that fulfils the promise of Americans’ most cherished values. But while it is, in some ways, somewhat consistent with Trump’s campaign promises, in many other ways, it is the antithesis of them.

My very cloudy crystal ball shows a rewriting of the rules, but not to correct the grave mistakes of the Reagan revolution, a milestone on the sordid journey that left so many behind. Rather, the new rules will make the situation worse, excluding even more people from the American dream.

What Stiglitz recommends all makes sense - to anyone setting out to implement Trump's "make America great again" promises. Trump, however, isn't of those ranks and neither are the Republican establishment leaders moving in to control him. Don't worry. He won't be held captive and waterboarded into concessions. All his handlers will do is to put in political language what already lurks deep inside Trump's guts.

But what of the poor Gullibillies? What will happen when they find out they've been had? The first thing is they really won't want to admit they've been conned by such an obvious blowhard. They'll settle and nothing works better than scapegoating. This could get ugly fast.

Our Miner's Canary - the Arctic

Do you remember how balmy temperatures were in the high Arctic last winter? No? Well it's a safe bet that most have probably forgotten all about it. That too is our new normal.

Conditions got so warm that a northern cyclone was spawned last December, thinning the sea ice by 4 inches.  Since the sea ice has been thinning for years in the now warmer Arctic that meant an earlier ice melt this summer, even warmer water temperatures and, now, a longer delay in winter ice reforming.

Residents of the Alaskan city of Barrow (due to change its name to Utqiaġvik on 1 December) would normally be looking out across a frozen harbour by now, but this year the sea is reluctant to freeze.

Barrow’s average temperature for October 2016 was a balmy -1C, significantly warmer than the long-term average of around -8C. And over the North Pole the air has been a full 10C warmer than average of late.

Much of the reason for these warm temperatures and the sluggish rate of sea-ice formation is the exceptional summer sea-ice melt that occurred this year. By 10 September the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that Arctic sea-ice had shrunk to an area of just 4.14m square kilometres – tying with 2007 for second lowest sea-ice extent on record, and some 740,000 square kilometres short of the record set in 2012.

The rapid melting of this ice earlier in the season gave plenty of time for the surface waters of the Beaufort, Chuckchi, Barents and Kara Seas to warm up, and it is these warm waters, combined with persistently warm dry weather blowing up from the south, that have boosted air temperatures and slowed the progress of fresh sea-ice formation.

It's complicated but the growing loss of Arctic sea ice and the warming of the Arctic Ocean and land mass are said to be causing the Polar Vortex that's been hitting eastern North America and parts of Europe.

And now a few words from Katharine Hayhoe, Canadian born, evangelical Christian, climate scientist living in Texas.

Let's Not Be Under any Illusions. Alt.Right Lives and It Will Have a Voice in Trump's White House.

I've been using the word "AmeriKa" to refer to Trumpland. Now it seems I might be infringing on somebody else's intellectual property rights.

Kinsella found this handbill plastered on what appears to be a light post near his neighbourhood.

I was a bit surprised to see the URL for amerika.org. I was drawn to explore the website. I wasn't totally surprised by what I found but it is troubling. We all need to take a hard look at this contagion now that Trump has appointed Breitbart's Steve Bannon as his political strategist. Take a look.

The Neoliberal Racket

George Monbiot traces the origins of neoliberalism and how to seized control of political and economic thought in the West eventually leading to the election of Donald Trump.

At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. “This is what we believe,” she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.

The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

[Hayek] begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.

Democracy, by contrast, “is not an ultimate or absolute value”. In fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising choice over the direction that politics and society might take.

...The ultra rich are “scouts”, “experimenting with new styles of living”, who blaze the trails that the rest of society will follow. The progress of society depends on the liberty of these “independents” to gain as much money as they want and spend it how they wish. All that is good and useful, therefore, arises from inequality. There should be no connection between merit and reward, no distinction made between earned and unearned income, and no limit to the rents they can charge.

Inherited wealth is more socially useful than earned wealth: “the idle rich”, who don’t have to work for their money, can devote themselves to influencing “fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs”. Even when they seem to be spending money on nothing but “aimless display”, they are in fact acting as society’s vanguard.

...Thatcherism and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax cuts for the rich, crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this network was not its capture of the right, but its colonisation of parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.

...As I warned in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation.

...Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek’s “independent”; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our remaining decencies, beginning with the agreement to limit global warming.

Monbiot thinks that man's better nature will be awakened by the excesses of
Trump and his handlers and that we will finally rise up to resist the neoliberal juggernaut. I wonder if he had to say that. After all, what is the alternative?

That Flushing Noise? It's the Sound of the Great "Bait and Switch"

The Gullibillies want their due from Team Anti-Establishment and it's captain, the Orange Behemoth. It's "winning" time and they know they'll soon be winning so much they'll become tired of always winning. Donald Trump told them so, he promised.

Of course president-elect Trump won't become president Trump for another two months but he's already busy putting together the winning team, what the New Yorker's John Cassidy calls "Trump's Great Bait and Switch." Oh, oh, Gullibillies, this might not be what you want to hear.



Six days into the Trump transition, one of the biggest bait-and-switch operations in recent history is already well under way. Trump campaigned as an outsider who would overthrow a hopelessly corrupt Washington establishment. Now we learn that many members of that very establishment will play key roles in a Trump Administration. On Friday, Trump announced that his soon-to-be Vice-President, Mike Pence, a former head of the Republican Study Committee on Capitol Hill, would replace New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as the chairman of his transition team. And, on Sunday, that team announced that Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, the Party’s principal fund-raising and organizational arm, will serve as Trump’s White House chief of staff, while Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker and head of Breitbart News, the controversial alt-right Web site, will serve as Trump’s chief strategist.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that “at least a half dozen major Washington lobbyists and three top fundraisers for Mr. Trump’s campaign have been tasked with heading key portions of Mr. Trump’s transition team. . . . In many cases, the lobbyists are selecting administration officials for departments that will affect the interests of firms they represent.”

The Journal report helpfully listed some of the lobbyists, the special interests they represent, and the duties they have been assigned. Martin Whitmer, who shills for the Association of American Railroads and the National Asphalt Pavement Association, is leading the transition’s “transportation and infrastructure” team. In the magazine this week, my colleague Jane Mayer wrote about Michael Catanzaro, a veteran lobbyist for oil and gas firms who is overseeing “energy independence,” and Mike McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies, who is overseeing appointments to the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Both men count Koch Industries as clients.

...Conservative policy experts, many of whom turned up their noses at Trump during the campaign, are also—selflessly, no doubt—prepared to help. On Saturday, the Journal reported that the Heritage Foundation, which for decades has been in the vanguard of promoting conservative policies such as privatizing Social Security and prisons, has dozens of staffers and alumni working on the transition. Have these free-market conservatives suddenly discovered the virtues of Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on China and Mexico? Hardly. But they can see much to like in his pledge to make a bonfire of financial and environmental regulations, and also approve of his tax plan, which, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, would boost the annual after-tax income of the top one per cent by $214,690, on average, and annual after-tax income of the top 0.1 percent by $1.1 million.
...And what of the great leader himself? The Times reported this weekend that Trump perhaps intends to dispense with the antiquated notion that the President should spend nearly all his time living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. According to a report by Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker, Trump “is talking with his advisers about how many nights a week he will spend in the White House. He has told them he would like to do what he is used to, which is spending time in New York when he can.” The idea, apparently, is that Trump “might spend most of the week in Washington, much like members of Congress, and return to Trump Tower or his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., or his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach on weekends.” I don’t know about you, but I missed the bit in Trump’s speeches where he promised to the turn the Presidency into a part-time commuter job.

But what happens if, during one of these weekends while Trump is away, the Russians march into Ukraine, or the Chinese occupy a disputed island in the South China Sea? Never fear. The Trump Administration will be staffed by folks as skilled at dealing with pesky foreigners as they are at draining the swamp: statesmen like Gingrich, Giuliani, and John Bolton—the veteran warmonger who has been rumored as a possible Secretary of State.

To sum up, this is the prospect we are facing. A populist but semi-engaged President who is less interested in governing than in soaking up adulation at big rallies. (He might hold more of them even though the campaign is over, the Times story said.) Meanwhile, his cronies and members of the permanent establishment may make many of the actual decisions, which will largely benefit the already rich, including the ruling family. Debt mushrooms as El Presidente approves prestige construction projects but not the taxes needed to pay for them. And skilled propagandists, like Bannon, whip up nationalist fervor to keep the masses diverted from what is really going on.

We’ve seen this movie before, many times. But not here in the United States.

All Of the Above

Everybody, it seems, has an explanation for how a racist, bigoted, misogynistic pathological liar became the president-elect of the United States. Inevitably the focus becomes attaching blame for this farcical calamity.

Some blame the dead-ender, political illiterates who supported Trump. Others blame the media that gave Trump such a free pass. Hillary gets a lot of blame. Obama too. The Democratic Party that has lost touch with the public, it gets blamed. To these and more my take is "all of the above." Without the benefit of a thorough post-mortem, a real muscle and sinew exploration, it can't be helpful to play this game. That can only lead to scapegoats.

Timothy Garton Ash, writing in The Globe, says the focus has to be on defending liberal democracy, not just in America but across the West.


So now the challenge is in plain view: We face the globalization of anti-globalization, a popular front of populists, an international of nationalists. “Today the United States, tomorrow – France,” tweets Jean-Marie Le Pen. It will be a long hard struggle to defeat them, at home and abroad, and we may now have to look to Germany rather than America for the “leader of the free world.” But defeat them we will.

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, we have something very close to fascism. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey is rapidly crossing the line between illiberal democracy and fascism, while Viktor Orban’s Hungary is already an illiberal democracy. In Poland, France, the Netherlands, Britain and now the United States, we have to defend the line between liberal and illiberal democracy. In the United States, we shall now witness the biggest test of one of the strongest, oldest systems of liberal democratic checks and balances.

What we see in all these nationalist populisms is an ideology that claims that the directly expressed will of “the people” trumps (the verb has already acquired a new connotation) all other sources of authority. And the populist leader identifies himself – or herself, in the case of Marine Le Pen – as the single voice of the people. Donald Trump’s “I am your voice” is a totemic populist line.

...Does history teach us anything about such wave-like phenomena, appearing at roughly the same time in many places, in different national and regional forms, but nonetheless having common features? Nationalist populism now, globalized liberalism (or neoliberalism) in the 1990s, fascism and communism in the 1930s and 40s, imperialism in the 19th century. Two lessons perhaps: that these things usually take a significant period of time to work themselves out, and that to reverse them requires courage, determination, consistency, the development of a new political language and new policy answers to real problems.

We must, therefore, brace ourselves for a long struggle, perhaps even a generational struggle. This is not yet a “postliberal world,” but it could become so. The forces behind the popular front of populism are strong, and traditional parties are often weak, and such waves are not reversed overnight.

...A greater burden therefore falls on other leading democracies of the world: the many national democracies in Europe, but also Canada, Australia, Japan and India. If we in Europe feel it is vital for the Baltic states to be protected against any possible kind of aggression by Mr. Putin’s Russia, we must work through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union to ensure that. We can’t rely on a Putin-praising Mr. Trump. Britain having sidelined itself as a result of its own version of nationalist populism, a special responsibility lies with French and German voters. If we have a French president Alain Juppé and a re-elected chancellor Angela Merkel at the end of next year, Europe may still be able to pull its weight.

Ms. Merkel made by far the most dignified response I have seen to Mr. Trump’s election. “Germany and America,” she said, “are tied by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and human dignity, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views. I offer the next President of the United States, Donald Trump, close co-operation on the basis of these values.” Magnificent.

The phrase “leader of the free world” is usually applied to the president of the United States, and rarely without irony. I’m tempted to say that the leader of the free world is now Angela Merkel.

What a time for a generational struggle to defend liberal democracy. This authoritarian populism is indeed a challenge and to more than just liberal democracy. It arrives as a massive "threat multiplier" to complicate and worsen every other challenge now facing mankind from climate change to nuclear proliferation and just about everything in between. One essential factor to responding to every one of these challenges is social cohesion out of which collective will arises. Now that we've embarked on a world of social division, popular will becomes angry and incoherent. Oh dear.

Hillary Fingers Comey

A leaked recording of a conference call between Hillary Clinton and top party donors reveals Clinton puts her election defeat down to FBI director James Comey's interference in the campaign.

With voting day just two weeks off, Comey broke with protocol to announce that a further criminal investigation into Clinton emails was underway. Nine days later he just as surprisingly cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing in the follow-up investigation.

Did Comey throw the election to Donald Trump? Clinton's not alone in believing that. Some 20-million votes were cast while Clinton was under Comey's engineered shadow.

"There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful," Mrs Clinton told the donors on a farewell conference call on Saturday.

"But our analysis is that Comey's letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum. We dropped, and we had to keep really pushing ahead to regain our advantage."

According to US media, she added that Mr Comey's later recommendation that she should face no charges had energised Mr Trump's supporters.

I believe her. I don't doubt for a second that Comey deliberately threw a last-minute wrench in Clinton's gears. He may not have known how damaging the impact would be but he had to have known that there would be no time for Clinton to undo the damage.

Was this a coincidence, a matter of happenstance? Well we know that police investigators are trained not to write off events of this sort as coincidence, not until there's something that shows they weren't intentional. Comey, a Republican, does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

If Trump Wants a Swamp to Drain

Forget Hillary Clinton's emails. That was all nonsense anyway.

If Trump wants to "drain the swamp" the only way he'll do it, the only thing that will do his people any good, is to get money out of politics.

First thing would be to dismantle the collusion between government and Wall Street by which not one of those responsible for the '08 meltdown was ever prosecuted. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has done a ton of research that pretty much lays it all out.

Take it apart. Investigate it. Expose it to the light of day. Show the American public who perpetrated their economic nightmare, where the bailout money really went, how those responsible flourished in the wake of their perfidy, in the process driving wealth and income inequality to unparalleled heights.

That 9/11 Commission? Do the same thing to investigate, analyze and explain to the American people how their country got sucked into a ruinous debacle in the Middle East starting with the illegal conquest of Iraq. Lots of suspects there - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, Scooter - dust'em off.

And then force Congress into accepting campaign finance reform. Get big money out of the game. It should never have been allowed to become the lifeblood of Congressional politics. It's the vehicle by which Congress has become a "bought and sold" entity in service to special interests.

These are all things that Obama should have at least attempted and didn't. His failures rightly convinced many voters that the political apparatus in Washington is rigged, corrupt. That's not to say that he would have succeeded but at least he could have shown who was standing in the way.

Washington was always a malarial bog. There's no shortage of swamps at hand if Trump is in the mood for some draining. Only he's not. That was just electoral horseshit he used to feed the Gullibillies.

Sam Bee Disses the "Caucasian Nation."

She's got a point. If all American Muslims are suspected terrorists, then all white Americans, even if they voted for Hillary, are responsible for Trump.

How Nigel Wright Got a Pass

It's an interesting story but hardly convincing. When the RCMP went after senator Mike Duffy for supposed bribery it left people shaking their heads. How could Duffy have committed the crime of bribery for receiving Nigel Wright's $90-thousand without Wright being criminally responsible for giving the bribe? It became known as the "immaculate bribe."

Newly released documents show the RCMP gave Wright "a pass"  in order to secure Harper's ex-chief of staff's testimony against Duffy. They let the little fish go in order to catch the big fish.

Two things wrong with this story. In the months between Wright's resignation turned firing (remember how Harper changed his story on that?) and the RCMP announcement that he would not be charged, supposedly because he'd done nothing wrong, I kept getting word from a well placed Ottawa conservative that Wright was making the rounds socially and telling the conservative fold that, if he was charged, he would tell all. The message , I'm told, was that he would implicate Harper as not merely knowing everything but as the directing, and hence criminal, mind. The "bribe" was all about making a political problem go away.

Wright hung around Ottawa those several months basically doing nothing but waiting for the "all clear" from the RCMP. Literally the day after he was taken off the hook, he headed for the airport.

Here's something to remember. You can't make sense of this scandal without recalling how it broke in the first place. It began with an incredibly foolish email Duffy sent to his inner circle (seemingly half of Ottawa) about the deal that had been cooked up in the PMO. It unveiled all the essential elements of the deal. Duffy would be given cash to square away his Senate debt. But there was more. He was to immediately cease cooperating with the Senate auditors. And the PMO would see to it that the Senate audit report "went easy on" old Duff.

Duffy's email was sent contemporaneously with the deal. It's the marker. Afterward each and every element of the deal came to pass. It was only well after the plan was implemented that someone leaked the email to CTV's Bob Fife. That critical email did not evidence some bribe. There was no scheme hatched by Duffy. The scheme, quite plainly, was the doing of the PMO - Wright and Harper. Remember these are the RCMP's top investigators and the commissioner who supposedly were blinded to the obvious.

The second problem is that, as Justice Vaillancourt observed, Duffy wasn't bribed at all. Duffy was ordered to take the money, pay off his Senate tab, and make the story die. But Vaillancourt went further. He said that a crime had indeed been perpetrated, just not by Duffy.

Remember that Duffy was acquitted of all 31 charges brought against him. The very number is astonishing. 31 charges, all of them groundless? 31 acquittals, that's not a matter of misjudgment or oversight. That's a political persecution, a deliberate effort to bury the guy. That's what Harper had said they would do if Duffy didn't play ball. And the RCMP were in on it. They had to be.

Wright was taken off the hook because he had to be. When he was off the hook so too were the prime minister, the Senate leadership, and everyone else in the PMO. The RCMP didn't do it gracefully. It was extraordinarily clumsy. They had to invent a new crime, the immaculate bribe. But it staunched the bleeding within the PMO, the Senate leadership and the Tory party. God save the King.