How And Why Bernie Will Defeat Trump

Crooked Hillary…

Everyone who pays attention to the news – especially political news – has heard the phrase uttered by the Current White House Occupant, sometimes also known as POS45. There’s even a Wikipedia page of the nicknames he gives folks.

Que sera, sera… eh?

Nevertheless, recall the 2016 General Election?

Why, of course you do!

Who could forget it, right?

I mean, it was a choice between “the devil you know, and the devil you don’t know.” Either way, it was a devil. But at least with one, you could half-way predict what that devil might, could, or possibly would do.

Not so with the other devil.

Or, put another way, a known quantity versus an unknown quantity.

And, time has proven it to be the case.

But for all the investigations which have been launched against her, or about her, and her dealings, nothing has stuck. So maybe she’s the “Teflon Don,” rather than her husband “Blowjob Bill,” eh?

Remember Donna Bazile, the twice-former, interim Democratic National Committee Chair? Recall how she’d been discovered having sharing debate questions with Hillary after a WikiLeaks email dump, and during a second such revelation resigned in shame from her position at CNN as political commentator/pundit?

Yeah… THAT Donna Brazile.

And, perhaps you may recall how she later revealed in her book, an excerpt of which was made into a Politico article, what she’d found when she was briefly DNC chair, specifically, how a back-room deal was struck between Hillary and the DNC a year before the 2016 election campaign season began.

So, let’s recap.

Here’s two of the article’s first three paragraphs, which are excerpted from her book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House:

“I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

“So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”

Focus upon that last sentence – “It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”

“…for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”

That, my friends, is a classic example of a quid pro quo – giving one thing of value in exchange for another thing of value. Legally defined as a type of valid contract, the quid pro quo is not an illegal act in and of itself, per se, and must be considered within context to determine if it was an illegal act, or not.

There’s little-to-no question that it was unethical, at the very least, and certainly hasn’t reflected positively on the party, nor upon Hillary.

But how did it get to that point?

After the convention, Ms Brazile called Gary Gensler, Chief Financial Officer of Hillary’s campaign, who told her that the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

Stewardship of the party’s finances was in shambles, to say the least, and it was due in significant part, or so she claims, from her predecessor Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Representative from Florida’s 20th Congressional District.

Ms. Wasserman-Schultz, as you may recall, also later resigned as DNC Chair after a tranche of WikiLeaks emails showed she had given significant help to Hillary during her Presidential campaign, rather than remain a supportive, yet independent observer. So perhaps it was for the best, anyway.

Not everyone in the party had been happy with her at the helm, either. Lis Smith, a longtime campaign operative, former Communications Director, and former Deputy Campaign Director for candidates like Martin O’Malley, Bill de Blasio, Claire McCaskill, and Barack Obama, said of Wasserman-Schultz’ resignation that, “Her resignation is good news for Democrats, and great news for anyone who believes the DNC needs wholesale reform. Hopefully we can all learn from her little experiment this past primary season and never repeat it as a party.”

Senator Sanders was more diplomatically circumspect in his remarks, saying that, “While she deserves thanks for her years of service, the party now needs new leadership that will open the doors of the party and welcome in working people and young people. The party leadership must also always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race.”

But, back to the story at hand.

Ms. Brazile wrote that while she was interim DNC Chair that, “I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him.” But in her search for the “smoking gun,” after diligent efforts, speaking with numerous party lawyers and officials who feigned knowledge or responsibility, she continually came up empty-handed… until later. She wrote:

“When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

“The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook [Hillary’s Campaign Manager] with a copy to Marc Elias [General Counsel for Hillary’s campaign]—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”

She wrote that while she was the interim DNC Chair, she experienced some unusual events, which at the time, seemed nothing more than purely odd, if not curious, but certainly not suspicious, nor even eyebrow-raising. One of those trifling matters was that, as chair of the party, she was hamstrung from doing anything the party chair would have normally done, such as write press releases, unless

The Birmingham News knew of plot to assassinate Fred Shuttlesworth

The things we continue to learn about the explicit wickedness and evil of that era continues to plague the South, and the nation at large… particularly those who pander to it in the Republican party. And GOP party officials wonder why they continue to lose elections. Perhaps they should get a clue.

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Good and Evil in Birmingham

January 20, 2013

By DIANE McWHORTER

FIFTY years ago, Birmingham, Ala., provided the enduring iconography of the civil rights era, testing the mettle of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so dramatically that he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.

During his protest there in May 1963, the biblical spectacle of black children facing down Public Safety Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor’s fire hoses and police dogs set the stage for King’s Sermon on the Mount some four months later at the Lincoln Memorial. And the civil rights movement’s “Year of Birmingham” passed into history as an epic narrative of good versus evil.

Our understanding of the “good” has expanded beyond the lone-dreamer theory to embrace other activists, like King’s partner in Birmingham, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. Yet the evil segregationist archetype is fixed in the popular mind as the villainous housewife of “The Help” or the cretinous mob of “Django Unchained” — nobody we’d ever know, or certainly ever be.

But the disquieting reality is that the conflict was between not good and evil, but good and normal. The brute racism that today seems like mass social insanity was a “way of life” practiced by ordinary “good” people.

According to the Southern community’s consensus of “normal,” those fighting for rights now considered mainstream were “extremists,” and public servants could rationalize plans to murder men like Shuttlesworth, confident that they were on the right side of history.

Consider new evidence about a plan by Connor to have Shuttlesworth assassinated. Under Connor’s orders, Detective Tom Cook

Little Known History: The NRA Once Supported Gun Control.

Monday, Jan 14, 2013 10:00 AM EST

The NRA once supported gun control

It may seem hard to believe, but for decades the organization helped write federal laws restricting gun use

By Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet

The NRA once supported gun control.

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

For nearly a century after its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association was among America’s foremost pro gun control organizations. It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against government—if not armed insurrection—emerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.

In the years since, an NRA that once encouraged better marksmanship and reasonable gun control laws gave way to an advocacy organization and political force that saw more guns as the answer to society’s worst violence, whether arming commercial airline pilots after 9/11 or teachers after the Newtown, while opposing new restrictions on gun usage.

It is hard to believe that the NRA was committed to gun-control laws for most of the 20th century—helping to write most of the federal laws restricting gun use until the 1980s.

“Historically, the leadership of the NRA was

Alabama State Senator Scott “aborigines” Beason: “When their children grow up and get the chance to vote, they vote for Democrats.”

Garbage like this infuriates me to no end.

What kind of garbage am I referring to?

I’m referring to the kind of racist garbage that has been HB56 – the state’s lazy attempt to “do something” about illegal immigration.

And just for the record, it is my considered opinion that Alabama State Senator Scott Beason is a lazy, incompetent, racist who is so lazy that he wouldn’t even pick up a bucket to pick vegetables when one was thrust toward him by an Alabama farmer who stood to lose millions in a crop that HB56 forbade him to hire migrant farm workers. (Alabama tomato farmer Leroy Smith, Chad Smith’s father, challenged Beason to pick a bucket full of tomatoes and experience the labor-intensive work. Beason declined but promised to see what could be done to help farmers while still trying to keep illegal immigrants out of Alabama. Smith threw down the bucket he offered Beason and said, “There, I figured it would be like that.” {There you have it. Scott Beason is a man too Goddamn lazy to put in an honest, hard day’s labor. What a worthless, shit eating, son-of-a-bitch. ed.})

Migrant farm workers have been, and continue to be an integral part of this nation’s agricultural production.

Alabama’s version of Arizona’s immigration law was written by xenophobic Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who, in his legal/political career has written laws that have consistently been struck down after judicial scrutiny & review, as well as having come under fire within his own profession by complaints of racism by University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law as far back as 2003.

To give the man his due, however, he is a very hard-working man, and was involved with honor society, debate team, forensics, student council, spirit club and intramurals while at Harvard, where he graduated in 1988. Having won a Marshall Scholarship from the British government, he attended Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in political science in 1992. He then was accepted at Yale Law School, where he taught political science to undergraduates and won a Prize Teaching Fellowship in 1994.

But then, I suppose, some might consider Adolph Hitler a hard-working man.

In 2001, he was awarded a prestigious White House fellowship, and reported for duty at the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sept. 1. Ten days later, the United States suffered the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil. Though he was not a specialist in immigration law or policy, Kobach became Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief advisor on immigration and border security.

Interestingly, in 2002 Kobach reduced the number of Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) judges from 19 to 11, which many believe was significantly responsible for creating a significant backlog of immigration hearings.

By 2005, so much criticism had been leveled at the DOJ’s purported “streamlining” and at what appeared to be “a pattern of biased and incoherent decisions” that DOJ started proposing to boost the number of judges and to mandate full opinions instead of one-line decisions, effectively reversing Kobach’s efforts.

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The Strange Career of Juan Crow

Opinion By DIANE McWHORTER Published: June 16, 2012

 THE depth of my alienation from home hit me last January, when Alabama shut out Louisiana State for the college football championship. Even in the familiar afterglow of ’Bama’s second title in three years, I had to ask myself,

Cussin’ in the kitchen and other ignominies

Regular readers of this blog will acknowledge that, while there are many subjects about which I write and opine, the entries wherein I write about myself are rare, exceedingly so. That is upon purpose. As I have written in the front page This blog is about… “What you won’t find here are observations about my personal life. I won’t – and typically don’t – write about my relationships with my family or friends.”

As I now see, Zemanta has suggested the following tags: “profanity,” “politics,” “Mark Twain,” “health,” “Satan,” “Oh Hell,” “fuck,” and “shit”.

How quaintly appropriate.

There are a few omissions.

However, I shall spare you kind readers those blue notes.

As astute observers have read, I am a native Southerner. I take some degree of pride in that fact. That means, that by default, I stand with such historical greats, notables and traditions as: