Oklahoma & Kentucky: Teaching Democracy

Tulsa, Oklahoma elementary school teacher Janie
Mitchell at an April 2nd rally at the state capital 

On the 50th anniversary of his assassination, it's difficult to know exactly what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. might think about the current state of America.

Particularly given the polarized nature of our politics, a two-tier justice system rife with racial and economic bias and the growing socioeconomic inequality between American citizens exacerbated by legislative policies passed by Republican-majority state legislatures and the GOP-majority House and Senate. 


But if Dr. King were still alive today (he'd have turned 88 in January), it's fair to speculate that he'd be among those fighting for the causes that he believed in and fought so hard to achieve in the 1950's and 60's - including the right to a good education and fair pay.

The essence of Dr. King's spirit, including his embrace of Mahatma Ghandi's belief in the power of peaceful non-violent resistance and civil disobedience, and the courage to speak truth to power, can  arguably be seen amongst the striking public school teachers across the nation.

Inspired by West Virginia teachers, whose nine-day walkout in early March captured global attention and forced state lawmakers to grant them a 5% pay increase, thousands of Oklahoma public school teachers, administrators and other supporters descended upon the state capital in Oklahoma City on Monday morning.

They rallied in front of the state capitol building, then broke into groups to confront state lawmakers in hallways and offices to demand significant increases to Oklahoma's education funding. 

Since the Oklahoma state legislature slashed public school spending by more than $200 million in the wake of the Great Recession in 2008, the number of students in Oklahoma public schools has increased by more than 40,000 - placing huge demands on public school administrators and teachers and forcing some schools to eliminate funding for programs like art, music and athletics.

Thousands of Kentucky public school teachers
packed the state capital in Frankfurt on Monday

As the sign (pictured above) held by Tulsa elementary school teacher Janie Mitchell demonstrates, Oklahoma public school teachers are fed up with being ranked 49th out of 50 states in terms of salary.

And at the same time, the draconian education cuts have led to some 1,500 teachers being removed from the ranks of Oklahoma public schools.

Those cost are impacting the lives and futures of both students and teachers.

Some public schools in Oklahoma have four day school weeks due to a lack of teachers and money - a situation that plays out in Kentucky as well where thousands of teachers closed schools to fill the halls of the state capitol building on Monday morning to protest under-funded public schools and a sneaky legislative maneuver by state lawmakers to pass cuts in teacher pension benefits on the sly.

Part of what would rankle Dr. King is that the reality is that there's money in the Oklahoma state budget to fully and properly fund public schools and pay teachers a competitive salary.

But as in other states controlled by Republican state legislatures (like Kansas), lawmakers have used anti-union rhetoric and irrational ALEC-driven vilification of public schools to justify shifting money from education in order to fund (drum roll please...) tax breaks for corporations and the 1%.

For example, consider the $300 million tax break for new oil and natural gas drilling Republican Oklahoma legislators and Republican Governor Mary Fallin tucked into the fiscal 2018 state budget.

Republican Oklahoma Gov. Mary Falin

Oklahoma is one of the biggest producers of oil and natural gas in the nation, and U.S. petroleum companies already benefit from a host of federal subsidies for oil and natural gas exploration and drilling.

Yet Oklahoma Republican lawmakers authorized moving $300 million in taxpayer funds to oil and gas companies as many public school classrooms go without sufficient teachers, books and other basic school supplies - it literally borders on criminal.

Conservative Republican Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, who many already considered something of a ideologically right-wing nitwit, epitomized the simplistic, condescending, uninformed Republican contempt for public education on Tuesday when she told CBS News that:

"Teachers want more, but it's kind of like having a teenage kid that wants a better car."  

Now when you read a dismissive, idiotic, Trump-like statement like that, just remember that the public school teachers Fallin is talking about have gone without pay raises for a decade, rank 49th out of all 50 states in salary, and are teaching more students with less funding in an era when education is as critical for global competitiveness as it's ever been.

Who sounds more like the teenage kid?

Fallin and other state legislators moved to sign an education funding and teacher salary increase, but it's way below what teachers are looking for - and her Betsy DeVos-ish "teenage kid" statement only gives teachers more fuel to keep pressuring Republican lawmakers to cough up the money.

Dr. King with other leaders of the 1963 March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 

Unfortunately for Fallin, she's too politically one-dimensional to realize that her statement only validates the striking teacher's demands, and paints Republicans as even more tone deaf than most Americans already think they are.

And it only increases the chances of a Democratic Blue Wave this fall when these thousands of voters head for the polls in November for the mid-term elections.

These grassroots protests are demonstrating growing widespread support for public education.

Teachers, administrators, parents and educational professionals are building political momentum across the country - including way out in Arizona where teachers, fired up by the strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky, are moving closer to a strike in one of the most reliably politically Red States in the nation - one with an open Senate seat in the fall too.

This despite years of Republican legislators working to curb collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public sector employees, and trying to shift public education funding to private and charter schools with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council.

But thousands of teachers across the country (and thousands of students protesting gun violence) are showing that real voices matter - and that there is real power in numbers.

This is what Democracy looks like, and Dr. King would be proud to see civil disobedience and organized protest making a difference and moving the needle in the 21st century.

Cris Dush, ALEC & Sketchy Republican Math Exposed

Got Gerrymander? PA state legislator Cris Dush

Democrat Mike Revis' defeat of a Republican challenger in Tuesday's special election for Missouri's 97th district seat for the state legislature only adds to growing conservative anxiety over the increasing likelihood of significant gains for Democrats in this fall's 2018 midterm elections.

As Matt Ygliesias reported for Vox, Revis winning the seat by a 3-point margin in a district Trump won by 28 points isn't a good sign for the GOP.

Nowhere is Republican desperation any more visible than in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Republican state legislator Cris Dush has been thrust into the media spotlight lately after calling for the impeachment of five of Pennsylvania's seven state supreme court justices.

All five of those justices are Democrats, and all five recently ordered Pennsylvania's Republican-majority state legislature to redraw the state's congressional map because it's so unfairly biased against Democrats that it violates the state's constitution.

As journalist Tim Darragh reported in an article for The Morning Call on Thursday, "The groundbreaking Pennsylvania Supreme Court majority opinion declaring the state congressional map unconstitutionally partisan came down to six simple words in Article 1, Section 5: 'Elections Shall Be Free and Equal.'"

The 139-page ruling handed down by the court Wednesday night gave the Pennsylvania legislature until February 15th to redraw the state's congressional map in a manner that legislators and Democratic Governor Tom Wolf can agree on - or a special master appointed by the court will redraw it in advance of the 2018 midterm elections.

Now undermining the basic principles of democracy by actively suppressing and manipulating the access to vote for those who tend to vote Democratic has become part and parcel of the Republican playbook.

The Republican congressional map drawn in 2012
when 50.5% of votes were were cast for Democrats 

So predictably, Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers freaked out when the state supreme court told them their intentionally-rigged congressional map had to be redrawn.

So just how biased is the current Pennsylvania congressional map as drawn by Republicans?

It's arguably one of the most politically-biased in the country - one intended to keep a Republican minority in control of a numerical Democratic majority.

According to the latest data from the Pennsylvania Department of State, there are 4,030,174 registered Democrats and 3,221,975 registered Republicans - so amongst those registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 808,199.

During the 2012 elections (when Obama won Pennsylvania), Democratic congressional candidates won 50.5% of all votes legally counted.

But back in 2011, Republicans redrew the congressional map of Pennsylvania's 18 congressional districts established after the 2010 U.S. Census - so because of that, Republicans won 72.22% of the congressional seats in 2012 even though they won 49.5% the total number of congressional votes.

Based on the numbers, that should've been more like a 50-50 split - so how does that math work?

As the majority of the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday, it doesn't.

Map showing the 68% of state legislatures currently
controlled by the Republican Party [Map NCSL]

Based on the state's population as determined by the U.S. Census, according to Wikipedia, there are currently 17 congressional representatives from Pennsylvania, 12 Republicans and 5 Democrats - one seat remains unfilled and is up for election, there should be 18.

How do Republican congressman outnumber democratic congressman by 12 - 5 when registered Democratic voters outnumber their Republican counterparts by over 800,000?

Cris Dush could probably tell you, but I doubt he would.

Especially in light of the fact that he's calling for sitting justices of the state supreme court to be impeached because they ruled that Pennsylvania Republican's rigged congressional map is illegal.

Republicans in general really don't want Americans knowing how it is that a party that is so out of touch with the mainstream controls both legislative branches of the federal government, the White House and, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) a remarkable 68 percent of state legislative chambers across the U.S. (See map above).

Normally, a conservative state legislator like Cris Dush wouldn't exactly register as a familiar household name on America's national political radar.

But the way that he and other Republican members of the Pennsylvania state legislature are digging in their heels and trying to oppose the court order to redraw the congressional map is only drawing more media attention to the length to which Republicans will go to hold on to their majority in congress.

Journalist & voting rights advocate Ari Berman

A redrawn (fair) congressional map in Pennsylvania could obviously have serious implications in the 2018 midterm elections in November.

So the Keystone state has become a focal point for national media attention on Republican gerrymandering in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Or North Carolina, where the Supreme Court denied Republican efforts to disenfranchise black voters last May.

Journalist Ari Berman's article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, "How The GOP Rigs Elections",
offers some intriguing insight into the Republican Party's rampant, overt and calculated interference with congressional districts, voting rolls and the use of legislative power to put up obstacles making it harder for people who tend to vote Democratic to cast votes.

In his article, Berman takes a particularly close look at the Republican's gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts in Wisconsin - the home state of House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Rather than reflect the inflated rhetoric extolling the ideals of freedom and democracy so often bandied about by Republicans like Ryan, the sketchy political rigging in Wisconsin reeks of the same kind of repressive authoritarianism Americans so often attribute to countries like North Korea, Russia and China.

During a politically-tumultuous year marked by a chaotic White House, when 33 different seats in the U.S. Senate and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for election on November 6th, the repercussions of the 2018 midterm elections could have a profound impact on American society and the Trump presidency.

Bill Murray escapes with Punxsutawney Phil in
a scene from the 1993 film Groundhog Day 

So it's understandable why Cris Dush has suddenly achieved national recognition.

The married Pine Creek Township resident represents the 98% white, solidly "red" Republican 66th district in rural western Pennsylvania which includes all of Jefferson County and parts of Indiana County.

Fans of the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day might be more familiar with Jefferson County as the home of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania where actor Bill Murray played a depressed weatherman trapped in a time loop.

Punxsutawney is the town where each year a groggy groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil is hoisted aloft to great fanfare to check if he sees his shadow to herald six more weeks of winter.

Now when I think of the film Groundhog Day, I think of two things: the song "The Pennsylvania Polka" and the horror of being stuck in a time loop living the same day over and over again.

In recent days, Cris Dush's actions have reminded me of both.

Remember back in 2016 when the Republican-majority of the radically right-wing conservative Kansas state legislature tried to pass Senate Bill 439?

Republican legislator Mitch Holmes authored the overreaching legislation that proposed authorizing the legislature to be able to impeach State Supreme Court justices after the court ruled that ruinous cuts to the Kansas public school budget violated the state's constitution.

Kansas Republican legislator Mitch Holmes 

That kind of unprecedented expansion of legislative power, using oversight authority over state supreme court justices meant to be used to impeach judges who commit "high crimes and misdemeanors" to block judges from ruling on legislation that violates state law reeks of the creepy fascination with authoritarianism that Republican politicians now seem to covet.

It also reeks of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive organization funded by corporations and wealthy donors that drafts "model legislation" templates for state legislators and even members of Congress to use to propose laws that make it easier for corporations to profit by undercutting or eliminating environmental laws, or dismantling unions through "right to work" laws.

Or, as in the case of Cris Dush in Pennsylvania, suppressing Democratic and progressive votes by shielding sketchy Republican math that undercuts free and fair elections from the oversight of the judiciary as mandated by the state constitution.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court has thus far refused to overrule lower court decisions in North Carolina in 2017, and last Monday in Pennsylvania, where Republicans have sought to usurp the court's authority to crack down on laws that violate "free and equal" elections.

And as Tim Darragh shrewdly observed in his article for The Morning Call on Thursday, Pennsylvania Republican legislator's efforts to impeach state supreme court justices could backfire - and pave the way for other state courts to begin to dismantle the complex trickery of unfairly-drawn political maps intended to subvert the will of the American people.

Between Cris Dush calling for the impeachment of judges he disagrees with, and the High-Chair President's absurd call to spend millions on a military parade to appease his narcissism and soothe his massive personal insecurities, reasonable mainstream Republicans really have to ask themselves two questions:

When did they allow their political party to become defined by an overtly authoritarian sense of control - and whether their embrace of a "power-at-any-cost" philosophy is helpful to American democracy.

Or a means to intentionally undermine it.

Inside the Republican Playbook

Alec Baldwin as Trump being visited by the ghost
of Michael Flynn on Saturday Night Live

Kudos to the staff writers of Saturday Night Live, last night's episode hosted by the talented Irish actress Saoirse (pronounced like 'sayer-shia') Ronan was pretty hysterical.

Ronan was really impressive (and earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination) in the critically-acclaimed and genuinely touching 2015 romantic drama Brooklyn, but she displayed a genuine natural talent and flair for comedy and improv on SNL that was impressive - not all actors have that gear.

The opening skit with Alec Baldwin returning to skewer Trump in a twisted political take on "A Christmas Carol", in which 45 is visited by a chained Michael Flynn as "the Ghost of Witness Flips" as well as former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton, must have had the real Trump seething.

The faux girl-group video performance of "Welcome to Hell" was a pretty brilliant use of biting social satire to highlight the shocking absurdities and prevalence of sexual misconduct in American society.

It certainly didn't hurt that U2 played two live songs either.

Like the millions of other people who tuned into SNL last night, I really needed a few good laughs for a change, and welcomed a light-hearted break from the mind-numbing cacophony of ethical corruption and devise politics that have become the hallmark of Republican politicians this week.

In Washington, Alabama and beyond.

Trump using a racist slur in front of members of
the Navajo Code Talkers in the White House

In what has by now become an intentional and calculated (albeit disturbing) media strategy by the White House, Trump once again made an overtly racist and inflammatory comment in an effort to shift media focus away from the growing fallout from the special counsel investigation as well as the absurdities of the Republican tax scam.

He decided to honor surviving members of the Navajo Code Talkers by setting up the podium in front of the portrait of the controversial 7th president of the United States, Andrew Jackson.

Don't think it was some kind of random coincidence that he used the occasion to (once again) derisively refer to Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" either.

An offensive racial slur that, according to a CBS News article lastTuesday, left families of the Navajo Code Talkers totally "dumbfounded" after Trump said it at a ceremony meant to honor Native American Marine Corps veterans .

Decorated heroes whose ability to use the Navajo language to send and receive indecipherable classified radio transmissions in combat were critical to American military victories against the Japanese Army in the Pacific during World War II.

Trump's use of the slur in front of the portrait of Jackson earned him widespread criticism.

An artistic rendering of the "Trail of Tears"

Remember when the unhinged, resident Republican fear-meister Rudy Giuliani described Trump's 2016 election victory as "One of the greatest victories for the people of American since Andrew Jackson." ?

In 'A People's History of the United States', historian Howard Zinn notes that, "Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history."

Jackson's decision to sign the Indian Removal Act of 1830 into law engineered the systematic ethnic cleansing of multiple Native American tribes from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River between 1830 and 1850.

A blight on the tapestry of American history commonly known as "The Trail of Tears" during which members of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee and Muscogee tribes were systematically removed from their lands and forcibly-marched hundreds of miles west in a brutal, mass forced-exodus that lead to the deaths of approximately 3,000 - 4,000 indigenous people along the way.

As in many examples of the displacement, enslavement or slaughter of indigenous peoples the real number will never be known.

But that portrait of Jackson was apparently a small but sketchy part of Republican efforts to ram through a "tax reform" bill which is essentially one of the largest transfers of wealth to the richest 1% and corporations in U.S. history.

One which will add a staggering $1.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years and eventually force serious cuts in bedrock social spending programs like Medicaid, it's hardly surprising Trump would try and use his own bigotry to shift media attention away from what Republican Senators are trying to do behind closed doors.

Good governance? Handwritten notes on a page of
the Republican tax bill

Trump, and the Republicans who hold legislative majorities in the House and Senate, are so desperate to produce some kind of measurable achievement (even one which will raise taxes on the poor and working and middle class), that they not only blocked Democratic Senator's requests to allow time for the nearly 500-page tax bill to actually be read and analyzed.

They're actually trying to hide what's in it from the American people.

The version Republicans brought to the floor late Friday night actually had hastily-scribbled and almost indecipherable handwritten notes scrawled on some of the pages concerning obscure provisions like modifications to s-corporations.

S-corps are just one of the sketchy ways the super-wealthy in America pay tax on their income at a rate far below the rate at which the average Joe or Jane pays tax on his or her job income.

As defined by Investopedia, S-corps "allow a corporation with 100 shareholders or less the benefit of incorporation while being taxed as a partnership. The (S) corporation can pass income directly to shareholders and avoid the double taxation that is inherent with the dividends of public companies."   

Like other experts, I sure can't decipher exactly what those notes (pictured above) mean, but you can bet some high paid lobbyist or corporate tax attorney wrote them to throw in a little something extra for America's struggling top earners.

Edgar Welch, the man who stormed Comet Ping
Pong in D.C. based on the fake Pizzagate story

So it's pretty clear that the timing of Trump's willingness to publicly use petty, divisive racist comments to stir up controversy is intended to keep members of the American public from focusing on the massive tax swindle Republicans are trying to pull off - as well as the special counsel investigation.

It's the reason he continually uses the words "fake news" over and over and over in order to sew distrust of fact and information among his supporters.

It's the same Russian counter-intelligence strategy that pro-Trump conservative organizations, big Republican donors and Russian operatives, who used technology and social media to turn a fake news story about Hillary Clinton being part of a pedophile ring that conducted satanic rituals in the basement of a family restaurant in Washington, D.C. called Comet Ping Pong, to stoke anti-Clinton sentiment to manipulate voters.

A bogus story re-tweeted millions of times by thousands of gullible Trump supporters including Michael Flynn, Jr. and comedian-actress Roseanne Barr - who Tweeted about it to her 400,000-plus followers on Twitter back in February.

If you get a chance, take some time to check out journalist Amanda Robb's in-depth analysis of the unfolding of the fake "Pizzagate" story, "Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal" published in the November 30th issue of Rolling Stone.

Inside the real Comet Ping Pong

As Robb notes, "The original Pizzagate Facebook post appeared on the evening of October 29th, 2016, a day after then-FBI Director James Comey announced that the bureau would be reopening its investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state."

The story, which was stoked by kooky conspiracy theorists like Douglas Hagmann, Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince (the brother of secretary of education Betsy DeVos), and InfoWars host Alex Jones.

As Robb reported in her RS article, after Prince falsely accused the NYPD of investigating claims that the Clintons "went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein" during an interview on Breitbart Radio, an enraged Alex Jones seized on it as evidence and told his audience that "Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped" children.

Which would be funny if it hadn't prompted 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch to pack a loaded assault rifle and a handgun and drive from his home in North Carolina up to D.C. and walk into Comet Ping Pong to "self investigate" last December.

Fortunately there was no actual basement, no children being held prisoner and no one was hurt when he fired his gun - Welch was eventually taken into custody without incident - he was sentenced to four years in prison this past June.

And that's where he'll languish, a disturbed and gullible by-product of a fake internet conspiracy story that was a part of a massive international effort to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 elections, elect Trump president and undermine American's faith in democracy in the United States.

All with the help of members of the Trump campaign in violation of U.S. law.

Almost sounds like something out of an overly long Saturday Night Live skit, but it's straight out of the Republican playbook.

Lifting the Veil & 'Broadchurch'

Matt Laurer and Charlie Rose 

Watching the news unfold this week has been an even more surreal experience than usual in the post-inauguration era.

Lately it seems like every time the alert sound on my iPhone pings, another hole gets punched in the fabric of the media-driven reality in which many of us live here in America.

Rape, sexually-related assault, harassment or inappropriate contact against anyone is obviously a heinous violation against one's body, mind and spirit - to say nothing of one's personal rights.

But to me there's something deeply unsettling about watching the fleeting veil of money, power, fame and influence being lifted from the steady parade of American media icons who've wielded such a grip on our mainstream popular culture.

Revealing them to be serial sexual predators who knowingly and repeatedly (over the course of years) used their positions to cajole, intimidate or force women into dubious encounters of a sexualized nature.

These are men, arguably vain to varying degrees, who've made careers and fortunes by being arbiters of taste, popular entertainment, intellectual achievement, political power - and often morality and ethics.

Knowing a little something of the darker side of the Hollywood film industry, the allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein were disturbing, but they weren't "surprising" in the conventional sense.

Los Angeles is rife with sleazy dirtbags who play on the fears and desires of those they perceive to be weaker than they are in order to incorporate sex into a kind of sick power dynamic that functions like a narcotic for some people - Harvey was one of them.

Charlie Rose interviewing Natalie Portman

But the disturbing allegations of serial sexual misconduct with subordinates and co-workers leveled against people like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose is a deeply troubling look into the extent of the mistreatment of women in the workplace in America.

One that also forces all of us to look at ourselves - and ask how it is that people in positions of power can mistreat others when so many are aware of their actions.

I mean if even half the allegations against Lauer and Rose are true, and this sordid business was going on within large and influential media institutions (NBC and PBS), how bad is it in smaller offices and workplaces across America?

Places where the media spotlight is far less likely to shine the light of truth.

I can't even count the number of quiet evenings that I've tuned into PBS and watched Charlie Rose sit across that dark round table and interview the famous and the influential.

Over the years I've gained genuine insight into so many people and ideas watching Rose use his particular interview style to coax usually elusive people into revealing things about themselves and what they do and think - in part because they are aware of the cache of his show.

But learning about the way he was treating female staffers - or the fact that he surrounded himself with younger female subordinates - it leaves me feeling untethered from reality.

It's not like I thought Rose was some kind of media demigod without personal flaws, but he certainly struck me as an evolved intellectual who respected people.

Olivia Colman & David Tennant in Broadchurch 

It's clear that something of a Pandora's Box has been opened and more people of power and influence are sure to be named.

But too often lost in the public being "shocked" at these revelations and the subsequent toppling of careers and reputations, are the ways in which their behavior affected the lives of the people they mistreated and in some cases abused.

This week I've sought refuge from the news and Trump's incessant tweets by watching season three of the brilliant Netflix series Broadchurch starring David Tennant and Olivia Colman as Detectives Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller.

If you haven't seen it, the show is a detective procedural - mystery set in the fictional town of Broadchurch on the English coast.

The first two seasons focused on the tragic murder of a local boy and the ways in which the killing disrupted the lives of the people who inhabit the small town - and the toll it took on the personal lives of determined detectives Hardy and Miller as they worked to solve the case.

But the third, and sadly, final season focuses on the rape of a local woman and the detectives' efforts to track down a serial rapist.

Jodie Whittaker as the rape counselor and  Julie
Hesmondhalgh as the victim in Broadchurch

The beautiful setting and camera shots contrast with the disturbing nature of the crimes that have taken place in the seemingly tranquil seaside town.

But it's a first class procedural and I was genuinely moved as the first episode literally walks the viewer through the ways the detectives investigate the crime of rape.

Including graphic scenes as the victim goes through treatment at a rape crisis center and the ways in which evidence is carefully cataloged.


While I'm only four episodes in, the storyline has forced me to sit back and view the allegations against people like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose not from the shock of what they did - but to try and view their actions from the perspective of their co-workers and subordinates who were their victims.

Broadchurch, while obviously just a fictional TV show, has helped me, as a man, gain some degree of insight into just how devastating the crime of sexual assault is and how it impacts the lives of those who are affected by it.

And during a time when people like the delusional Republican "activist" James O'Keefe has the temerity to pay a woman to go to the Washington Post to lie about being sexually assaulted just to undermine the credibility of women who've come forward with allegations of sexual abuse against Republican senate candidate Roy Moore, I think that's important. 

The scope of the crime, and the shock of learning who allegedly committed it, should not overshadow the victims of their behavior - nor should their suffering be used as some kind of political tool.

Rape isn't Republican or Democrat, it's just rape.

And as the veil is lifted on people once viewed as media icons, the truth of just how extensive sexual assault is, is finally being revealed - and there's nothing political about it.

Kris Kobach's Ministry of Voter Suppression

Voter suppression czar, Republican Kris Kobach

In the cruel pantheon of the modern American Republican Party ideology, aside from a fetish-like obsession with lowering the tax burden on the wealthiest 1%, no idol is more worshiped than the suppression of the right to vote.

Content to abandon their supposed allegiance to Constitutional principles, many Republicans have now gone full tilt and embarked upon a crusade to aggressively block access to the ballot box on a nationwide scale.

No that long ago these reprehensible voter suppression tactics were generally engineered from the state level in those states with majority-Republican state legislatures and Republican governors mostly working off of scripts, media talking points and model legislation courtesy of our old friends at the American Legislation Exchange Council (ALEC).

Check out the Center for Media and Democracy's 'ALEC Exposed' Website to learn more about how ALEC helped Republican politicians lay the groundwork for massive voter suppression by enacting ludicrous, overly-burdensome voter ID laws in at least 37 different states following the 2010 mid-term elections.

To most Americans it's an affront to the basic principles of democracy, but as you've likely heard over the past week couple weeks, Republican efforts to target the voter rolls of the entire nation are now being orchestrated from the federal level - directly from the Trump administration.

As Madeline Conway reported yesterday in an article for Politico.com, written requests from the Presidential Advisory Commission On Election Integrity for individual states to provide detailed information including voter's full names, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, party affiliation, voting history since 2006, and information on felonies and military status, were met with widespread outrage - and not just from traditionally blue states either.

Mississippi Sec. of State Delbert Hosemann

After reviewing a copy of the letter sent from Trump' widely-panned commission, Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said his response would be:

"They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from." 

And he's a Republican from Mississippi.

As Chris Cillizza reported for CNN yesterday, at least 45 states have already refused to provide at least some of the information to the commission.


Democratic Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe got to the heart of the matter when he said in a statement:

"This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November. At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump's alternative election facts, and at worse is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression."
 
The blowback for the Trump administration's "voter integrity commission" and it's chief architect Kris Kobach has been swift, but what's really bizarre are their attempts to justify and defend it.

Despite serious pushback from dozens of secretaries of state and governors, Kobach simplistically dismissed the media's efforts to question the commission's motives "fake news."

And predictably, Trump took to Twitter to suggest that anyone who doesn't comply has something to hide.

What else can you expect from Republicans who know they can no longer win the mainstream American vote based on the issues?

Whether it's gerrymandering of political districts or voter suppression, they must cheat to win.

What real voter fraud looks like courtesy of Crosscheck

What's particularly troubling is that if you take some time and go back and read Greg Palast's meticulously-researched article "The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters" published in Rolling Stone back in August of 2016 in the lead-up to the November elections, Trump's outrageous information request is really nothing more than a souped-up version of Kris Kobach's widely-condemned voter data collection system known as Crosscheck.

As Palast noted, based on the algorithms and search parameters within the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program as it's formally known, the program "disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters" by incorrectly listing certain ethnic-sounding last names as inherently suspicious.

Click the link above and read some of the flagrant ways in which thousands of mostly-minority Americans were improperly and unfairly "flagged" by Crosscheck and denied the right to vote.

It's truly Third-World authoritarian stuff, and this big data request by Trump's "commission" (ostensibly headed up by Kobach) is nothing more than an attempt to create a "Crosscheck 2.0" in time for the 2018 mid-term elections.

If you missed it, check out Ari Berman's profile of Kobach that was published in the New York Times Magazine back on June 13th.

Kobach is a genuinely dangerous individual, heading up a hyper-partisan "voter integrity commission made up of a cast right-wing zealots summoned up from the putrid depths of authoritarian bigotry.

Voter suppression zealot Hans Von Spakovsky

No member of Trump's "commission" embodies that more than the widely-reviled Hans Von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission who oversaw the division of the Justice Department that monitored voting rights during the Bush administration.

If there is a Creature From the Black Lagoon of Republican voter suppression, it's this guy.

His mission in life is clear:

Use arcane misinterpretation of data, racist and xenophobic fear-mongering and the flagrant manipulation of existing federal and state laws to prevent as many people of color, the elderly, students, legal immigrants and people with foreign-sounding names from participating in the voting process as possible.

If you're not familiar with this guy, take some time to read Leon Neyfakh's recent feature on Von Spakovsky published on Slate.com titled, "The Dark Prince Of Voter Fraud Alarmism Is Joining the Trump Administration".

Kris Kobach may be the evangelist of Republican voter suppression in America but Hans Von Spakovsky is arguably the high priest - a man who has literally spent years trying to make it harder for non-white people to vote in the name of mass voter fraud that simply does not exist.

Trump is far too self-obsessed, uninformed and shallow to realize the degree to which Kobach and Von Spakovsky are true believers in the Ministry of Voter Suppression.

He embraces them and their so-called commission only because he thinks it will help legitimize his continuing delusional fiction that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because 3 to 5 million illegal aliens cast votes in the 2016 presidential election.

Make no mistake, men like Kobach and Von Spakovsky need Trump too in order to lend an air of credibility to the dark and arcane arts they practice - Trump's concocted unproven lies about fictional "busloads" of illegal aliens costing him the popular vote in 2016 are right up their alley.

And their "presence" in the White House under the guise of a presidential advisory board is indeed a boon to the likes of Trump policy advisors like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller - and proof positive that a cabal of white nationalists eager to create a 21st century version of Apartheid in America now runs the presidency.

Point of No Return? Republican's Environmental Agenda

EPA nominee Scott Pruitt addresses the 2014
Annual Meeting of ALEC (Yes, that ALEC)

Being somewhat superstitious by nature, it comes as something of a relief to have Friday the 13th off - even if it does mean I have to work on a chilly Saturday when we're expecting snow.

Tonight it's supposed to dip back down into the upper 20's here in central New Jersey, a far cry from yesterday when it got up into the lower 60's.

Last night I stepped out for a few beers at my local, as I stood outside in a short sleeve shirt admiring the exceptional brightness of January's full moon (also known as the Wolf Moon), I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that this is the last full moon under a rational president with actual experience as an elected leader.

It was, to say the least, a rather sobering thought that sent a chill down my spine.

Experiencing mild spring-like weather in the middle of January reminded me that Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Trump's new pick to head up the Environmental Protection Agency, is on record as denying the scientific consensus that human activity affects global warming.

Pruitt, a former college baseball player whose professional resume includes stints as a lawyer, general managing partner of a AAA baseball team, state politician and attorney general, is not a scientist - so maybe he should read Jeff Goodell's interview with James Hansen, the former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in the latest issue of Rolling Stone.

As Goodell notes in his RS article, Hansen, one of the world's leading experts on climate change and the first scientist to present hard data that human activity related to the burning of fossil fuels is heating up the Earth's atmosphere, warns that mankind is dangerously close to a 'point of no return' unless massive systematic changes to how we govern ourselves, consume energy and appropriate resources can be enacted.

As Hansen observes, "We're close to that point of no return, Whether we've passed it or not, I don't know...We've passed it in the sense that some climate impacts are going to occur, but we have not necessarily hit the disastrous level, which would knock down global economies and leave us with an ungovernable planet. But we are close."

Seriously, what part of "ungovernable planet" do Republicans who deny climate change not get?

Chart tracking temperature changes as recorded by four
international science agencies including NASA & NOAA

According to studies of climate change research conducted by NASA (folks who actually ARE rocket scientists), "Multiple studies conducted in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97% or more of actively publishing scientists agree: Climate warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities." 


But Scott Pruitt disagrees with stuff like scientific research based on facts.

Pruitt was one of a group of Republican attorneys general from other states with Republican governors and majority-Republican legislatures that formed secretive alliances with some of the nation's biggest energy companies to challenge federal regulations that protect water, soil and air from pollution caused by fossil fuel extraction and production.

As Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton reported in a New York Times article back in December, Pruitt is on record as saying, "Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connections to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged - in classrooms, public forums and the halls of Congress."

Actually, it's not a debate, but that's the mindset that this lackey of the fossil fuel industry and member of the American Legislative Exchange Council will bring to the EPA - nominated by a man who thinks climate change is a "hoax."

Clinton email Obsession? GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz

But it's not just the federal regulatory agencies that will be impacted by radical conservative ideology.

You can be certain that the Republican-majority 115th Congress is already at work chipping away at laws that protect environmental safety, or making it more difficult to hold those who commit environmental crimes accountable.

Increases in subsidies to oil and natural gas companies are almost a given.

Remember the crusading Republican Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz who chairs the powerful House Oversight Committee?

Same guy who did everything he could to theatrically draw out a Congressional investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a personal server to store emails during the presidential campaign season?

Despite multiple Congressional investigations of the same issue for over a year, in addition to a lengthy and highly public FBI investigation that concluded that nothing illegal had taken place, Chaffetz recently announced that he will continue his dogged pursuit to further investigate Clinton's emails.

As CNN reported, Chaffetz said, "Just because there was a political election doesn't mean it goes away." 

But what's interesting about Chaffetz's apparently unquenchable thirst for the truth is that it magically (and for conservatives) conveniently seems to coincide with the broader partisan political needs of the Republican Party.

Republicans stopped investigating this?

Oh and speaking of thirst...

Just one day after the Trump transition team cancelled a planned December 15th press conference where the new PEOTUS would lay out a plan to sever his ties from his hundreds of businesses amid public outrage and media frenzy over his potential unprecedented conflicts of interest, Chaffetz quietly and quickly decided to end a Congressional investigation into the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.


Which of course was caused by Republican Governor Rick Snyder and other state Republican politicians and officials who stripped Flint citizens of the right to govern themselves by appointing an "emergency manager" for the city who ordered Flint's fresh water supply to be switched to the polluted Flint River.

Why?

As part of an effort to slash state spending on government in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthy; fiscally irresponsible efforts which have proved disastrous in Kansas and were designed by none other than the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Remember, the Flint water crisis resulted in people dying, and exposed thousands of Flint residents to toxic levels of lead poisoning - and it's still going on.

Republicans on Capitol Hill famously fought efforts to provide $600 million in federal funding to fix Flint's toxic water supply system before eventually approving $170 million in relief.

Flint residents still get drinking water like this

So Jason Chaffetz ended a House Oversight investigation into an environmental crime of monumental proportions that affected 100,000 people and is still happening now as you read these words.

But he's continuing a bogus partisan witch hunt over how Hillary Clinton stored her private email correspondence when she was Secretary of State over three years ago?

That, and the nomination of Scott Pruitt to head the EPA pretty much sums up the Republican stance on the environment in a nutshell and as hard as it is to imagine, James Hansen could be right.

The inauguration of Trump a week from today along with the clown car of kleptocrat cabinet picks he's bringing with him, coupled with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, plus a conservative-leaning Supreme Court doesn't bode well for our environment.

Should Trump follow through on his campaign pledge to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement and causes other large-scale fossil fuel burners like China and India to pull out, it could very well mark the beginning of the 'Point of no return' for our environment and the climate.

All in the name of narrow-minded political ideology and short-term financial profits for a small fraction of the Earth's population.

"Making America Great Again?" Not so much.

The Road to Political Chaos in Carolina

Defeated & spiteful NC Republican Gov. Pat McCrory
goes for the last laugh   [Photo - Getty Images]

There's been a lot of justifiable outrage in recent days after both chambers of the Republican-majority North Carolina state legislature called a stunning special session where they rapidly introduced a series of bills
specifically designed to place limits on recently-elected Democrat Roy Cooper's powers as governor.

Not surprisingly, outgoing Republican Governor Pat McCrory quickly signed the bills amidst widespread protests.


The legislation, which was railroaded through Republican-dominated committees and pushed to the floor with almost no debate, includes a measure intended to curb the incoming Democratic governor of his ability to appoint members of his own party to the state's county election boards which oversee critical functions like the setting of voting hours at polling sites.

As Richard Fausset and Trip Garbriel reported in the New York Times on Thursday, remarkably this critical bill also mandates that a Republican will oversee the state board of election during election years while a Democrat will oversee the board during non-election years.  

Who even thinks something like that up?

The legislation, which was signed by Governor McCrory on Friday, also mandates that the incoming governor must have his own cabinet appointees approved by the Republican-majority State Senate.

Politically-speaking, the whole affair reeks of petty partisan Republican vindictiveness over their recent loss of the governor's seat to a Democrat.

Protesters pack the NC statehouse on Friday [Photo - AP]

An election that took over a month to finally decide after efforts by various Republicans to challenge the results of the election which Cooper won by 10,000 votes - not one shred of evidence of voter fraud was found.

Hundreds of outraged protesters packed the halls and chambers of the NC state legislature in Raleigh on Friday and over a dozen of them were arrested and forcibly removed in handcuffs.

Aside from the overt power grab by a hyper-conservative legislature that has conspired with Governor McCrory to do everything within their power to limit the ability of North Carolina citizens to exercise their right to vote, people around the nation are also angered over the blatantly deceitful manner in which Republican lawmakers introduced and passed the legislation.

As Emma Margolin reported for NBC News on Friday, state lawmakers had scheduled a special session for Wednesday December 14th in order to approve funding for victims of Hurricane Matthew.

But after passing measures to green-light $201 million in hurricane relief, Republicans quickly began introducing the legislation to strip the incoming governor of power.

Those kinds of flagrantly unethical tactics are nothing new for Governor McCrory and his Republican Tea Party cronies in the state legislature - that's how they passed the notorious House Bill 2 known as the "Bathroom Bill" last March widely-recognized as one of the most blatantly anti-LGTBQ laws in the nation, one that has cost the state hundreds of millions in business revenue after numerous high profile concerts, events and sports tournaments pulled out in protest of the discriminatory legislation.

NC resident Grace Hardison, who is 100-years old,
had her voter registration challenged [Photo - WNCT]

In states across the country, from Wisconsin and Ohio, to North Carolina, Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida, the Republican party's willingness to subvert the principles of the democratic process in order to create a stranglehold on power has been relentless and remarkable in it's brazenness and scope.

One of the two major American political parties openly and actively using their power to draft laws to suppress the right to vote of citizens who happen to disagree with their policies harkens back to the Jim Crow south with poll taxes and literary tests.

The introduction of legislation in Republican-majority statehouses, bills crafted by influential hyper-partisan conservative think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) designed to intentionally make it more difficult for people who tend to vote Democratic to cast their ballots on election day, is a prime (and truly disturbing) example of a political party that has decoupled itself from morals and principles.

What took place in North Carolina last week is, in effect, the political weaponization of the American legislative process.

When lawmakers use their time, resources and influence not to enact legislation to revise the tax code in the interest of fairness, fund the construction of highways, repair damaged bridges, or protect drinking water from harmful pollutants, but to perpetuate control over the political process itself.

It's unprecedented, ethically flawed, toxic to a representative democracy that's supposed to be a model to the free world and totally contrary to the principles enshrined in the Constitution.

The Supreme Court - 277 days since Republicans
have acted on Merrick Garland's nomination 

It's a transparent effort to rig the American political system, but the Republican politicians, influential conservative media figureheads and wealthy hyper-partisan ideologues didn't do it alone.

They had help from one of the three branches of the federal government.

One that should by design, stay out of the political process.

Remember the partisan political environment in this country two years into President Obama's first term?

Back in January of 2010, as a wave of Tea Party anger swept across the American political landscape, fueled by simmering Republican resentment over the election of a Democratic African-American president with the audacity to believe Americans have a right to decent and affordable healthcare, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court gave the Republican Party a gift.

The high court issued a stunning 5-4 decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. 

As the SCOTUS Blog notes, in Citizens United the five justices who made up the conservative majority radically expanded the scope of the First Amendment by ruling that:

"Political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment, and the government may not keep corporations or unions from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections." 

Just ten months before the critical 2010 mid-term elections, when all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 37 of the 100 seats in the Senate were up for election, the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United ruled that corporations and unions could pour unlimited amounts of money into Political Action Committees (PAC's) to either support, or trash a political candidate.


And pour money the Republican Party did.

According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, over the course of 2009 - 2010 the Republican Party spent a staggering $570,019,831 to take back the House of Representatives.

While Republican Senate candidates spent a whopping $439,855,244 during that same period to shrink the Democratic Senate majority.

The opening of those spigots of unrestricted cash flow into the political system by the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling, along with their 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder which gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, seemed to give a kind of legal sanction to the Republican Party's efforts to subvert democracy.

It certainly empowered the North Carolina legislature to engage in the various kinds of reprehensible legislative actions we've seen since 2010.

While incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has vowed to challenge Republican efforts to strip him of power, he's clearly got his work cut out for him.

The road to the partisan political chaos that's taking place in North Carolina didn't just begin with a sneaky legislative maneuver in the state house last week, it started years ago.

On a road that runs right through the Supreme Court.