KKK/Mussolini/Fascists Endorsement Welcomed by Trump? (Tne End of Democracy Upcoming or Already Achieved?) Piercing the Big Dick (If John Oliver Respected CBS More, He Would Have Shaved)

So,  Mr. Trump has admitted (so he said this week when questioned on TV) that he doesn't know who David Duke is or what the Ku Klux Klan has campaigned for since the end of the Civil War, or what repeating a quote by Mussolini* denotes to his audience, and therefore cannot be expected to comment when he is questioned about their endorsements.

Good to know.

And Hillary's troops have pre-fixed the super-delegates to vastly favor her candidacy when they vote at the Convention - without needing the backing of any actual voters.

Anyone remember what U.S. democracy was supposed to be about?

The vote totals in the Democratic races are way down from both 2012 and 2008, and the Republican voter numbers are way up, supposedly because they are motivated to go to the polls by the blue-collar/jobs message they are hearing from the tangled prose of Donald Trump(f).

No matter what he is really advocating (like even bigger tax cuts for those other million/billionaires in the top tax brackets).

The problem is not just the deafness of those who are determined to vote for Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton) without regard to their past actions or positions on controversial issues.

The problem is that the fervor so confidently voiced is reminiscent of famous mob activity that has brought catastrophic events to full flower in the past.

From our seasoned reporter at Down With Tyranny:

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, once rejected by the Senate for a George W. Bush judicial appointment because of his ties to the KKK, is now a hard right senator from Alabama himself, and one of the most extreme racists in Congress. It came as no surprise to anyone yesterday when he announced he had finally formally endorsed Herr Trumpf for president, just as David Duke and several other Klan and white supremacist leaders had. (Herr, whose father was once arrested at a KKK rally in Queens and who had an anti-racist song written about him by Woody Guthrie, refused to disavow his KKK support and was delighted that he landed a senator, even a senator as out-of-the-mainstream as Sessions, before Ted Cruz did. On the far-right fringe, there was ecstasy over the endorsement.

Sessions, the intellectual leader of the future of the conservative movement, has provided the brainpower behind the populist nationalist revolt against political elites that’s been emerging since at least 2013 ... Sessions' backing Trump is a significant blow to both Rubio and Cruz, as now the powerful Alabamian will be putting his entire operation all in behind Trump.

...[All Trumpf's other] endorsements pale in comparison to Sessions’ backing of Trump, as the Alabamian senator is universally respected - and feared - inside the beltway in Washington. Sessions is known for his tough views on immigration and trade and has repeatedly aimed to push the Republican Party in a more populist, nationalist direction.

Sessions has helped frame the movement’s views on both issues - and more, like courts and judicial nominations, law and order and police matters, and on budgetary issues and the fiscal well-being of America - while maintaining a formidable political and policy operation that his allies view as invaluable and his enemies dread.  

Even apart from the screaming match he had with Chris Wallace on Fox News (see the hilarious video up top), it hasn't been a good weekend for Cruz... although Democrats must have been kvelling when he went on TV to accuse Herr Trumpf of being in business with the Mafia - not, he reminded his fans, that that would keep him from supporting Herr when he wins the nomination... of course.

He told Jake Tapper, on CNN's "State of the Union" that if Trumpf wins the nomination Hillary will "probably" beat him, in part because of Herr's $100,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation. Cruz:  "Listen, if Donald becomes president, who the heck knows what he would do? Even Donald doesn't know what he would do. And I think the challenges facing this country are too grave to roll the dice and risk losing the Supreme Court for a generation, risk yet more economic stagnation and risk on foreign policy allowing radical Islamic terrorism to continue to rise and threaten America."  

On "This Week," Cruz rolled out the Mafia stories about Trumpf's long associations with Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, head of New York's Gambino family, both of whom were also intimately tied to Staten Island Republican Congressman Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm, currently in prison on a number of fraud convictions. 

Cruz sent out a really unflattering 1990 portrait of Trumpf in "Vanity Fair" by Marie Brenner. Cruz focused on repulsive statements by Trumpf like, talking about his divorce settlement with Ivana and the sympathy she was getting in the tabloids, "When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass - a good one! - there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left." What he ignored were things that Democrats wouldn't, like sleazy McCarthyite Roy Cohn having been Trumpf's lawyer, ally and political mentor.

Trump once told a reporter that "If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy. People will drop a suit just by getting a letter with Roy’s name at the bottom." He represented Trumpf in his countersuit against the government when they caught him systematically discriminating against blacks in his residential buildings. Cohn was the man who brought Trumpf into the Mafia circles Cruz was hissing about on TV yesterday. Before he was disbarred for unethical practices, Cohn was the attorney for Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, an eventual Trumpf business associate.

Meanwhile, on another end of the GOP, poor Miss McConnell, sensing he'll be going back to minority leader in January, is telling vulnerable Republican senators to take out TV ads against Trumpf during the general election.

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton ... McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

John McCain didn't need any advice from McConnell about going after Trumpf. Sources close to his campaign say he is relishing the idea of attacking Trumpf and rendering him unelectable in Arizona, although a powerful ad from Ann Kirkpatrick, the extremely flawed conservative Democrat running against McCain, would have you believe that McCain is just another McCain lap dog now. Do remember though, that Trumpf is not without heavy-duty allies in Arizona Republican politics and he could certainly do some rendering of his own if he chose to. And he is known to be a vindictive fellow. Other Senate Republicans most in jeopardy of losing their seats with Trumpf on top of the ticket are Ron Johnson (WI), Mark Kirk (IL), Kelly Ayotte (NH), Rob Portman (OH), Pat Toomey (PA), Richard Burr (NC) plus GOP candidates Joe Heck (NV) and whomever the Republicans wind up with in Florida and Colorado.

If things go really bad(ly) for them, Chuck Grassley (IA), Roy Blunt (MO) and John Boozman (AR) could also be looking at trouble. If all of those races go badly (for) the GOP, it means the 2018 midterms are unlikely to win the Senate back for the Republicans. Luckily for the Republican, Chuck Schumer - in other words, Wall Street - has taken effective control of the DSCC and is working to insert candidates who cannot win in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, while ceding North Carolina, Iowa and Arkansas to the Republicans.

The NRSC is going to soon understand how lucky the NRCC was all these years with Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Steve Israel at the helm of the DCCC.

By the way, you can help elect a more progressive U.S. Senate here and thwart both McConnell and Schumer. . .

Click this link to read the entire essay.

  *  In 1912 Mussolini was the leading member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).^[5] Prior to 1914 he was a keen supporter of the Socialist International, starting the series of meetings in Switzerland ^[6] that organised the communist revolutions and insurrections that swept through Europe from 1917. Mussolini was expelled from the PSI due to his opposition to the party's stance on neutrality in World War I. Mussolini denounced the PSI, and later founded the fascist movement. Following the March on Rome in October 1922 he became the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history until the appointment of Matteo Renzi in February 2014. After destroying all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes, ^[7] Mussolini and his fascist followers consolidated their power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years he had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means, aspiring to create a totalitarian state. Mussolini remained in power until he was deposed by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943. A few months later, he became the leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German client regime in northern Italy; he held this post until his death in 1945. ^[8]

And Charles the Piercer has put the hidden historical evidence, courtesy of Oliver Stone's persistence, to bed. Our bed.

Here's a Nice Little Dick Cheney Story to Ruin Your Day

By Charles Pierce, "Esquire"

01 March 16

He would have been right at home in any authoritarian regime.​

here's no more valuable resource for an informed citizenry than the folks doing god's work at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University. Their most recent revelations concern the Rockefeller Commission, which was formed by the Ford Administration as a reaction to the New York Times stories in 1975 that broke the news of the CIA's misdeeds, up to and including covert assassinations. It seems that kindly old Gerry and his minions did all they could to ratfck the commission's report. And, lo and behold, you'll never guess who was leading the fcking of the rats.

The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University(www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney. Today's posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney's handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives.

Richard Cheney cares less about American democracy than he cares who he shoots in the face. And this has been true since he first crawled out of the primordial authoritarian soup. He would have been the perfect Hauptfuhrer, the ideal Politburo conniver. He'd have risen high in the Stasi, and Pinochet would have had him over for Scotch and electrodes at least twice a week. And the great irony of this latest expose is that we can at least partly thank Oliver Stone for it.

This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.

And, to the surprise of practically nobody, these documents show that a lot of the internal wrangling within the Rockefeller Commission traced its roots all the way back to Dallas in 1963.

There had already been revelations of illegal domestic activities by the CIA. These led to the creation of a presidential panel under Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, and committees of inquiry in both houses of the United States Congress. Ford's January 1975 admission of CIA involvement posed a dilemma for the administration. Vice President Rockefeller attempted to head off inclusion of the subject, restricting consideration of assassinations to the question of what role Cuba might have had in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

That proved unacceptable to some members of his own commission, among them then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan. When the Rockefeller Commission took a vote on whether to include charges of CIA assassination plots in its inquiry, the group overrode its own chairman. Rockefeller's key opponent in the fight over investigating assassinations was the panel's staff director, David W. Belin. A lawyer for the Warren Commission, empanelled to look into the Kennedy assassination in 1963-1964, Belin had been handpicked by Ford for the Rockefeller group. Ford, one of the Warren commissioners, was confident of Belin's loyalty, but this time the lawyer fought hard to investigate deeply.

When even a Warren Commission lawyer smells a bag job, you can be pretty sure that there's burlap over something important.

Among the abuses that led directly to President Ford creating the Rockefeller Commission were charges the CIA had compiled dossiers on American citizens and infiltrated political groups that opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. In this instance the Rockefeller panelists entered a blanket finding that the files and lists of citizen dissenters were "improper."

The White House edit changed this conclusion, indicating that the "standards applied" had resulted in materials "not needed for legitimate intelligence or security purposes," and that this merely applied to "many" records gathered about the antiwar movement (see unnumbered page revising p. 41 in the report). White House editors eliminated a Commission recommendation (number 17 in the original text) that applicants for agency positions and foreign nationals acting on behalf of the CIA be informed more clearly that they could be subjects of U.S. security investigations.

Bernie Sanders, remember, is a kooky extremist because, at the exact time Cheney was developing his authoritarian chops and becoming the most loathsome government apparatchik since A. Mitchell Palmer, Sanders said that it might be good idea to reduce the CIA to smithereens. Crazy talk.