Breaking: Autocratic ruler of Hungary defeated in free and fair election concedes defeat, calls winner to congratulate

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Democrats are aghast at the lack of coordinated pushback from their GOP colleagues against the Trump administration's aggressive incursion into the power of the purse

The GOP wants autocracy, and boy are they ever giving it to us, in the name of cutting duly authorized spending of already appropriated funds.

It's pure madness, a complete abnegation of the constitution, brought to us by the GOP.

It would be unpatriotic to ever vote for them again.

 

... “I believe that we don’t have a choice about reducing spending,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana), a member of the committee. “The only time I’ve seen us reduce spending from the 10 years I’ve been here is through a rescissions package.”

The administration’s “aggressive” incursion into the power of the purse follows decades of members of Congress ceding their authority to the executive on other matters like tariffs and war powers, according to Molly Reynolds, an expert at the center-left think tank the Brookings Institution. But the appropriations process — although messy and increasingly partisan in recent years — had remained generally free from the reach of the executive branch. ...

More.

Do you not see what's happening here? The Trump administration is declaring everything it doesn't like to be terrorism in order to justify autocratic repression of it using the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force

The run of the mill narco smugglers from Venezuela suddenly are terrorists under Trump, so they blow them up.

Suddenly the left wing Charlie Kirk critics are being transformed into terrorists, too, so they say they will also destroy them.

Who's next? Where will it end? 

J. D. Vance once wanted to stop this underlying basis for neo-con adventurism. Now the chameleon is part of its expansion to include unconstitutional domestic repression.

These people must be stopped. 

Stephen Miller: We Will Dismantle And Destroy "Terrorist Networks" That Led To Charlie Kirk Assassination

 

 

 

More autocratic rule by national emergency from Mad King Ludwig

Is that national emergency #53? I'm losing count. 

Trump vows national emergency in Washington, D.C. over ICE dispute

 

 

Andrew Sullivan makes Trump subhuman the way Mark Levin and Michael Savage have made their enemies subhuman, says the American people no longer want to govern themselves

They shoot wild boar in Texas from helicopters, don't they?

 

 The Permanent Stain

 ... Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.

This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit. ... 

I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it happened. And Americans rewarded it four years later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy. That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise. ...

 

Andrew Sullivan intimately knows all about not governing oneself. If only the Democrats did, who relentlessly persecuted and prosecuted Trump while in office and out. That's why we are here.

Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko agrees with Ukraine's military commander in chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi against Zelensky that the war with Russia is at a stalemate

 But despite his litany of grievances, the mayor stopped short of calling for Zelensky’s immediate ouster. “The president has an important function today, and we have to support him until the end of the war,” Klitschko said. “But at the end of this war, every politician will pay for his successes or failures.”

More.

LOL, in article supposedly touting the Cornel West threat, clueless former Green Party candidate Ralph Nader says he prefers Biden autocracy to Trump fascism

 “I know the difference between fascism and autocracy, and I’ll take autocracy any time,” Nader said, according to the outlet. “Fascism is what the GOP is the architecture of, and autocracy is what the Democrats are practitioners of. But autocracy leaves an opening. They don’t suppress votes. They don’t suppress free speech.”

Yeah, every censored, canceled person in America agrees with that, right?

If Ralph Nader is West's friend, who are West's enemies?

The whole farcical thing is here, pretending Biden doesn't now have a record, that he won the House in 2022, and that inflation isn't crushing the worker.

Bloomberg economic model forecasts 25% tariffs between democratic and autocratic countries would roll back globalization to 1990s levels and leave the world 3.5% poorer

Arguably that would be a good thing for American workers, but Bloomberg doesn't care about that.

 

For three decades, a defining feature of the world economy has been its ability to churn out ever more goods at ever lower prices. The entry of more than a billion workers from China and the former Soviet bloc into the global labor market, coupled with falling trade barriers and hyper-efficient logistics, produced an age of abundance for many.But the last four years have brought an escalating series of disruptions. Tariffs multiplied during the US-China trade war. The pandemic brought lockdowns. And now, sanctions and export controls are upending the supply of commodities and goods.All of this risks leaving advanced economies facing a problem they thought they’d vanquished long ago: that of scarcity. Emerging nations could see more acute threats to energy and food security, like the ones already causing turmoil in countries from Sri Lanka to Peru. And everyone will have to grapple with higher prices.

More.

The story never mentions how those newly introduced extra billion plus workers reduced economic outcomes for the already established middle classes around the world, especially in America where the full time job of the 1990s became a thing of the past.

If I'm repeating myself, I don't care.

 

 

 

The default position of liberalism is to blame obstruction by reactionaries for republican failure, not the revolutionary impulses of the autocrat

"The republicans made me seize power".

You know whose side they are on when people talk like this. Spengler long ago observed how liberalism is all about tyranny, but does anyone still read him?

"The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all that Liberalism sets out to be."

The voices opposed to the US Senate filibuster, are, to put it bluntly, not related to our founding.

"However high-minded":

Caesar would soon seize autocratic power, and Cato would commit suicide rather than live under Caesar’s rule. Goodman and Soni argue Cato’s obstructionism — however high-minded — was a contributing factor to the Roman Republic’s collapse. America’s Founding Fathers, however, idolized Cato. George Washington’s soldiers staged a play about Cato at Valley Forge.  Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty of give me death,” is derived from a line in that play.

Rush Limbaugh on Michael Bloomberg on China: "Nobody is this stupid to think communism is the equivalent of democratic or representative republican freedom"

Rush, winning this year's tin ear of politics award today of all days with Trump making communism acceptable and not threatening:

Now, all of this is designed to make communism acceptable. It’s all designed to make communism not be threatening. It’s all designed to advance the idea of really smart people controlling government — who are really autocrats — under the illusion that they have constituents that they have to listen to and keep happy and pleased. I think Bloomberg sounds a lot like Biden. Remember Biden said a couple of times, “Come on, man! China’s not a threat to the U.S.! Come on, man! China’s no threat!”

Trump doubles down on autocratic rule in China, says "I think it's great"

If you're not offended by Trump's casual flaunting of the seriousness of his role as "leader of the free world" by now, then you are as un-American as he is and deserve to be ruled by a dictator.

Watch for Rush Limbaugh to dismiss this as just yet one more instance of Trump trolling his mostly liberal opposition in order to dominate the news cycle.

The news cycle.

That remark by the press during the 2016 campaign that Trump could shoot someone in the street and still get elected has drilled itself down into Trump's brain and has become a veritable axiom and exemplar to Trump about his invulnerability, which explains the freedom with which he has so many times gone off the reservation of his own supposedly strongly held beliefs: "They say I have the most loyal people -- did you ever see that? -- where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters".

Obviously, he doesn't have any strongly held beliefs, except the belief in his own greatness which his twisted sense of self has from the beginning latched on to in the flimsiest of quarters, the news cycle.  

From the story here:

"He's now president for life, president for life. And he's great," Trump said, according to audio of excerpts of Trump's remarks at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida aired by CNN. "And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday," Trump said to cheers and applause from supporters.

It is not clear if Trump, 71, was making the comment about extending presidential service in jest. The White House did not respond to a request for comment late Saturday.

U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat, said on Twitter that "whether this was a joke or not, talking about being President for life like Xi Jinping is the most unAmerican sentiment expressed by an American President. George Washington would roll over in his grave."

Leader of the free world my foot: Trump White House says it's up to China if it wants to turn back toward autocracy

Li Datong, a former editor at the state-run China Youth Daily, posted a draft letter urging legislators to vote against the move -- which would abolish term limits set in 1982 under Deng Xiaoping to prevent a return to the decades of chaos under Mao Zedong.

"It was the highest and most effective legal restriction meant to prevent autocracy or putting individuals above the party and the state," said the letter. It was not sent to legislators but shared with hundreds of people in a private group on China's WeChat phone messaging app.

"Lifting the term limits of national leaders will be ridiculed by civilised nations all over the world and also sow the seeds of chaos for China," said the text posted on Monday. ...

"The president has talked about term limits in a number of capacities during the campaign and something that he supports here in the United States, but that's a decision that's up to China," said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.

More here.

Neocon insanity: Krauthammer blows a gasket, says Russia trying to expand hegemony in Syria

Oh yeah, like Syria is somehow Ukraine. The USSR is alive and well, but only in the fevered minds of the neoconservatives.

Here:

"This isn't about the Russians taking on ISIS; this is about the Russians taking over Syria and keeping Assad as a client in place."

Ah, no Charles. This is about a pro-Christian autocrat rescuing an autocrat who used to protect Christians before the Obama policy to disorganize the Middle Eastern community resulted in Christians getting their heads cut off and their communities destroyed.

We should be thanking the Russians, not trying to bury them.

Libertarian Ben Domenech, like every sick liberal does, descends into the politics of personal destruction

Libertarian Ben Domenech, here, sensing his own marginality, states quite seriously that deporting law-breakers and enforcing the constitutional concept of jurisdictional citizenship is nothing short of racism and despotism:

"The idea that America is going to endure the blood and moral outrage over the deportation of 11 million people, including young children of illegals born here who are constitutionally American citizens, is absurd. Even one of the most prominent immigration hawks, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, dismissed this mass deportation as impossible on my radio show this week. But Donald Trump has proposed this, and loudly insisted he will do it. And the faction of the country that believes not in freedom but identity politics for white people adores it."

Sprinkled throughout he calls Trump supporters a bunch of narrow-minded, disaffected, angry street thugs who are motivated by an unprincipled and frankly anti-constitutional emotionalism to support a dangerous man who is only too willing to rule in a dictatorial and autocratic manner in the style of Obama but for the "right" reasons. Why, they'll even abolish the US Senate!

It's that simple you see. You knuckle-dragging conservatives have an insufficient concept of freedom. How dare you have a border and stop other people from exercising their right to be free by crossing it! How dare you successfully deport over a million illegal aliens in 1954 with just 750 agents!

The outrage! The horror!

The Present Day Tea Party's Connection to the Past

The author inhabits the world the Tea Party opposes, but provides a sympathetic accounting nonetheless, which originally appeared here. It is especially useful in that it locates a major break with America's past, not in our times, but in the times of Woodrow Wilson, and that Obama's is an attempt to reassert that revolution. To which we say, Reactionaries Unite!

February 17, 2010

Party Like It's 1773?

By Richard Samuelson

Are this year's "tea parties" really tea parties? What could today's protesters have in common with the "Indians" who dumped 90,000 pounds of tea in Boston harbor in 1773? Quite a bit, actually.

What do today's tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement "is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective." Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that the government seems to be a closed circle, run by an elite in both parties. These elites, combined with a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, use government power to serve their own ends, and not the public good.

The Boston Tea party was the most famous colonial American protest, but it was by no means the only one. In late colonial America, mass street protests, parades, and other events, often led by the "Sons of liberty," were a formal ritual. Some scholars have even described them as a legal practice. In an age when government was understood to be for the people, but not of or by the people, "out of doors protest" allowed British subjects to participate in the political process, and to shape the actions of government. Government was supposed to serve the common good, and it was supposed to be under law, and yet most colonists had no vote. How could they express their opinion? They could shout, protest, and even riot.

Inevitably, some demonstrations got out of hand, and spilled over into needless violence. Such excess led supporters of the King's government to condemn all protests. They wanted to rule without being questioned by the people. After all, the elites reasoned, they were smarter, better trained, and wiser than the common folk. The patriot response to this line of reasoning was that no one, however smart, well meaning, and wise had the right to rule another without his consent.

After the American revolution, we created a government that was much closer to being of, by and for the people. A little over a century later, however, it came under assault. In the early twentieth century America's leading intellectuals concluded that our constitution was out of date. Woodrow Wilson said quite bluntly that "we are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past." The founders, he noted, "speak of the ‘checks and balances' of the Constitution." Such ideas were passe. By replacing checks and balances with a simplified administration, he would update and rationalize the American state. Wilson, we should recall, was our first and only PhD president. The social science PhD was a new invention in his day. Wilson believed that experts, armed with PhDs and law degrees, could make better choices than the common people and the politicians they elected. Armed with expertise, Progressive bureaucrats would rule effectively and fairly. Checks and balances, he thought, were no longer necessary.

Wilson, his friends, and his successors in the New Deal and other Progressives (sometimes cleverly calling themselves "liberals"), did not achieve a full revolution. Anyone witnessing the gridlock over health care in Washington realizes that. That has always frustrated them. When Thomas Friedman, the voice of the establishment, declares that "one-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages," he reflects the goal of Progressive politics since Wilson's day. He also echoes the ideas of the Tories of the 1760s and 1770s. Like the Tories, today's would-be elites claim that better training and education gives them the right to rule, although the Progressives and their children have largely dropped birth and wealth as criterion for rule.

Even if their revolution was incomplete, the Progressives did transform American government. They expanded the role of experts in government at all levels in the U.S. This permanent bureaucracy has taken over sizeable chunks of American life, and has, at the same time, removed many areas of regulation from the political process. Our representatives have been only too happy to delegate broad swaths of power to these, unelected branches of government. That way they can blame someone else when things go wrong. Meanwhile, our courts, have taken away from our elected representatives the right to legislate about various issues. The upshot: even though almost all American adults have the right to vote, their votes matter less. Perhaps that's why fewer eligible voters vote today than was the case a century ago.

Now we can see how today's tea parties resemble those of yesteryear. As more and more government operations are taken off the books, popular frustration rises. Similarly, and ironically, bureaucracies often serve the industries they regulate rather than the public good. When the government is unresponsive to the views of the people, and, beyond that, when our administrative and judicial branches restrict the scope of the people's legislative rights, protest rises. President Obama, an heir to the Progressive tradition, wants to strengthen this unaccountable, administrative state. The response has been altogether fitting.

Richard Samuelson is the 2009-2010 Garwood Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's James Madison Program, and an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, San Bernardino.