Steve Bannon, unkempt global fascist, is an enthusiastic advocate of an old propaganda technique espoused, if memory serves, by Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The theory goes that if you flood the news with infuriating lies, one after another, at a dizzying pace, you will so confuse and enrage the populace that you can do whatever you like with them. The technique was refined by the Hitler team, led by cunning, supremely able Minister of Public Enlightenment Josef Goebbels. Chrump is the perfect avatar of this firehose of mendacity, lying as naturally as most people breathe, flooding the zone with shit and gleefully setting that shit on fire. You can’t keep your eye on the previous lies, or fix institutional problems, because the newest one is so incendiary and burning so hot.

The NY Times recently broke the story of a commutation Chrumpie signed hours before leaving office, one of hundreds of last minute pardons and commutations he likely sold (he is nothing if not transactional). This guy, Jon Braun, is a predatory lender and violence threatening thug who was finally beginning to serve a ten year sentence that had been delayed by ten years as he grudgingly began to cooperate with the DOJ against his predatory lending colleagues. Braun had a connection to convicted felon, and fellow recipient of Trumpie’s mercy for hire, Charles Kushner, father of grossly unqualified entitled idiot Jared, Chrumpie’s right hand boy (back when it was worthwhile to Jared to serve in that role). Alan Dershowitz, Braun’s attorney, made a call and Jared took care of their friend’s prison sentence. It was nullified by a stroke of the big guy’s pen. Braun went back to his old job and told DOJ to go fuck itself and its fucking investigation into predatory lenders. Here is Team Chrump’s perfect response to the NY Times revelation (actually this is in response to the Koch Network throwing its support behind Nikki Haley — the responses are pretty much interchangeable):

Kushner had testified to the J6 Committee that he didn’t know anything about the many tentacled plan to stop the certification of Biden’s victory on January 6. 2021 because he was busily working on pardons around the clock in that final month. Giuliani, or his assistant, described a profit sharing scheme for pardons that didn’t go through the office of the pardon attorney, as is traditionally done before a president issues a pardon. These pardons went for $2,000,000 each, according to this source, and if everyone was to pocket their share of this tidy sum it was important that the office of the pardon attorney not be in the loop. We’ve heard nothing more about this, or about the NY State case against Steve Bannon for bilking MAGA loyalists out of millions in his Build the Wall scam (Trump pardon erased identical federal charges against Sloppy Steve).

Every American convicted as a result of the Mueller investigation (witch hunt!) got a pardon from the Big Guy, in exchange for dummying up when it counted most. Nothing to see here, the president has 100% unappealable discretion to pardon anyone he wants, Joe Arpaio (contempt of court for telling judge to fuck off after she ruled his broiling, outdoor prison camps were illegal), Rod Blagojevich, Michael Milken, a bipartisan rogue’s gallery of infamous scumbags. As is the president’s absolute right, apparently, unless the DOJ were to challenge any as corrupt, for example as a quid pro quo for not cooperating with federal investigators (see for example, Roger Stone, his former partner Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, et al). Nothing has been done to prevent misuse of the judicial system by wealthy weasels like Don (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh) McGahn, John Bolton, Trump and others to weaponize the delays appeals cause, allowing them to routinely moot legitimate, legal claims against them.

This abuse of the pardon power, aggravating, unjust and sickening as it is, is one among a hundred, two hundred piles of toxic poop Chrumpie left burning in his wake. There’s a new one every news cycle.

Trump channeling Hitler, raising the question among MAGA nation — why this sudden irrational hatred of the Führer? Trump’s plan to build concentration camps for immigrants, even the children of immigrants born here, to deport millions, the Fourteenth Amendment be damned. Trump’s plan to fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with servants who believe the 2020 election was rigged and who’ve taken a personal oath of loyalty to Trump (German: Führereid or Führer Oath). His repeated vows to get revenge on everyone from Rosie O’Donnell and Crooked Hillary to “the Biden Crime Family” and to weaponize the DOJ, as Biden, he insists, has weaponized it against him.

His grotesque, deadly mishandling, and continuing lies about, the COVID pandemic that resulted in further polarizing Americans and causing this great nation to have the highest COVID death toll in the world. The massive corruption involved in the pandemic relief money he handed out to wealthy people he liked. His open interference in the 2020 election by launching hundreds of pre-election lawsuits trying to stop mail-in voting during a spike in the plague and having his mega-donor postmaster general remove mailboxes and dismantle high speed mail sorting machines in areas where Blacks and other “undesirable” voters live.

The riot of January 6 itself, directly incited by his hourlong speech which included the immortal “when you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by very different rules” (actual fraud, no, different rules and lynch mob, yes) and years of subsequent lies about the innocence of the rioters, valorizing those who attacked the police as true patriots he will pardon as soon as he gets back into office. The list is literally fucking endless, before we get to the Orange Polyps financial fraud (and already shuttered Trump University and Chrump Charitable Chrust), sexual abuse, hush money payments, illegal non-disclosure agreements and his limitless frivolous lawsuits, groundless motions and futile appeals designed only to delay adjudication.

In this environment, with the firehouse of shit blasting full bore all the time, amplified by right wing media and echoed in the corporate “liberal” media, it’s impossible to remember things like the reasonable plan to get rid of that Republican-minority benefiting vestige of slavery The Electoral College by having states pledge to award electors to the winner of the nationwide popular vote [1]. Or to restore something like the Fairness Doctrine for mass media, making it harder for partisan news outlets to pump out a stream of inflammatory lies, “opinions” presented as fact, 24/7. Or the group Biden set up to monitor online threats that was quickly shut down amid a flood of violent online threats.

Or to regulate hate speech and violence-producing lies on social media, because, to do so, according to the beneficiaries of hate speech and related lies, is to unfairly hobble one side of the political debate. A rightwing racist billionaire will bring lawsuits to carefully selected extremist judges to prove that Communists, Marxists, Jews and Fascist Thugs are illegally interfering with his right to run his own private social media company as he sees fit. The Senate is unable to abolish the filibuster or make sure that one potato-headed imbecile can’t block the presidential appointment of military leaders year after year. The list is almost endless, and this is by design.

You take a firehouse, connect it to the crusty asses of everyone you can find with projectile diarrhea, and blind ambition, you turn it on full and when the high power spray comes out, set it on fire. In a landscape of constantly replenished plumes and sloppy mounds of burning shit, nobody can focus on what needs to be done to hold the shit sprayers responsible and turn off the pressurized firehoses of mendacity. You have to admit, the plan works beautifully, if you can get over the stench.

[1]

However, a constitutional amendment is not the only means by which an alternative to the current Electoral College can be implemented. The most popular alternative is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). Started in the mid-2000s, the NPVIC is a fairly straightforward system that capitalizes on the constitutional guarantee that states are free to determine the manner in which they award their electoral votes. The compact requires states to pass laws that would award their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally. Under the current plan, states that join will not activate the compact until enough states have joined to total 270 electoral votes. That is, the compact does not go into effect until there is a critical mass of states for it to be effective.

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