Besides Real Life (selling house, moving, hurricane, dying cat) the major reason I haven't been posting here is I discovered Twitter, which seemed the proper medium to fight our Twitter Duce.
So you can catch me there for now. I might get back to blog posting if time and mood allows.

In any case, continue to Resist. We have won some victories, but the real trials are yet to come. Our democracy remains balanced on the point of the Washington Monument  (for those who recall 7 Days in May).

Anti-semitism is at the heart of the white nationalist movement. Go. Read.

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism/#sthash.cxzO3Hw4.b2hYTT3D.dpbs

So to those who thought it unfair to bring up Hitler in relation to Trump, your apology is accepted.

I deleted a series of comments assuring me that Trump is at worst just another bad President and that comparisons to the Nazis are, in effect, silly. I disagree, but it isn't a productive debate: anyone who doesn't recognize the danger isn't going to (at least until it is too late). As for myself, I agree with David Frum (not something I would have expected a decade ago): if our democracy and indeed our civilization survives Trump, it won't be because the threat wasn't real, but because enough people recognized the danger and acted to meet it.

So, the GOP is now the party of Russian subversion:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/18/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-putin-215387

and defended by the idiot Left (see The Nation, or for that matter Bernie, who says we mustn't "rush to judgement" over the obvious).

Nationalists on the Right allying with Socialists on the Left against liberal democracy. Perhaps we can call them National Socialists.

Meanwhile The New Yorker runs a story on how Trump's rural voters support him because the Left (by which they mean not the Left  but supporters of liberal democracy, though they are too ignorant to know it) hates Trump for the same reason we hate them.

To which I reply, if you say so. If you share Trump's racism, sexism, bigotry, greed, corrupt authoritarianism and willful ignorance, then yes, I hate you and for the exact same reasons.

And you deserve it.

First, been busy selling our house (we have accepted an offer, but haven't closed, so there is always the chance the deal will fall through, which has kept me away from blogging. Apologies to my vast audience of readers.

Reading another book on the Holocaust (a subject one cannot study too much) and I'm struck again about the comparison between Germany then and the US now. Not so much between Trump and Hitler, or the GOP and the Nazis as (again) between how much and how little it took our respective voters to leap off a cliff. Germany, a nation with no democratic traditions, took a lost world war, multiple revolutions, hyper-inflation, depression, and international humiliation to turn to extremists (mostly on the Right but also the Left). The US, a country with hundreds of years of democratic tradition, took a severe but hardly historic economic downturn, some mediocre leadership, and the horror of a black man being succeeded by a woman to turn to extremists (again, mostly on the Right but also on the Left). American exceptionalism indeed.

Or perhaps not: the US and UK seemed locked together in mutual stupidity lately. Isolationism, inequality, a turn to the extremes.

Liberals (again, I use the term in the American sense) in both countries are fighting back, and perhaps we will prevail, but we shouldn't be here to begin with. And in both nations, the press, and especially but hardly only the Murdoch press, bears a large share of the blame. Still in the bad journalism contest the US wins pretty handily. The BBC isn't CNN or MSNBC, and the Guardian isn't the NY Times.

But again, there are intelligent voices. Here is one over there worth listening too that has obvious relevance here:

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/politics-needless-death/#

Go. Read.

Some random thoughts in response to the hurricane of news lately:

Roger Ailes died 50 years too late.

Dems should run the film of Trump doing a curtsy to the Saudi king in every ad for every race forever.

Mike Pence is in this up to his eyeballs, though the thought of Paul Ryan in the WH prevents that from being as amusing as it could be.

Bernie, on the day before the special prosecutor was appointed, rushed to agree it isn't time to talk of impeachment yet. He is right-January 20 was the time to start talking about impeachment. What a fraud, and his cultists are as deluded (if not as evil) as Trump's.

Speaking of which, anyone who voted for Trump has demonstrated they are incapable of taking their duty as citizens seriously, and should never be allowed to vote again. I suggest an Amendment to the Constitution to that effect. :)