And the sanewashing predictably continues.

Yes - an outside group charged with coming up with ideas to cut government waste is a reasonably sound idea.

But such a group led by a toxically self-absorbed and brazenly dishonest billionaire whose emotional development never made it past adolescence under the administration of an overtly treasonous and delusional pathological narcissist whose emotional development never made it past childhood is very much not a sound idea.

This is fascism 101.

Fascism is at least as much an economic system as a political one, or more precisely, it's more like an economic system hiding behind a political system.

And the way the economic system works is very simple - private ownership of the means of production combined with an overt and institutionalized revolving door between business and government, so that the end result is plutocratic oligarchy.

Basically, it's taking the system that already existed in the US, by which the wealthy bought access to political power mostly surreptitiously and nominally illegally unless they followed specific restrictions, and legitimizes and formalizes and institutionalizes it and moves it right out into the open.

And behind all of the white supremacist and christian nationalist and reactionary conservative rhetoric, this was always the real goal.

Given the opportunity, no, he's not going to prosecute his foes. He's going to have them killed.

But until he can count on getting away with that, he'll have to, and will, settle for just prosecuting them.

Exactly what he's doing is pushing for them to protect the scumbags he intends to appoint from the scrutiny that's sure to expose just how scummy they are.

Huh.

I've been sort of idly wondering who was going to be the first "enemy" politician the Trump regime was going to kill.

I'd say McConnell just became the odds-on favorite.

The question isn't if the Trump administration will try to pull the US out of NATO, but simply when and by what excuse.

Mmm... sort of.

In some very broad sense, yes, it's corruption.

In a narrower and more precise sense though, it isn't really, since "corruption" implies a violation of higher standards, which is what we've had, to a greater or lesser extent, pretty much throughout our history.

The difference in the coming era is that there will be no higher standards to corrupt. The things that were previously violations of higher standards will become the new standards. Theft and graft and cronyism will no longer be crimes or even (meaningfully recognized) wrongs - they will be the institutional norms.

And I don't mean this as mere pedantry - the point is that when what used to be corruption becomes the overt norms, things will get much, much worse than they ever were or could be when they were still corruption.

News flash for wealthy authoritarian parasites around the world, because you all seem ignorant of this fact:

Declining birthrates are a direct result of the simple fact that more people all the time decide that they have no desire to bring children into this world, and that in turn is a direct result of the fact that you've turned this world into a warped, corrupt, toxic, authoritarian shithole.

You have no one to blame but yourselves.

It's become obvious over time that one of Trump's primary strategies in life is assigning his failures and faults to other people. He lives in a sort of permanent fog of projection.

I wonder who he's trying to fool though. It's so constant and seemingly effortless that I suspect that it's really mostly for his own benefit - that it's not just the story he's telling other people, but the story he's telling himself.

It's astonishing how completely and thoroughly fucked things are right now.

Think about it - the measure of how damaging a story might be to a deranged convicted felon presidential candidate is the eagerness with which a social media site owned by a billionaire troll and self-professed "free speech absolutist" tries to censor it.

How is that even possible? Does no one else recognize how jaw-droppingly insane these people are?

Since the Heritage Foundation just overtly declared war on American democracy, complete with a thinly veiled threat of violence and bloodshed, it's just that much more important that news like this is spread as widely as possible.

The fascists riding Trump's coattails aren't even hiding their intentions any more. We must not let them succeed in destroying the few remaining vestiges of American democracy, and the first step in that is keeping that loathsome lunatic Trump out of office.

No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That's the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that's the case, it's pretty obvious what the real problem is.