To the AI Bots Raiding My Blog

In the past few weeks, I've noticed an insane uptick in traffic to this blog. Normally I'd be thrilled that more people are finding my ramblings to be coherent and plausible (yes I'm an influencer at last) except that I have no idea where the traffic is coming from. 

At least until I saw one source was ChatGPT. 

Crap.

The onslaught by our tech overlords to insert their Artificial Intelligence bots into every crevice of the Internet - Gemini on Google, Copilot on Microsoft products, whatever the hell they call it on Apple devices - is creating an environment where anything posted on the Internet can get vacuumed up by these AI bots as use in someone else's work. Without citing sources or providing links to the original work, and in the case of artists and musicians (and even professional writers) failing to pay them for their work. Violating copyright laws left and right.

So let me state here, loud and clear.

I did not give consent, I DO NOT give consent, I WILL NOT GIVE CONSENT TO HAVE MY WRITINGS USED WITHOUT CREDIT TO MY EFFORTS.

I'm not making any money off this blog, so I can't claim loss of revenue. But I do claim my rights as the person who wrote this junk to get cited by others referencing what I've written. These are my thoughts and opinions and I'm damn well entitled to defend them.

What bothers me is how these AI systems could well go after my published writings, the stuff I have as ebooks. THAT is a source of revenue, I should get paid for what's on the market, and if anybody steals "Road Trip to Vegas" or "The Brides of WiFi" I will be very vexed indeed.

I'm reading up now on how to block AI scavengers from this blog. I've gotten as far as "robots.txt" but I have no idea how to apply to a Blogger site. If anyone's got pointers, please help.

And to the Silicon Valley thieves who think they can take everything and leave us with nothing: Please die in a fire. It's the least YOU can do to save the world from your greed.

In The Matter of Allegations Relating to Gaetz

Update: Io Saturnalia to Steve In Manhattan for tagging this article for Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. I hope everyone's safe and healthy and enjoying whatever there is of the holiday spirit. Except for Matt Gaetz. I hope he rots.

I need to get back into the blogging mindset, and what better way to get at it than to report on the nastiness of Florida's Worst Scuzzbucket (AKA Matt Gaetz)?

After all the storm and fury over the House Ethics' investigation into his misconduct with underage women - where the House voted to suppress the committee's report while trump was offering Gaetz control of the Justice Department, all of it rendered moot when Gaetz dropped out after a disastrous meeting with angry Senators poised to deny him the post - the committee decided to leak that report this week anyway.

Going by the summary, here are the things that Gaetz did that crossed a whole bunch of lines (skip to page two):

In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following:

• From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him.

• In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.

• During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.

• Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.

• In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.

• Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.

• Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.

Based on the above, the Committee concluded there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.

This is the stuff that the House Ethics committee uncovered in spite of a Justice Department's investigation into Gaetz's criminal behavior back in 2021 that ended up going nowhere. The DOJ argued at the time that they couldn't proceed to criminal charges on Gaetz because their witnesses were either unreliable on the stand or unwilling to testify. You can see that as well in the committee's work where most of the teenage girls claimed their Fifth Amendment rights to avoid self-incrimination, but even then the congresscritters and their staffs were able to put the pieces together that would have made a legitimate criminal case. Goddamn.

One of the horrifying elements of these reports is how much of Gaetz's misconduct was openly known. Not so much the prostitution, but his eagerness to sex women far younger than his own age range and his often drunken (now allegedly drugged) state of mind. Stories were rife about fellow legislators at both the state house and congressional levels how Gaetz would brag about and share pictures of his sexual exploits in the public forums. For all that his fellow congresscritters were bothered by his vulgarity, none of them cared enough to stop him until his business buddy Joel Greenberg got caught and revealed the nastier stuff hiding under the Florida GOP's foundations. 

While a solid number of our Republican elected officials DO care about their own personal conduct and ethics, they do happily turn a blind eye to a lot of this bad behavior because of two reasons: Some of them fear "rocking the boat" and disrupting their party's access to power; and Some of them honestly don't see the harm of sexually exploiting / abusing young women - even underage - because their own conservative philosophy - that women and the young are not part of their elite status and thus exploitable by their laws - allows it.

Granted, Democrats in power get caught in their own sex scandals and misconduct towards young women as well, but on this scale? With this level of disdain and disregard that Gaetz kept displaying towards his targets? You can feel from just reading the report the contempt he had, the lack of emotional connection to most of the girls he manhandled.

When you expand your view to examine the sexual misconduct we've seen over the years, you should notice that when it comes to Republican sex scandals there's an open display of misogyny and toxic masculinity driving most of that behavior. It's at a point where a more nonpartisan government would require full drug testing and ID checks of women under 40 at every Republican-based country club and convention gatherings just to make sure they're not violating laws.

And we STILL haven't seen a full accounting of Jeffrey Epstein's Client List containing the names of Men Of Power - both Republican and Democrat and CEO billionaire alike - who "flew the Lolita Express" engaging in sexual misconduct with seriously underaged girls.

Do us a huge favor, Joe Biden: Just before you leave office this January 20th 2025 PLEASE release the Epstein Client List (redacting the names of victims ONLY) not only to the general public but to every law enforcement agency on the planet.

Women remain abused as long as Men of Power retain that power to abuse them. THIS NEEDS TO END.

And ship Gaetz to the nearest prison for breaking drug use and statutory rape laws, please and thanks this Saturnalia season.

It's Campaign Time 2024 and the Beltway Is Still Broken

As the Democratic National Convention continues this week, apparently the national punditry are raging into the void about how they got bamboozled by the Biden retirement/Harris promotion (via Meredith Shiner at New Republic): 

...Trump (in 2016) was unique among that field of suits in that he did not slide from Polite Washington’s slick political candidate widget factory. He didn’t care to perform the same canned lines on tax rates, entitlements, or the national debt. And he showed the world that audiences didn’t care about that long-running political vaudeville act, either. The Trump era, however you define it, yielded few gifts and cured little about the broken political discourse coming out of Washington. But if it didn’t wreck the political press’s performative vacuity, it at least exposed it for all to see.

Now, with nearly four years of Trump out of the White House, Trump back on the trail, and a Democrat at the top of the ticket who can actually campaign, the gap between the Beltway Truman Show and what people outside of D.C. actually are experiencing is widening. And this rift in reality imperils the media at a time when journalism is fighting a multifront war against anti-truth Republicans, declining revenue, and predatory venture capital mismanagement...

The problems of campaign coverage from 2016 wasn't entirely all about trump: The National Media had been suffering with embarrassments and acts of self-immolation ever since they went all in on Bill Clinton's sex scandals and wondered how the hell the rest of the nation stopped trusting them. It didn't help in 2016 that Hillary was there to incite the media mob into a dangerous binary world-view that made Hillary a threat to everyone and not trump. But I digress.

When Trump burst onto the scene, I was still a reporter in Washington covering national politics and Congress. I watched as the journalism-industrial complex of D.C. reporters and operatives around me tried to cast Trump as an atypical candidate who blew up the Republican Party. Casting Trump as an outlier—trying to make him an aberration instead of an outgrowth of a decades-long Republican effort to break our country—obscured the collective national gaze from something much more troubling for the people who make their living on politics: Trump didn’t break the Republican Party at all. He just broke the made-up Washington rules that empowered every lobbyist, reporter, and staffer to attend parties together without fear or reservation.

The Republican Party had been dying for some time, when as a party they decided to shift to a Culture War narrative light on policy and heavy on demonizing fellow Americans. trump merely saw the weak spots in the GOP relationship between leaders and voters and overtook control of the wingnut base. The national media elites had no idea how to explain that - not only to the citizenry but also to themselves - and so have been flailing about trying to find anything that would fit their "both sides!" or "let's have bipartisanship!" world-views. America's punditry are stuck in a bubble of their own. Back to Shiner:

Because if this summer has revealed anything, it’s that, just like the Scott Walkers of yore, we are watching the national media short-circuit before our very eyes. They are insular. They are unprepared. And after years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico Playbook, they do not see their role as speaking to us, but rather speaking to themselves. While this may seem ancillary to the main plotline of our national politics, the mainstream media own-goaling themselves out of civic relevance is a net negative for anyone who believes in the outcome of better, more representative, good government.

For years, largely because Republicans are better at working the refs and crying foul about any effort by the media to hold them accountable for their actions, the idea that the media are dyed-in-the-wool liberals has become the orthodoxy. Of course, the Beltway media are conservative. This is not a novel argument by any means: It’s an industry run by (increasingly reactionary) plutocrats, who reliably summon their charges to lead a highly effective, “But how will you pay for it?” pincer movement against anything resembling liberal policy. Meanwhile, there is seemingly no sin grievous enough to earn a Republican the same sort of nullifying skepticism—the Trumpists who aided and abetted the former president’s attempt to overturn a lawful election remain in the good graces of America’s cable news bookers.

Still, we need to acknowledge that the media are conservative in the most traditional, unideological sense of the word: They are clinging to a status quo, their status quo, that has not matched our reality since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the Tea Party emerged as the energized manifestation of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s fever dreams. Their rules, their conventional wisdom, their savvy takes become more stale, more detached from normal life, and more cartoonish with every passing day...

I argued about this earlier about how the modern Beltway media elites are still obsessing over the Reagan Era like it's still 1985, with Green Eagle making a solid case that the ultra-rich owners of the media outlets have their own (anti-tax and deregulation) agendas to pursue. Either way, we are talking about an entire profession - journalism - unable to fulfill even the most basic functions of that job - to provide Objective (fact-driven) reporting - because they've sunk entirely into Subjective self-absorbed pandering to each other in the news business.

The problem is that we as a nation - we Americans as a people - need objective factual reporting to keep us informed properly about our choices when it comes time to use our power to elect our representatives and our leaders. We're not getting any of that when the headline writers and the front-page opinion pundits and the talk show guests can't even be correct about what they're selling us in their columns and podcasts.

Just again a reminder: For the national media elites, there is no accountability for being wrong (or self-centered). Maureen Dowd could spend the first half of 2024 screaming that Biden needed to step down from the presidential campaign, and less than a month after he did so accuse the Democratic Party of "pulling a coup" that she refuses to admit her own role in it. THIS is how that punditry acts - and reacts - and when things don't go their way they'll throw a conniption far bigger than anything crybaby trump puts out.

Until the national press comes to terms with the current reality that they are biased (and towards trump and other Far Right wingnuts); until the punditry realizes they are not the heroes of their own narratives, they are accomplices in the Far Right's schemes; until the likes of Dowd and David Brooks and the majority of swelled heads at the New York Times and Washington Post settle the fuck down: We are not going to get an honest story out of any of them.

And it's still up to us to tune out their ego-driven narratives and focus on what matters most: keeping criminal trump out of the White House and banishing the Republican Party from the national stage this November general election.

Get the damn votes out, everyone.

What Was Bought, What Was Sold

A lobbyist working the Texas state legislature gets wind of a bill that would go against his clients' interests, so he goes around offering campaign funds to willing legislators to drop the bill. A particular official is tricky to get but the lobbyist finally gets him to commit with a $10,000 donation. When the bill comes to a floor vote, the lobbyist is outraged to watch that official vote for the bill. He angrily confronts the man later on to find out the opposition had paid him off with a $50,000 donation. The lobbyist keeps cursing out the legislator, who finally shrugs and answers "you knew I was weak when I took the ten thousand."
-- one of many Molly Ivins' apocryphal yet likely-true stories

The corruption of Far Right, holier-than-thou, hypocritical, two-faced conservatives is easy to spot when the rot is sitting atop the entire federal judiciary.

Clarence Thomas got on the Supreme Court bench in 1991 under a cloud of legitimate sexual harassment allegations, aided by Republican Senators who bullied Anita Hill and Democratic Senators loathe to rock the boat. That there were other accusers who were ignored or blocked from testifying remains an injustice to this day.

Ever since then, Thomas has worked under a cloud of unethical behavior that kept getting swept under the rug because those in charge - the Chief Justice is responsible for overseeing investigations into SCOTUS misconduct - would rather keep the conservative majority unified and in control of the Judiciary. 

Never mind the many times Thomas should have recused himself from cases that involved his politically active wife Ginni, especially her involvement in the January 6th Insurrection.

Never mind the calls for investigations like this one in 2013 into Thomas' attending fundraising events for the Federalist Society, a violation of judicial ethics banning judges from any political fundraising.

There's been other questionable and unethical judges on the Supreme Court before: Samuel Chase was impeached in 1805 but it was more over partisan politics than direct misconduct, James Clark McReynolds was personally unlikeable and anti-Semitic, and Abe Fortas was forced to resign over revelations of an annual retainer from a Wall Street financier that compromised impartiality.

But have any of them sank to the levels that Thomas has, given the reveal of Thomas' ties to a deep-pocket Far Right billionaire?

ProPublica broke the story last week about how Clarence and Ginni Thomas would receive lavish gifts, rides on luxury yachts and private jets, and enjoy expensive vacations all on the dime of one Harlan Crow, billionaire real estate developer and a major Federalist Society funder (Via Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski):

In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.

If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said...

The law in question appears to be the Ethics In Government Act, passed in 1978 as part of the post-Watergate reforms. Thomas apparently refused to file the paperwork that thousands of federal employees - from the President on down to the janitors at the Smithsonian - file every time they receive ANY kind of gift from persons who have or even might do business with the U.S. government.

Even Thomas' fellow Justices reported gifts as simple as fishing rods or as ornate as bronze sculptures, all because these things could be considered acts of bribery and influence peddling by rich people looking for favors if any legal matters come to the fore.

Thomas refused to apply the laws to himself, exposing his judicial authority as hypocrisy, himself as a fraud. His claims to not understanding the law, or that he went by other people's bad advice, violates the common legal concept that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

And today the story got worse when ProPublica (again by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski) uncovered how Crow directly paid Thomas in a land deal that Thomas failed to report. 

In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.

The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.

The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.

A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica...

This wasn't a misunderstanding or the gift of a friend, this was a business transaction and a clear violation of ethics.

It ought to be treated as violation of federal law.

Given the broken nature of Congress, and the historical failures of impeachment where partisan loyalty overrode the best interests of the nation, we should not expect any action out of them other than public posturing. The House Republicans will never turn on one of their justices responsible for the extremist rightward bent of the Supreme Court: The Senate Democrats may hold committees about Thomas' failures but can't get the two-thirds vote needed to remove him.

This is a matter that has to go to the Justice Department. Never mind the screams from the Far Right that this is "yet another witch hunt" against a Republican figure. Thomas is refusing to abide by the expected ethical norms of the office he holds, and he is flouting the legal system he is supposed to defend. If he's breaking a law, any law, he needs to be held accountable like any other citizen. No one, not a President nor a Senator nor a Justice should be above the law.

How can anyone accept a legal ruling from a Supreme Court Justice who will not hold himself accountable to the laws he applies to everyone else?

The Damage of Far Right Lies

I don't know if I'd mentioned this on the blog, but one of the outcomes of the 2020 post-election madness - where trump claimed "rigged" or "stolen" voting happened, to incite his followers into acts of insurrection - was that one of trump's targets decided to fight back against the Fox News network for promoting trump's falsehoods.

Dominion, one of the companies that manufactures voting machines, got targeted with allegations of rigging their machines to where it cut into their ability to win contracts with states (and I believe other nations). So they filed a massive defamation lawsuit against Fox, and thanks to the discovery process of acquiring evidence to back their suit, revealed a lot of intraoffice scheming and plotting by the media corporation to shill trump's lies to keep their audiences and their profits.

To quote from Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact...

The most compelling example of Fox News consciously lying to its viewers, however, arrived yesterday with the evidence in the defamation lawsuits filed by the voting-machine company Dominion, over claims aired on Fox News echoing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been fixed by compromised voting machines. Dominion’s latest filing argues that privately, Fox News hosts admitted that the allegations of election fraud being floated by Trump allies were baseless, but they kept airing them, in part because they feared another right-wing network, Newsmax, was stealing their audience. The filing shows that when Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities were livid, complaining internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” the Fox News executive Bill Sammon wrote to a colleague about the network’s coverage of the “fraud” conspiracy...

The Fox executives knew they were violating journalistic ethics - yes, those do exist - in pursuit of ratings.

The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive. Another is that despite the long-standing right-wing argument that conservatives distrust mainstream media outlets because they do not tell the truth, Fox News executives and personalities understand that their own network loses traction with its audience when it fails to tell the lies that the audience wishes to hear. There are infinite examples of the mainstream press making errors of omission, fact, or framing. But as the private communications in the Dominion filing show, the mainstream media’s unforgivable sin with this constituency is not lying, but failing to consistently lie the way conservative audiences want them to...

Not only is there a closed wingnut echo chamber, that chamber is bolted shut by an audience that wants to remain ignorant of the facts and angered by their own fears.

There is also a story here about how social media and analytics can compel even powerful media institutions to meet a strong demand for falsehoods. Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it.

This is where decades of Fox Not-News - and other Far Right media figures like Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and James O'Keefe (who's not having a good month anyway) - twisted free speech protections to shill conspiracy instead of facts, lies instead of truth.

There shouldn't be a First Amendment right to lie, especially when those lies are malicious, designed to enrage a handful of followers into acts of violence driven by unfounded fear and hatred. We've seen the effects of conspiracy "replacement theory" racism towards Blacks and Jews that have led to mass shootings and constant harassment of innocent Americans.

What Fox Not-News does on a nightly basis - promoting fear, selling rage - has done legitimate harm to the American political discourse. This lawsuit by Dominion could well put a clamp on that harm, but we need to understand that the Far Right punditry will continue to shill that fear and rage until they can no longer profit from it.

We are long past due bringing out the big guns of fraud charges and going after that Far Right Noise Machine with professional malpractice laws. Go after Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's wallets, people. Every penny they earn comes from lying, and no one should be allowed to profit from lies.

That Lies Are Now the Currency of the Realm: Day Two of the Trump Era

This is just wrong:

What Kellyanne Conway said to defend Spicer is worse:

CONWAY: Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. What... You're saying it's a falsehood. And they're giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains...
TODD: Wait a minute. Alternative facts?
CONWAY: ...That there’s...
TODD: Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered, the one thing he got right...
CONWAY: Hey, Chuck, why... Hey Chuck...
TODD: ...Was Zeke Miller. Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods.

There are no alternate facts: A Fact is a piece of information as part of an objective reality. If you wanna be Randian about it, that means A is A. You can't go claiming A is B all because B fits your Narrative better.

There's a better word for "alternative facts" or "falsehoods". What my Deep South Grandma Kinzer used to call Good Ole Fashioned "LYING".

Trump and his Republican handlers have no respect for the media they seek to bully into submission. It's not a surprise that they're lying: What's shocking is how brazen they are about it.

Every aspect of journalistic standards and ethics are now facing their greatest challenges. Reporters and editors now have the responsibility to fact-check every WORD uttered by these liars and point them out as falsehoods every step of the way.

Telling Tales Out of School

I got into a brief conversation on Twitter about the stories now floating out there about Trump's business practices.

I never fully worked in the private sector - I've mostly been a librarian, that's public sector, any private sector gig has been as part-timer wage slave - so it kind of stuns me that there's no shared or collaborative awareness of who the good guys and bad guys are in the business world.

It boils down to the concept of "telling tales out of school," an old phrase about giving up confidential hush-hush information about somebody that you might not wanna do (unless you want the reputation of being a snitch). Like Octavia's Daughter points out, going public by bad mouthing a client could have been bad for business overall (future clients might want confidentiality).

The thing, I've got a solid point here: Trump has a consistent history of intentionally ripping people off.

Trump would hire contractors, get the service done, then complain about the finished product and refuse to pay. He would draw it out with the lawyers up to the point where he knows the contractors needs money to pay off their own debts and force them to take less, killing any profit those contractors could expect. Some of those contractors had to go into bankruptcy themselves.

His own Presidential campaign has generated tales about his refusing to pay out money he promised to charities, to providers, to state agencies. He's currently getting sued by a troupe of girl performers who sang at his rallies, for God's sake.

And as far as we can go with the "telling tales out of school" phrase, there's no finer example than Trump University.

And to Trump, it's just "good business."

This is a man who does not respect anyone else's rights or needs to be well-paid for services rendered.

Do you honestly think he's going to stop thinking like that the second he enters the Oval Office?

We're talking about a man who'll likely empty out the federal coffers faster than Speedy Gonzales emptying out a cheese factory. (No offense to Speedy Gonzales, and besides he raids the cheese factory to feed the starving villagers)

It's good that the stories are getting out there now, during a period that our voters can realize that Trump isn't a successful businessman, he's a successful thief. But it bothers me that someone like Trump was allowed to operate like this for over 40 years and got away with it. Shouldn't some requirement of business ethics DEMAND that a crook of Trump's venality be hauled into the spotlight for his sins long ago? Before it got worse?

For the Record: Trump Lies Like a Rug

Submitted with one comment, from the Politifact website tracking Donald Trump's public statements as he campaigns:

When you put Trump's Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire numbers together, it adds up to 76 percent of his statements being lies. That's the comment I wanna point out: three-fourths of nearly every statement out of Trump's mouth cannot be trusted, cannot be accepted as factual or honest or reliable or good.

And the Politifact people give themselves a ton of wiggle room for politicians and public figures in terms of giving them some benefit of doubt. Trump is so brazen and consistent a liar that for their 2015 Lie of the Year award, they pretty much gave it to Trump for pretty much EVERYthing he said.

I know there's the perception that ALL politicians are liars. But perception doesn't always match the facts. By the same metrics I put Trump: Hillary Clinton lies 28 percent of the time (a little over a quarter), Mitt Romney tracked at 42 percent of the time, Obama at 26 percent of the time, and Bernie Sanders at 30 percent of the time (and the only one avoiding a Pants of Fire).

Trump is by far the biggest, most consistent liar on the political stage.

And yet he keeps getting his fanbase to buy his bullshit. He keeps getting the mainstream media to buy his bullshit: Even with most of them well aware he's a bullshitter.

What the hell does that say about this nation, that we don't hold liars like Trump accountable for the fraud they commit upon the voters? There may be First Amendment restrictions on our government from enforcing such fraud in public statements, but our journalism industry ought to set itself to higher standards and ethics.

The cable channels and newspapers and radio stations are under no obligation to cover Trump, or grant him such privileges as the near-constant - and FREE - coverage he gets for his daily bullshitting. To hell with ratings: where the hell is common sense that Trump is a liar and shouldn't be listened to?

They ought to start charging Trump $50,000 a minute whenever he tries to do a damn phone interview instead of showing up in-person. They ought to set up a bullshit billing system where he has to hand over $100,000 per falsehood to the channel's or paper's lawyers to cover any lawsuits for journalistic malpractice Trump will be costing them.

And why not? It's a business, after all. The channels and papers and radio stations have every right to raise revenues, especially to cover the costs of lies they're forced to shill.

Brief Things about Jon Stewart and the Daily Show

I haven't written much about Jon Stewart, save for the occasional observation that The Daily Show was a more accurate news source than most other cable shows - not just Fox Not-News but also CNN and MSNBC paled in comparison - so this is kinda out of the blue for me writing about him just as this is his LAST DAY hosting The Daily Show after 16 years.  (I'm not about to live-blog the GOP debate tonight because this site's just not built for it, check with Wonkette please).

So, just to say this much:

1) For a stand-up comedian hosting a satire show that parodied the flaws of television media, Stewart took his job seriously.

2) When he took over the show, the tenor of the Daily Show went from a sadistic streak under Craig Kilborn - insulting half of everyone - to a sarcastic one that relied more on the Talking Head media elites getting caught failing basic logic.  Stewart's focus could still rely on crude and direct put-downs of specific targets - Glenn Beck in particular - but that was applied more as a scalpel cutting out cancerous growths instead of the sledgehammer style Kilborn employed.

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes,  More Daily Show Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

This embedded clip above - if it plays correct - is perhaps Stewart's crowning moment of political satire, shredding Beck's performance style and pointing out the twisted failures at logic Beck tried to shill.

3) I probably would have missed going to college with him as he's eight years older than me, but if the parental units had decided on staying in Virginia Beach instead of moving to Florida, I could well have gone to William And Mary.  Oh well, it wouldn't do.

4) While he's leaving at arguably the most dire time our nation needs him - in the middle of the craziest, wingnuttiest Republican campaign for the White House since Wendell Wilkee - in a lot of ways I don't blame him.  Stewart's made it clear that all these years fighting the BS shilled by Fox Not-News has burned him out.

For all of Stewart's efforts to point out the flaws and insanity of the Far Right, nothing much ever changed.  Some of the messengers got mocked off the stage - Beck is now so fringe that barely anyone quotes him on Twitter now - but Ailes and his network simply reloaded with fresher faces and worse talent.  The Far Right media of which Fox is the major hub keeps chugging along with the same message - FEAR LIBRULS, FEAR THE OTHER - in a way that belittled Stewart's efforts to slap reality into the dialogue.

5) It's DEBATE TIME.  God Help Us All.  When it ends, Jon Stewart is gone.

Fox Not-News And the Reputation Of Bad Journalism

Everything I said about the failures of journalism during the Brian Williams exaggeration-and-lies fiasco remains true.  Especially as a follow-up revelation: that Bill O'Reilly, prime promoter of the Fox Not-News media charade, is himself caught in a web of falsehoods regarding his coverage of the Falklands War.  It's built up into a series of additional revelations that O'Reilly has fibbed and exaggerated his way through various news stories and major moments over the decades he's been paid as a journalist.

To wit:

• O'Reilly claimed to have witnessed deadly rioting - "bodies in the streets" - in Argentina during the Falklands War. While there were riots, none were lethal nor as bad as he claimed.  Adding to this fib has been O'Reilly's contention that being in Buenos Aries qualified him for being in "a war zone" even though the real war zone - the islands themselves - were hundreds of miles away.  There weren't any American reporters in that actual war zone during the firefights.
• O'Reilly claimed to have been at the house when a prominent figure in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories committed suicide in 1979.  The police reports from that incident never mentioned his being there (which would have been investigated, he would have been interviewed as a potential witness), and there's eyewitnesses and documentation O'Reilly was in Dallas that day (oh irony).
• A recent report that O'Reilly claimed to witness "nuns getting shot" in El Salvador during the violent civil war there in the early 1980s.  While nuns were killed, the only documented cases were in 1980, and O'Reilly didn't get there until 1981.

Making O'Reilly's struggles against the accusations more poetic is the reality that his channel has a poor reputation with truth-telling when it comes to reporting.  The channel repeatedly passes along unverified stories as factual, edits clips to distort statements by experts or political figures the channel openly despises, and places on-air people who are not experts on topics to discuss opinions instead of facts.

O'Reilly's not even the worst culprit: the bigger fact-denier has been Sean Hannity, who goes after ill-informed opinions that sync with his own rather than getting actual research and expert opinions.

Fox viewers tend to be the least-informed viewers among the three major cable news channels.  A lot of that is due to Fox News providing reports that tend to be false.  A lot of that is due to Fox News not really being news at all.

There's a push to get Fox Not-News to suspend O'Reilly for his exaggerations/outright lying about his professional career, but considering that cable channel thrives on exaggerations and lies, why expect them to punish him for it?  He's probably going to get a pay raise for this.

Addendum: there's a Washington Post article by Paul Waldman that simplifies the O'Reilly scandal in five easy-to-understand points.  Not only why O'Reilly lies...

So why not just say, “I may have mischaracterized things a few times” and move on? To understand why that’s impossible, you have to understand O’Reilly’s persona and the function he serves for his viewers. The central theme of The O’Reilly Factor is that (his) true America, represented by the elderly whites who make up his audience (the median age of his viewers is 72) is in an unending war with the forces of liberalism, secularism, and any number of other isms. Bill O’Reilly is a four-star general in that war, and the only way to win is to fight.

The allegedly liberal media are one of the key enemies in that war. You don’t negotiate with your enemies, you fight them. And so when O’Reilly is being criticized by the media, to admit that they might have a point would be to betray everything he stands for and that he has told his viewers night after night for the better part of two decades...

...but also why O'Reilly will never admit or acknowledge his lies...

Brian Williams got suspended from NBC News because his bosses feared that his tall tales had cost him credibility with his audience, which could lead that audience to go elsewhere for their news. O’Reilly and his boss, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, are not worried about damage to Bill O’Reilly’s credibility, or about his viewers deserting him. Their loyalty to him isn’t based on a spotless record of factual accuracy; it’s based on the fact that O’Reilly is a medium for their anger and resentments...

Welcome to the Fox Not-News War on Truth. They distort, you abide.

The Fall of Journalism As a Principled Profession

While there's a sizable amount of schadenfreude involved, there is a sadness to the scandal surrounding NBC News anchor Brian Williams' fall from grace.

A lot of it has to do with the part of the scandal few are talking about: the failure of ethical behavior among the media profession.  The lack of quality control within what is a billion-dollar industry, with regards to offering a product - news - that ought to be factual and trustworthy.

The fact that NBC News was warned as far back as 2003 - during the Iraq War - that Brian Williams was "embellishing" the story about his being under fire highlights the problems within an industry that barely polices its own and ignores warning signs in the pursuit of "the hot story" and the Eternal-Loving Almighty Salacious Scoop.

It's worse than wanting to be the next Woodward and Bernstein (who at least vetted their reporting efforts even as they pursued the "hot" story of Watergate, which wasn't that hot until another year into their investigating).  It's wanting to be the next Drudge (who lived, still lives, for the rumor and innuendo of political sniping), and working a story to look credible enough to anchor a nightly news channel.

The paradox of modern journalism is how "personality" and "celebrity" - being the cool guy of the moment - has to blend with the credibility of being an "accurate" and "fair/balanced" reporter of the facts.  In theory there shouldn't be any conflict between those two sides of journalism.  In practice, the desire for the fame (celebrity) keeps trumping the professional and ethical requirement of being a reporter (accuracy).

The pursuit of celebrity makes someone like Brian Williams work harder at the image - such as making himself look like a fearless, hard-nosed war-front reporter surviving the risks of a rocket attack on a helicopter convoy that didn't really happen to him - to where the need to keep telling the story grows, with the story growing with it.  Up until the point the Truth - not just the spiritual or relative truth, but the factual truth - turns out to be not what he was telling at all.  What's incredible here is that it took over 11 years for the accountability surrounding all this to catch up to him and to the news channel paying him $50 million for his celebrity and not his reporting...

I highlighted this point before: there is no accountability for being wrong.  Well, there may be some accountability now for Williams at least.  In most respects, Williams isn't getting punished for mishandling a news report, or issuing ill-informed opinions on political issues.  Williams is getting punished for aggrandizement, for promoting himself falsely as a courageous newsman therefore deserving of respect or trust.  While there's no evidence (yet) that Williams has committed the mortal sins of mis-reporting or lying - attempts to discredit his stories about seeing bodies floating during the Katrina disaster haven't gone anywhere yet - he's committed the mortal sin of Doubt.  Because we can't trust him when he talks about his personal actions, we can't trust him when he tries to tell us about the economy or a government scandal or even the weather.

As I wrote earlier, your plumber is better vetted than your news host.  This debacle with Williams is just one more proof of that.

What is happening now, the real scandal here, is the lack of accountability for the entire media/journalism profession.  The news channels that failed to vet their staff... the editors that failed to rein in egos and stick to the reports... fellow reporters and media celebrities who kept up with the embellishments and enabled Williams - and themselves - to keep selling each other as people they weren't...

From my years studying for journalism as a college degree, one of the things debated was the importance of retaining trust in the readership and the audience.  Whenever a story was mis-reported it was vital to get a correction printed or stated as soon as possible.  Journalists were liable in matters of defamation and libel if we got "facts" about people wrong.  Any irresponsible report from us could have hurt or killed people.  If we lost the audience's faith in the facts we try to present, they won't believe us the next time when the reporting was accurate and important.  These were serious matters.

Nowadays, I don't see much interest or focus in accuracy AND honesty.  The cable news channels bring on talking head guests who are not experts on the topics discussed.  There's a rush to report something scandalous only to find out hours later the reports were wrong... only for the reporters to either ignore the facts to report the rumor, or worse double down on the rumor to make the story even more scandalous.  The quality of reporting, of journalism, has slipped.  The quality of journalists has slipped as well.

There's been a push towards inserting the reporter into the narrative: a means to personalize a report, but fraught with the risks of bias and conjecture and the same embellishments that Brian Williams deployed.  The reporter becomes the story - in part or in full - rather than an impartial witness.  Losing that impartiality makes it harder for the reporter - and the media institution backing that reporter - to step back when the story proves false or wrong.  It's been one of the key reasons the Stephen Glass scandal was so huge... and it's been so horrifying how the journalism industry quickly ignored the lessons of that.

Journalism was, ought to be, an honorable profession: it's supposed to keep the public informed and forewarned.  It's supposed to check against the lies of those in power - the leaders of government or a corporation or a church or any institution threatened by corruption - with cold hard facts.  It's not like that now.  Because it lacks accountability, in a timely and just and appropriate manner.

We've got professions that require certification and has authority to punish misconduct.  Lawyers and doctors have ethics boards (and can get disbarred / lose their licenses), teachers have certification boards, plumbers have associations and unions (and government regs where they haven't been gutted yet).  Journalists need the same thing.  There ought to be standards, a code of behavior, something to ensure the public can keep the faith with us when it comes to the facts.

P.S. It does not help that the most trusted person reporting the news is a comedian anchoring a satirical news review show.  And it does not help that today Jon Stewart announced that he's leaving The Daily Show by year's end.  AAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHhhhhhhhhh...

P.S.S. We will not get to hear Brian Williams rap to Ludacris after all.

The Ethics Of Rick Scott

Basically, he doesn't have any.

Yes, let's do start off with the fact he ran a corporation that committed billions in Medicare Fraud to where the company had to fire him and pay $1.7 billion total in fines.

He still - God help us - bought his way into the Governor's office in 2010.  So let's look at a lot of the questionable things he's done in office:

His hand-picked Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll had to resign over her own ethics conflicts and criminal investigation involving Internet gambling cafes.

His hand-picked Education Commissioner had to resign over evidence he intervened in falsifying school evaluations owned by a prominent Republican Party fundraiser at his previous employ in Indiana.  So far, Scott isn't showing any skill in hiring the best of the best to work with him.  Speaking of...

He's had a high turnover rate of staff moreso than other governors, either due to scandal (see above) or internal office conflicts that point to a chaotic and mismanaged office.

He had on staff during his transition period one Adam Hollingsworth, who advised against the high-speed rail deal, then promptly went to work for a rail company pushing the All Aboard Florida project that rivaled the high-speed rail plan.  Thing about All Aboard Florida is that its:

...256-mile rail service has been touted from the beginning as a completely privately financed project that will not cost the state a dime, which is the reason Scott said he supports the plan... At this point, though, the project is seeking $1.5 billion in federal loans that could be key to refinancing its existing debt, and more than $230 million in state dollars already have been set aside for projects that either will directly or indirectly benefit All Aboard Florida’s rail line...

Too much of this reeks of inside dealing.  As an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times says:

It's now clear that All Aboard Florida was seeking special treatment from the governor's office as soon as Scott won the 2010 election... Meanwhile, state transportation officials have enabled All Aboard Florida to hide behind exemptions in the public records law to avoid releasing some documents, including a ridership survey that was part of its loan application process. Leaked documents obtained by the Scripps/Tribune Tallahassee bureau show much of the financial plan will rely on land development along the tracks, not ridership per se, just reinforcing that there is more the public deserves to know. Now Scott is asking the company to slow down to hear from concerned citizens, particularly those between Palm Beach County and Orlando, where no stops are scheduled. This is after he signed a budget that would pay for "quiet zones" in those neighborhoods and after his transportation agency had signed off on the project... Scott is all over the map on rail. ...Now he deceives voters by claiming no public money is going toward All Aboard Florida while millions in state dollars will be spent to make it work, his chief of staff has lobbied for it for years and his transportation department refuses to release documents that should be public...

Another questionable policy push Scott has been working on has been to force state employees and residents applying for financial aid of any kind to get drug-tested on a regular basis.  Despite the facts that 1) a majority of workers and benefits seekers ARE NOT DRUG USERS, and 2) the costs to the state to pay for all that testing was ridiculous.  It doesn't make sense until you consider that Rick Scott's pre-governor gig was being CEO for a chain of state-wide health clinics, which would have seen money pouring in from Scott's enforced drug tests.

Then just a few weeks ago, Scott's campaign committed a breach of campaign rules by having on-duty police officers appear at a rally, giving the impression that law enforcement was backing him for re-election.  Psst: you're not supposed to do that:

...Under Florida law, it's a first-degree misdemeanor for a public official to "directly or indirectly coerce" any employee to engage in political activity, and employees are prohibited from doing so while working.

Scott's campaign said it made its intentions clear but a high-ranking member of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office insisted that he believed he was going to a state event to meet the governor and discuss ways to reduce crime, which is why he asked several deputies to come along.

"We obviously didn't know we were going to a campaign event," said Hillsborough Col. Jim Previtera. "Had we known it was a campaign event, we wouldn't have been there."

Previtera said he was working on Friday, the Fourth of July, when Cody Vildostegui, a Scott campaign aide, asked him to attend a press conference Monday about reducing crime. Previtera's boss, Sheriff David Gee, who supports Scott, was unable to attend.

Also in attendance was another Scott supporter, Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who said the same campaign staffer made it clear to him that it was an event promoting Scott's re-election bid.

When asked about it, repeatedly, by reporters at a following event, Rick Scott basically zoned out and refused to directly answer, giving either rote responses or trying to deflect the question.  It made him a punchline for CNN for God's sake.

And now we're getting reports of how his "blind" trust is making money from a pipeline deal one of his staffers promoted while on his payroll:

Upon his election, Gov. Rick Scott’s transition team included a Florida Power & Light executive who pitched his company’s plan to build a major natural gas pipeline in North Florida to fuel a new generation of gas-fired power plants in places like Port Everglades...

...Five months later, the Florida Public Service Commission, whose five members were appointed by Gov. Scott, unanimously approved construction of Sabal Trail as the state’s third major natural gas pipeline. More approvals are needed from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which the governor oversees.

What wasn’t publicly known in 2013, however, was that Gov. Scott owned a stake in Spectra Energy, the Houston company chosen by FPL that July to build and operate the $3 billion pipeline. Sabal Trail Transmission LLC is a joint venture of Spectra Energy and FPL’s parent, NextEra Energy.

BrowardBulldog.org’s review of financial records made public last month by Gov. Scott show that as of Dec. 31 his portfolio included several million dollars invested in the securities of more than two-dozen entities that produce and/or transport natural gas – including some, like Spectra, with substantial Florida operations.

His stake in Spectra Energy was reported as being worth $53,000 that day.

Florida’s ethics laws generally prohibit public officials like the governor from owning stock in businesses subject to their regulation, or that do business with state agencies. A similar prohibition exists on owning shares in companies that would “create a continuing or frequently recurring conflict” between an official’s private interests and the “full and faithful discharge” of his public duties...

The problem is that the stock purchase happened while his portfolio was under a "blind trust".  While Scott isn't supposed to have any interaction with his trust, there's no guarantee he didn't get word to his handlers to put a little money in on a company he knew was going to do some profitable business.  Similar to Scott's push to drug-test everybody (okay, I exaggerate, Scott doesn't want to drug-test Florida elected officials), this is where Scott's policy actions are directly affecting his business holdings.

All of these things taken separately, you don't see much: maybe you see an elected official's office in a level of disarray.  But if you put it together... if you see the habits that Scott keeps, and the environment in which he puts himself...

What I see is an ongoing pattern from well before his governorship of running his office with disregard for rules.  A disregard to the point where laws get broken in the pursuit of personal profits.  It's a habit that didn't stop the second he took his oath of office.  An oath he doesn't take seriously.

Rick Scott performs his job as governor to enrich Rick Scott the businessman and no one else.  He holds no ethical values that would conflict with his self-serving wants.  He pursues personal profit at the expense of the public interest.

This is not a man who deserves our vote.  This is not a man to put in a position of public trust.
 

These Questions Are Retroactive

These are my questions about Mitt Romney's role at Bain Capital, and Bain Capital in general:

1a) If you, Mitt Romney, were not really CEO of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002 as you claim today, then who was CEO during that time?
1b) Can we speak with that person to verify that he or she was CEO of Bain Capital, and/or the person responsible for most business decisions?
1c) Was there a press release given to the business media back in 1999 or between 1999 to 2002 that announced who this replacement CEO is/was?

2) If that other person was CEO during that time, why did the company's SEC filings still list you as CEO?  And why were you still signing that paperwork as well as other business filings?

3) If you had retired from Bain Capital in 1999, why were you still receiving a base salary of at least $100,000 well into 2002?  Most retirement plans I've known do not work that way.  Were you receiving a salary for a no-show job?

4) If you had cut all ties from Bain Capital as you claim on your 2011 campaigning forms by 1999, why did you tell Massachusetts election officials under oath in 2002 that you were still regularly involved in Bain's business dealings to justify your residency requirement to run for Governor?

'Cause I'm with Andrew Sullivan on this one:

But responsibility for Bain? Think about it. No one disputes that Romney co-founded Bain, hired most of its staff, and honed its methods and strategies from 1984 to 2002. No one can dispute that he was paid at least $100,000 from 1999 to 2002 for being CEO. There is no massive difference between the kind of strategies Bain pursued from 1984 to 1999 when Romney was managing full-time and from 1999 to 2002, when he was managing part-time and by his own lawyer's assertion that his Bain activities "continued unabated just as they had." Is Romney saying that nothing that happened at Bain after 1999 is his responsibility but that everything that happened after January 2009 is all Barack Obama's fault?
Yep, that's what he's saying. It's a pathetic double standard argument from a suddenly pathetic and panicking campaign...

Romney's had the image problem already with being a habitual flip-flopper; getting nicknamed as the "Etch-A-Sketch" candidate whose ideology/talking points can change with a shake of a toy; of neither being conservative or liberal or even moderate, that he simply has no core belief and says whatever he needs to say at that moment to get what he wants.  Now he's trying to avoid responsibility for something that he claimed with pride back in 2002 to run for Governor, but now refuses to acknowledge as it's embarrassing as hell in 2012.

Now he's on record as being a liar, either lying in 2002 to get what he wanted (Governor of Massachusetts), or lying now in 2012 to get what he wants (President of the United States).

And making it worse for him is the fact that the campaign forms he signed to run for President in 2011 carry with them a penalty of perjury... which is a felony at the federal level.  How long will it take for someone in a position to do so file a criminal complaint to have his signed statements investigated?

These questions aren't going to go away with the next news cycle, Mitt.  If you don't answer, people will assume the worst.  Unless of course the answers are somehow worse...  In which case, the Republicans need to start looking for another candidate...

Blog Entry 300. The Amendments We Need. For Real.

It's taken some time for me to re-post, and a lot of it is due to a few factors - including job hunting - but above all the fact that this is my 300th post on this blog.

And for all the political ranting and raving I do here, I had a purpose for creating this blog in the first place: to promote Constitutional Amendment ideas in the hope that they can be discussed, ragged on, sniped, dismissed, and ultimately ignored by the blogosphere as a whole once the storm died down.

Heh.

So I spent some time thinking over "Well, okay, what are the top Amendment proposals I have that I really want Americans to promote in order to end government gridlock, media stupidity, wingnut madness, and create a Utopian nation that I'd considered hypocritical because I know that Utopias are a collective pipe dream?"

I decided my 300th post should be the Top Ten list of Amendment ideas that I really really REALLY think should get consideration from the Bottom on up to the Top.

I ended up with Twelve.  My bad.

And so, Copied/Pastied from my word processor, here is:

The Ten – Make That Eleven, Hold on Twelve – Amendments We Really Seriously Need To Save This Nation

One.

The President of the United States, and the people who serve at the pleasure of the President, are not above the law.

Members of Congress, and the people who serve Congress, are not above the law.

The Justices of the Supreme Court, and the people who serve in the Judiciary, are not above the law.

The system of checks and balances between the three branches of federal government shall be maintained at all times.

NOTE: This is my "Fuck You" to Richard Nixon and to anyone following his dark path by taking the Unitary Executive theory of allowing the President to do whatever the hell he/she wants.  But as I thought it over, I felt it constrained the President at the expense of the other two branches of government, so I included them as well.

Two.

Lying is not Protected Speech.

Any elected official, or person working for the federal government, found making false statements regarding laws, policies, government research, public polling, or historical facts will be suspended from duty pending investigation. If found that the person made any false statement while aware of the facts, that person will be removed from public service, and barred from all government employment and election.

NOTE: This is my "Fuck You" to every liar I've railed against on this blog.  If you follow the lies tag to this article, you might pull up the other times I've argued how lying in the political forum has poisoned our discourse and is hurting our nation's ability to get the wrong things made right again.  Breitbart Delendus Est.

Three.

Federal government shall regulate business and finance to ensure the protection of employees from unsafe or unhealthy workplaces, the protection of customers from fraud, and the protection of the nation's communities from large-scale accidents.

NOTE: Regulations exist for a reason: TO PROTECT PEOPLE.  This needs to get spelled out in the Constitution itself.

Four.

The power to wage war or any military action shall be held by the President as Commander-in-Chief. The power to call for war, to fund any war effort, and to oversee any military action shall be held by Congress.

If circumstance requires the President to act immediately on a military action outside of Congressional approval, the President is required to limit such military action to thirty days. The President must appear before a full session of both houses of Congress within three days of initiating the military action to explain to Congress what transpired, why action was needed, and if such action raises to the need for Congress to declare war.

After the required presentation before Congress, the President is required to inform the appropriate Senate committee of the military's assessment for action, and the short-term plans that the military has for carrying out successful operations within another three days. A long-term military plan including any occupation of foreign territory and oversight of any nation-building must be presented to that Senate committee within thirty days only if Congress does vote for war. Any objective that requires occupation and nation-building requires a declaration of war by Congress.

Congress has the right to vote for war which can be deemed ended once established objectives are achieved, or can vote to extend the military action for up to ninety days depending on the military situation. Congress cannot vote for military action extension more than twice: if action must continue Congress should vote for war or not.

The House of Representatives has the right to oversee expenditures committed during the military action or war effort to ensure there is no fraud, embezzlement or theft of funds.

The Senate has the right to oversee military conduct of the military action or war effort, and to receive regular updates from the President on the war's progress and ongoing military assessment.

Congress is require to raise funds through a war tax to pay for the military action or war effort as needed.

NOTE: We have a War Powers Act as law, but people have been noticing the past few wars - Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya - that the President hasn't completely asked Congress for full-out War, just military actions.  But this has led to horrendous and mismanaged occupations that include massive loss of funds and massive loss of civilian life.  Not to mention increased burdens on our military and our overall budget.  Obama's failures to fully keep Congress informed or show any sign of accountability over military action in Libya is troubling.  Every part of this amendment idea is to reinforce the checks and balances between the Executive and Legislative, to force Congress to take a more proactive role in the oversight of our war efforts.

Five.

The right of any person held by authorities of federal, state, or local jurisdiction to petition for a writ of habeas corpus will not be suspended under any circumstance, even in time of war.

Any person detained by the military can apply for prisoner of war status and receive legal protections as such, and be released from custody once Congress confirms the war has ended. A person not applicable for prisoner of war status must be tried fairly for any criminal acts that made that person a danger to the safety of our nation's citizenry within a court of law and within reasonable time.

The federal government has the right to retain a person they have basic evidence shows to be a clear danger to the safety of our nation's citizenry, until such time as can be proven in open court that person is no longer a threat or has served out the conditions of a prison sentence issued by the Judiciary.

NOTE: The abuses committed under the PATRIOT Act and committed with regards to prisoners taken during the War On Terror led to this amendment.  The century-old argument over who has the right to suspend habeas - President or Congress - should be answered by this amendment: None do.  This basic legal right is the basis for all legal protection for citizens.  Without habeas, any of us could be held without legal reason.  Abuse of rights would be rampant.  So habeas stays in effect, no matter what.

Six.

If the Senate refuses to advise and consent the President on Executive and Judicial nominations to serve the federal government, the President can fill ALL such vacancies however the President sees fit during that term of office.

NOTE: This is a "Fuck You" to EVERY Senator that has used a Secret Hold to obstruct any nomination before the Senate.  Because of this, half the Judicial system is void of judges, our courts are backlogged, and it's becoming enough of a crisis that even the Chief Justice - normally sitting above the fray - is crying out for it to end.  Not to mention the number of job vacancies at the Executive office that haven't been filled in the last three years!  This is getting out of control.  If a Senator doesn't like a nominee, the Senator can always vote NO.

Seven.

All professions of employment are required at the national level to create and oversee a code of ethics for professional behavior of those who work in said profession, and has the ability to decertify anyone in that profession who fails that code of ethics on a repeating basis.

NOTE: While there will be screams and protests that government shouldn't meddle or regulate, the fact of the matter is our entire business and industry system has issues with a lack of accountability and ethical oversight.  There ARE organizations at the national level for a lot of professions - usually unions or associations - but few of them have any authority to enforce a code of behavior.  Mostly doctors and lawyers and plumbers (I think, I'm not sure about plumbers), but because doctors and lawyers tend to be most vulnerable to liability issues.  But I'm thinking it's time every profession has a system of accountability - teachers, librarians, truck drivers, boat builders, food processors, stock brokers, journalists, jugglers, interior designers, bankers, bakers, dog trainers, people trainers, what have you - to try and clean up a lot of the mess that a decade (or three) of unethical behavior by certain groups - bankers, stock brokers and journalists especially - has led us to.  But if I go after bankers and journalists, might as well include everyone else.  No favors.  Gotta be cruel.

Eight.

The States must uphold equal and fair access to public education as a right to the states' residents and their children.

The States cannot endorse one religious belief over another within the states' public education system. And the states cannot endorse religion where it would interfere with the study of the sciences.

NOTE: This is a "Fuck You" to every Intelligent Design con artist and Creationist bullshitter out there.  Not to mention the Prayer In School crowd who never understood the Founders' intent of Separation of Church And State.  There's a place for God: it's called Church.  The only praying at school should be the week before final exams.  /rimshot
EDIT: This is also a "Fuck You" to every Governor or State lege that's pushing to privatize our school systems.  There's no evidence that privatization improves learning experience for kids and teens, and yet these bozos keep pushing things like vouchers and charter schools as miracle cures.  This also ties into the Prayer In School crowd because vouchers and privatization helps private religious schools more than existing public schools.

Nine.

All persons petitioning the federal government as representative to a group or corporate entity can only lobby for that group / entity after undergoing a basic background check that can be accessed by the public upon request.

All persons working as a lobbying or petitioning representative must recuse themselves if they have direct personal dealings with any member of the office of government that the group / entity is petitioning.

Any person working for the federal government as elected official, civil servant, employee of elected official, or military service is barred from working as a lobbyist or petitioner equal to the amount of time that person worked for the federal government.

Any person or corporate entity of foreign nationality must petition or lobby the United States government through their nation's embassy. They are barred from any financial contribution to a campaign or attempt to petition government through a third party.

NOTE: This is a "Fuck You" to every politician and high-ranking official who exits the public sector to take a lobbyist job ten minutes later at three times the salary and without the ethical oversight (although Amendment Idea Seven. might help with that).  Lobbying as a whole has become a multi-billion dollar industry all its own, and because of legal loopholes and First Amendment abuse that industry is rife with corruption.  Look, people do have a right to petition government, but not at the expense of pork-barrel waste, lopsided legislation that favors a single issue over all others, or one company or industry at the expense of other companies or industries that just don't have the insider connections to make Congress and President do their dances.  Even more terrifying is how foreign governments and foreign-owned companies hire lobbyists to directly petition our government for them: the threat of foreign influence on our government isn't a threat, it's happening on a daily basis.

Ten.

The right of the nation's citizenry to access government documentation at the federal, state and local level shall be maintained. Classification of documents can only apply to matters of national security such as military and defense, treaty negotiations with foreign governments, active criminal investigations that involve undercover work, and any such materials that a court of law determines to be of sensitive issue.

NOTE: It's called Sunshine Laws here in Florida.  And even with the Sunshine in place, our state government goes out of its way to hide meetings, cover up documentation, and avoid accountability at all costs.  At the federal level, it's worse: anybody with a "Classified" stamp and a black ink marker can hide a document or black out entire pages of information to where even Senators can't read them.  The lack of oversight and accountability is shocking.  The wake-up call for me was when Cheney held meetings with energy corporation CEOs to plot out energy policy, and when asked about it declared it was all "national security".  We still have no idea what was really discussed, except that afterward our nation's energy needs got more expensive...  We need to get rid of the excuse of "national security" for nearly everything our government does: our leaders and policy enforcers need to answer for what they do.

Eleven.

Any legislative bill reaching the floor of either the House or the Senate must be certified within three business days by all elected officials that plan on voting for that legislation.

The certification requires the Representative or Senator to sign an oath confirming they have read the legislation up for vote and are aware of the basic elements of that bill. If the Representative or Senator refuses to certify, that person cannot vote Yes or No on the bill, only Present.

The bill cannot be amended nor receive attachments or riders during the certification period. The legislation can only be amended after the vote if there is a need to clean up the language or fix a clerical error within the print. If the bill requires additional work it must be taken off the floor and sent back to the appropriate committee for review and re-work.

If the bill requires more than three days for review, the certification can be extended up to fifteen business days. Any scheduled vacation or recess will be delayed to allow those fifteen business days for Representatives or Senators to review and certify before taking the vote.

NOTE: This is an idea that's been floated before by others more experienced and better-known.  Given the size and complexity of some of the bills reaching the floors of Congress, there's been revelations that a good number of our elected officials don't even know what are IN those bills to begin with.  Something like this amendment can ensure that our elected officials at least read enough of the bill to know what's in it.  And it should prevent a lot of last-minute rider attachments and poison pills that turn some bills into boondoggles and disasters.

Twelve.

If Congress requires a balanced budget, the balancing of the budget shall involve cutting expenditures AND raising revenues through taxation.

All taxes at the federal level must be progressive by design.

Any state requiring that any tax hike or raising of revenue use a supermajority vote to pass, then that state must also require that any tax cut or reduction of revenue require that same supermajority to pass as well.

NOTE: This is a "Fuck You" to every tax-cut obsessive out there.  TAX CUTS DON'T WORK.  And tax cuts to the rich - which is what the tax-cut crowd REALLY wants - REALLY DON'T WORK.  And government exists for a reason: to create and uphold laws, and provide government services that will ensure the safety and well-being of the citizenry.  This is especially for California that's stuck with that supermajority requirement for raising taxes, while the cutting of taxes can get a simple majority vote.  And whenever there is a path of least resistence, our elected officials will take it, which is why California is as screwed as it is.  Make tax-cutting as hard as tax-raising, and at least things will be fair.

So.  There you have it.  Yes.  It's that crazy.  ;-)

And now, to the future.  The purpose of this blog was originally about proposing amendment ideas, but it quickly fell into the trap of "blogging whatever makes me happy or angry at that moment".  So the thing I'm thinking about is: changing the title and focus of this political blog.  Any suggestions from my seven readers (and to my bro Eric, no snarkery about it.  I get enough of that from Phil...).