Notices by A L Katz (alan@lor.sh)

Donald Trump saying he'll win in a landslide is Donald Trump climaxing way too soon - yet again.

Here's a radical notion: IF (that's the caveat) the Democrats do shift horses - from Biden to Harris (and someone needs to explain why an incredibly accomplished Black woman suddenly doesn't stack up) then Joe Biden should step down NOW and make Kamala Harris the 47th POTUS.

1) This would allow Kamala to run as the incumbent president.

2) As the rules of being president are now changed - and they are for ALL presidents, not just Donald Trump - then the current Democratic POTUS (whoever it is) should take the fullest possible advantage of those powers in order to preserve democracy from authoritarian hijacking.

Make Kamala the imperial president conservatives hadn't anticipated putting into power. And the moment Kamala does become POTUS, her first act should be to shit-can Merrick Garland and put a prosecutor on the job who doesn't give a fuck about the political ramifications of prosecuting traitors.

Working at the behest of a foreign government against your own is treason - even if rich, white, Christians do it.

Nothing good can come from normalizing treason - which is exactly what our news media has done with the entire Trumpublican story.

What exactly is a "pro-Putin Republican"?

And what does it mean exactly that "Russia 'interfered' with our elections"? Did any Americans help them interfere - or were they aware that Russia was "interfering" on their behalf?

That is the point of interfering - so that one side will win and not the other.

For some reason, I have it in my head that Russia doing what it's doing - and Americans helping them do it - is highly illegal.

And treasonous.

And now normalized.

America has convinced itself that a rich, white, Christian man can't possibly be a traitor. How else to explain the fact that we haven't gotten anywhere near prosecuting Donald Trump for being the most obvious thing he is: a traitor.

@drahardja @kbg @mekkaokereke It was not the case anyway. You can comb through every single Confederate state's secession docs. You'll find "slavery" all over the place. "States rights?" Nowhere.

Nikki Haley's omission of SLAVERY as the direct cause of the American Civil War wasn't - as the press keeps saying - a "fumble", it was a confession - of who she is as a human being.

@ajroach42 @cstross Let's say then he's given plenty of talented engineers the opportunity to do big things.

Most importantly, he's a crap human. That makes anything he does as an engineer - brilliant or otherwise - worth a lot less if not entirely worthless.

@cstross It's a simple fact of life & brain chemistry: you cannot make a sociopath feel actual empathy for anyone but themselves - no matter how much reality you show them.

Can't we just accept that Musk is a brilliant engineer but a shitstorm of a human being and adjudge him accordingly?

If we forced gun owners to insure their weapons for liability, the insurance industry would explain - in dollars and cents - how dangerous having a gun in your house is versus NOT having a gun.

If every gun purchaser had to also purchase liability insurance for their death machine (that's what guns literally are), far fewer of them would purchase guns - because they couldn't afford the insurance bite.

I wonder if that's why we've never forced the owners of a device designed to KILL people to take FINANCIAL responsibility for their possession. Cars kill people BY ACCIDENT yet we're all forced - by law - to insure ourselves in case something UNEXPECTED happens.

The gun industry has bamboozled America to literal death.

Another thing both sides don't do: aim to end American democracy and replace it with an authoritarian shithole run by morons.

Donald Trump might not realize it yet, but his whole world just BLEW UP.

A partial summary judgment in his NY tax fraud case has made the dissolution of the Trump Org mandatory.

And there's still going to be a trial - starting Monday - to determine how big the fine's going to be.

Want to know how to destroy Donald Trump?

This will begin to undermine him in ways he can't fathom. His whole empire is about to shatter.

@Npars01 Rich people didn't get rich by throwing their money down a black hole.

That's what Trump is now.

But the money will have a larger problem. Koch dollars helped pay for the insurrection. So did lots of rich donor dollars.

That will come to haunt every last one of them because how it got paid for will be on the prosecution table.

Stone cold fact: the Republican Party's entire leadership KNEW that Donald Trump was compromised by Putin BEFORE they even nominated him in 2016.

The GOP's leadership agreed to KEEP IT A SECRET instead of telling anyone.

The Washington Post even reported on it - after their reporter heard a recording of the whole conversation...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/house-majority-leader-to-colleagues-in-2016-i-think-putin-pays-trump/2017/05/17/515f6f8a-3aff-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html

Every time a Republican says "I will preserve religious freedom", he means "I will shove my Christian faith down everyone else's throat".