Not everyone is bothered by Trump's use of the Gish Gallop. For instance, the far-right bunch over at The American Spectator sure seem pleased with the practice. "The hacks covering Trump are as lazy as they are partisan," wrote Scot McKay regarding the phenomenon, "so feeding them clickbait such as manufactured controversies over inaugural crowds is a guaranteed way of keeping them occupied while things of real substance are done. At this rate, he'll have the country well on its way to recovery from the Obama malaise, and the enemies in the newsrooms will have hardly noticed his actual work."

There is more to this than right-wing wishful thinking -- "Look how the president plays pan-dimensional chess! He's a genius!" -- when you pile up the aftermath of this first week of Trump's administration. Torture is back on the table. "The Wall" is one step closer to realization. The Environmental Protection Agency has essentially ceased to exist as a governmental entity. The strongest version of the global gag rule ever deployed is in place. The Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines have been advanced. Trump's horrible cabinet nominees are sailing through the confirmation process largely untouched. All of this is happening without the GOP-controlled House and Senate getting fully into the game yet; when they do, it is going to be a hard day's night for a very long time to come.

Consider the events of this past weekend. Amid a blizzard of hastily-prepared paperwork came an executive missive on immigration that turned the nation on its collective ear. According to The New York Times, "The order bars entry to refugees from anywhere in the world for 120 days and from Syria indefinitely. It blocks any visitors for 90 days from seven designated countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen." The order also affected people with green cards, but the administration had crabbed its way back from that stance by Sunday. All of this initially took place on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which the administration took note of in a formal proclamation that omitted any mention of Jews.

Here was the Muslim ban come to life. The order galvanized a national protest the likes of which have never been seen. When word got out that people were being detained at Kennedy Airport in New York and faced forced deportation due to Trump's order, hundreds and then thousands of protesters rushed to Kennedy. Airports all across the nation saw similar actions erupt, and the streets of cities from Washington DC to Los Angeles came alive as thousands more shouted down the administration for its cruelty and its cowardice.

The ACLU and other rights groups flew into action, and a temporary restraining order was obtained that blocked the administration from executing its order. A court will decide the constitutionality of the Trump order, but given the black-letter wording of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, it seems ultimately doomed. By Sunday night, some refugees and green-card travelers who had been detained were being released, and the administration found itself in a full crouch trying to defend its actions.

True to form, however, another game was afoot. On the same night that all Hell was breaking loose over immigration, Trump quietly released another executive order that gave White House strategist and white nationalist leader Steve Bannon a regular seat on the National Security Council (NSC). Simultaneously, the order barred both the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from joining Council meetings unless they are specifically invited. The unprecedented move was met with horror by virtually the entire intelligence community, and for good reason. Even George W. Bush had enough sense to bar Karl Rove from attending NSC meetings, keeping to the long-standing "No political hacks" rule pertaining to the Council. Amidst the din of the uproar over the immigration order, the astonishing Bannon-to-NSC order went largely unnoticed.

Immigration over here, but wait! Steve Bannon over there. The Gish Gallop government strikes again.

That's one week. If your metric for success is measured by what has been accomplished to date, Donald Trump is Abraham Lincoln in a Superman cape... after fooling everyone into thinking he's just a bumbling Clark Kent. For sure and certain, much of the "news" media bypassed any serious analysis of Trump's first week in favor of an ongoing and utterly meaningless rhubarb over the nose count at the inauguration. Why? Because if given the choice, the corporate media will always pursue the easiest story to cover. After all, it beats working.

Trump and his team are playing the media like so many fiddles. All I know for certain is that a million lies have led to one truth: Donald Trump is Gish Galloping at speed, he and his people are almost completely running the table -- the pushback on immigration being a profoundly noteworthy exception -- and much of the media are eating it up.

Reality is under assault. Verbal confusion reigns. Truth and illusion have merged. Mental chaos makes it hard to fathom what is happening. We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors. Exposed lies are answered with other lies. The rational is countered with the irrational. Cognitive dissonance prevails. We endure a disquieting shame and even guilt. Tens of millions of Americans, especially women, undocumented workers, Muslims and African-Americans, suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator. All this is by design. Demagogues always infect the governed with their own psychosis.

"The comparison between totalitarianism and psychosis is not incidental," the psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in his book "The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing." "Delusional thinking inevitably creeps into every form of tyranny and despotism. Unconscious backward forces come into action. Evil powers from the archaic past return. An automatic compulsion to go on to self-destruction develops, to justify one mistake with a new one; to enlarge and expand the vicious pathological circle becomes the dominating end of life. The frightened man, burdened by a culture he does not understand, retreats into the brute's fantasy of limitless power in order to cover up the vacuum inside himself. This fantasy starts with the leaders and is later taken over by the masses they oppress."

The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump's election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in American history. Three million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted illegally. Climate change is a hoax. Vaccines cause autism. Immigrants are carriers of "[t]remendous infectious disease." The election was rigged-until it wasn't. We don't know "who really knocked down" the World Trade Center. Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact. Scientific facts are conspiracies. America will be great again.

Our new president, a 70-year-old with orange-tinted skin and hair that Penn Jillette has likened to "cotton candy made of piss," is, as Trump often reminds us, "very good looking." He has almost no intellectual accomplishments-he knows little of history, politics, law, philosophy, art or governance-but insists "[m]y IQ is one of the highest-and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure, it's not your fault." And the mediocrities and half-wits he has installed in his Cabinet have "by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled."

It is an avalanche of absurdities.

This mendacity would be easier to repulse if the problem was solely embodied in Trump. But even in the face of a rising despotism, the Democratic Party refuses to denounce the corporate forces that eviscerated our democracy and impoverished the country. The neoliberal Trump demonizes Muslims, undocumented workers and the media. The neoliberal Democratic Party demonizes Vladimir Putin and FBI Director James Comey. No one speaks about the destructive force of corporate power. The warring elites pit alternative facts against alternative facts. All engage in demagoguery. We will, I expect, be condemned to despotism by the venality of Trump and the cowardice and dishonesty of the liberal class.

Trump and those around him have a deep hatred for what they cannot understand. They silence anyone who thinks independently. They elevate pseudo-intellectuals who adhere to their bizarre script. They cannot cope with complexity, nuance or the unpredictable. Individual initiative is a mortal threat. The order for some employees of several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's research service, the National Park Service and the Department of Health and Human Services, to restrict or cease communication with the press or members of Congress, along with the attempt to impose 10-year felony convictions on six reporters who covered the inauguration protests, signals the beginning of a campaign to marginalize reality and promote fantasy. Facts depend solely on those who have the power to create them. The goal of the Trump administration is to create an artificial consistency that conforms to its warped perception of the world.

"Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations," Hannah Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism." "The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda-before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world-lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world."

Trump's blinding narcissism was captured in his bizarre talk to the CIA on Jan. 21. "[T]hey say, is Donald Trump an intellectual?" he said. "Trust me, I'm, like, a smart persona."

"I have a running war with the media," he added. "They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. And I just want to let you know, the reason you're the number one stop [in the new presidency] is exactly the opposite-exactly. And they understand that, too."

He launched into an attack on the media for not reporting that "a million, million and a half people" showed up for his inauguration. "They showed a field where there was practically nobody standing there," he said about the media's depiction of the inauguration crowd. "And they said, Donald Trump did not draw well. I said, it was almost raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and he said, we're not going to let it rain on your speech."

He has been on the cover of Time "like, 14 or 15 times," Trump said in speaking of his criticism of the magazine because one of its reporters incorrectly wrote that the president had removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. "I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine. Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover, it's one time, because he won the Super Bowl or something, right? I've been on it for 15 times this year. I don't think that's a record, Mike, that can ever be broken. Do you agree with that? What do you think?" [Editor's note: Photographs or drawings of Trump were on the cover of Time 10 times in the last year and a half and once in 1989.]

Trump's theatricality works. He forces the press and the public to repeat his lies, inadvertently giving them credibility. He is always moving. He is always on display. He has no fixed belief system. Trump, as he consolidates power, will adopt the ideology of the Christian right to fill his own ideological vacuum. The Christian right's magical thinking will merge seamlessly with Trump's magical thinking. Idiocy, self-delusion, megalomania, fantasy and government repression will come wrapped in images of the Christian cross and the American flag.

The corporate state, hostile or indifferent to the plight of the citizens, has no emotional pull among the public. It is often hated. Political candidates run not as politicians but as celebrities. Campaigns eschew issues to make people feel good about candidates and themselves. Ideas are irrelevant. Emotional euphoria is paramount. The voter is only a prop in the political theater. Politics is anti-politics. It is reality television. Trump proved better at this game than his opponents. It is a game in which fact and knowledge do not matter. Reality is what you create. We were conditioned for a Trump.

Meerloo wrote, "The demagogue relies for his effectiveness on the fact that people will take seriously the fantastic accusations he makes, will discuss the phony issues he raises as if they had reality, or will be thrown into such a state of panic by his accusations and charges that they will simply abdicate their right to think and verify for themselves."

The lies create a climate in which everyone is assumed to be lying. The truth becomes suspect and obscured. Narratives begin to be believed not because they are true, or even sound true, but because they are emotionally appealing. The aim of systematic lying, as Arendt wrote, is the "transformation of human nature itself." The lies eventually foster somnambulism among a population that surrenders to the magical thinking and ceases to care. It checks out. It becomes cynical. It only asks to be entertained and given a vent for its frustration and rage. Demagogues produce enemies the way a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat. They wage constant battles against nonexistent dangers, rapidly replacing one after the other to keep the rhetoric at a fever pitch.

"Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler proceeds like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go out and kill him in self-defense," Arendt wrote. "This certainly is a little crude, but it works-as everybody will know who has ever watched how certain successful careerists eliminate competitors."

We are entering a period of national psychological trauma. We are stalked by lunatics. We are, as Judith Herman writes about trauma victims in her book "Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror," being "rendered helpless by overwhelming force." This trauma, like all traumas, overwhelms "the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning."

Vice President Mike Pence proclaimed his intentions to fight for the lives of the unborn but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has taken extreme steps to shut down choice by women. After Abbott made an order that all women who have abortions and miscarriages must pay to have the remains buried, women launched a protest.

The Dallas Morning News reports that one woman, Ele Chupik, took to Facebook to urge women to send their used feminine hygiene products to Abbott. Chupik had no idea that women would actually do it, but they did.

"Unsure about fertilized status of these panty liners," one anonymous sender wrote including her package. Through December at least 17 women mailed their bloodstained products to the Texas governor's office according to records the paper obtained.

"Sending unprotected human bodily waste is a health hazard," said Michael Sullivan, a postal inspector in the capitol city. "We don't see a whole lot of that."

The governor's office kept the incident quiet, not reporting it to the press or to the postal inspector. The staff simply threw them away, but made digital copies of the items, perhaps for an open records request. Most elected officials' offices keep mail on file.

"I am enclosing my tampons and sanitary pads as long as the law stands," another woman wrote in.

One woman that didn't even live in the state mailed her items encouraging the office: "Bury this!"

"I hoped that it would be taken as an insult," Chupik said. "The same way we feel insulted."

Sullivan explained that most people who send items don't include a return address, so it's difficult to prosecute postal violations.

A federal judge has put the kibosh on enforcing the law, but it will likely be a while before the order is declared unconstitutional. That means several more cycles of menstrual products women can send.

"They're seeing it for the shaming tactic that it is, and that's deeply offensive to people," said NARAL Pro-Choice Texas director Heather Busby.

Chupik never did mail in her own products though she did think about dipping some tampons in red paint and sending them to the governor.

You don't need to live in a five-bedroom big-box suburban McMansion in order to stay warm and dry in the winter. Just ask Bilbo Baggins.

Recently I attended a vigil in memory of a homeless woman who had frozen to death on the mean streets of Berkeley, CA. You wouldn't expect something like that to happen here in Berkeley -- but it did. Homeless people brought candles to the steps of City Hall in order to honor this poor woman's memory. Someone also donated a portable space-heater to help keep the more fragile vigil-keepers warm. But in an ironic twist of fate, cops arrived and confiscated a space-heater at a vigil for a homeless person who had just frozen to death. But I digress.

With our federal government now threatening to shut down HUD subsidized housing in order to have more money to give to banksters, big oil and "war" profiteers, this sudden shift in the distribution of our tax dollars, away from the rest of us and into the pockets of the disgustingly-wealthy, could mean that approximately ten million Americans would be kicked off of HUD subsidy programs.

"Households that receive assistance comprise 9.8 million people, or roughly 3 percent of the U.S. population," sez HUD. Imagine what it would be like if housing subsidies all suddenly disappeared? Hey, it could happen -- and probably will.

If three out of every one hundred Americans suddenly found themselves on the mean streets of our country, the whole face of America the Beautiful would change overnight. Suddenly there would be this swamp of homeless people around us. Cincinnati would look more like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Seattle would look like some barrio in Mexico City. Atlanta would look like a scene out of "The Walking Dead". And parts of Berkeley would look like a Hooverville shanty town left over from the 1930s Great Depression. Hell, all of America would look like that.

HUD subsidized housing serves as a disguise, a stage set, a prop -- so that the world won't know how poor so many Americans actually are. It's a small price to pay. But I digress again.

What I really want to talk about is how Americans can solve this very-real housing crisis which has descended upon us like a giant black cloud, whether we have HUD subsidies or not. And I would then suggest that we solve this housing crisis by taking advice from the Hobbits. "Go small or go home!" Just sayin'.

Mike Lee, a member of the Berkeley Homeless Commission, suggests that we build lots of "tiny houses" -- for a price as low as $16,000 each. My friend Jennifer suggests that we bring back the good old-fashioned trailer court. And I suggest that we get Frodo Baggins on the job. Problem solved.
(c) 2017 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

Here's why I ask. Maddow devotes many minutes on MSNBC stirring up hatred of Russia in order to establish that there is a vague possibility that President Donald Trump might be corrupted by a foreign government.

But that's already established beyond any doubt. China's state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is the largest tenant in Trump Tower. It is also a major lender to Trump. Its rent payments and its loans put Trump in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Every building approval, extension of credit, tax break, subsidy, or waiver of normal rules that Trump's businesses get from numerous foreign governments, state governments, and the U.S. government define him as quintessentially impeachable.

So, if the point is just to document corruption by Trump, why reach and stretch for a speculative possibility, when you've got a solid case sitting in your lap?

Maddow opened her rant on Thursday by making clear that what was coming was baseless speculation that might conceivably turn out to be right. She then began by describing Mikhail Gorbachev as a man who "lost the Cold War" but got a Nobel Peace Prize as a "consolation." Then she praised a newspaper he started. But he himself wrote on Thursday in Time Magazine the polar opposite of what Maddow would go on to say. He proposed peace and disarmament. She launched into an attack on Putin as an "intense little man," whom she implied had a habit of murdering his critics.

In Russia, she said, there's no notion of an aggressive accountable press. And yet, she said, the Russian press has reported on the dramatic arrest and charging with treason of a top cyber official. Leaving the question of what that proves about Maddow's ostensible topic (Trump) completely vague, Maddow turns to denouncing Trump's Mexican wall plans as vague and rejecting his "unsupported contention" regarding voter fraud. Then she leaps into a series of unsupported contentions:

1. the pee-pee story
2. the evidence-free "intelligence community" report
3. an evidence-free October statement from DHS
4. an evidence-free September statement from the FBI

Worse than all those vague possibilities, Maddow says, is this: Rex Tillerson got a friendship award from Russia. Think about that. Here's a guy setting about rendering the earth's climate uninhabitable for his short-term greed, and Maddow wants to demonize him for getting a "friendship award." Then she attacks the idea of lifting sanctions on Russia and suggests the only possible explanation for that would have to be that Russia stole the election for Trump. As if lifting the sanctions were not needed in order for Tillerson's corporation to plunder Russia's oil and render the earth unlivable for our species and many others! The sanctions are needed, Maddow claims, because Russia "unilaterally annexed part of another country and took their land." As if Crimea didn't vote. As if a non-unilateral annexation would be one where the people do not get to vote?!

Maddow goes on and on demonizing Russia and Putin. She airs for free and in its entirety a television ad that refers to as fact "Putin's attacks on our democracy." Then she credits the ad, which asked no questions, with raising legitimate questions. Then Maddow declares that there will be an investigation into "Russia's efforts to influence our election on Trump's behalf," which assumes as fact all the evidence-free claims and then piles on the claim to know Russia's motivation. Yet, later Maddow's theory devolves into just the possibility that some little fragment within all these evidence-free accusations could be true -- and it would be over that fragment that a Russian was arrested for treason. Maddow struggles at this point to make the chronology work, since the arrest was in early December. Yet she asserts as simple fact that the treason arrest was in fact a response to U.S. election tampering.

Maddow, meanwhile, makes clear that she believes actual evidence of Russian hacking, supplying WikiLeaks, etc., exists somewhere in the U.S. government. Yet people are leaking torture prison plans and embarrassing accounts right out of the White House, and we're to believe that nobody in any of the sainted 17 "intelligence" agencies would leak evidence if it existed?

What if by some bizarre series of coincidences Maddow were right? How, even then, would you justify stirring up a cold war with a nuclear government over that government revealing to your public that one of your political parties had rigged its primary? Wouldn't some of the blame go to that party? Wouldn't a little restraint in name-calling and demonizing be in order? Wouldn't the outrages that Trump openly commits deserve a bit of condemnation as well?

We're facing open corruption, militarism, advocacy for torture, discrimination, xenophobic immigration bans, attacks on basic necessary services, actual attacks on voting rights and election integrity -- and rather than taking these problems on, Maddow prefers to find one problem that originates in an evil foreign land. I suppose that's a more comfortable place to lay blame. But even a country that would elect a fascist clown because another country had made public that an election was flawed would be a deeply deficient country in need of self-improvement in a major way.

I asked observant media critic Norman Solomon (with whom I work at RootsAction.org) what he thought of Maddow's performance, and he replied:

"Maddow's 25-minute soliloquy was a liberal version of Glenn Beck at the whiteboard. Her plot line was the current Democratic party line -- free-associating facts, possible facts, dubious assertions and pure speculation to arrive at conclusions that were based on little more than her zeal to portray Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. Even when sober, Joe McCarthy never did it better.

"We might dismiss her performance as just another bit of stagecraft on 'MSDNC,' but Maddow is in sync with widespread fear-mongering by pundits and Democratic Party loyalists who think they're picking some low-hanging fruit to throw at Trump. But what they're doing is poisonous -- and extremely dangerous. Escalate a new Cold War? Push the U.S. government into evermore assertive brinkmanship? Push the world to the precipice of nuclear holocaust and maybe over it? Humanity deserves better than mega-propaganda that could lead to the world blowing up."

Just when we might have thought we'd seen Donald Trump at his zaniest (say, in the first presidential debate) and most dangerous (say, in his executive order on immigration last week), he outdid himself with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, 49, a judge from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (headquartered in Denver), to fill the late Antonin Scalia's empty chair on the Supreme Court.

The zany part is the way our narcissist in chief introduced Gorsuch as his pick. The dangerous part is that Gorsuch is exactly the sort of Scalia-in-waiting we would expect from an extremist right-wing administration that aims to roll back constitutional rights in pursuit of a political agenda driven by the fantasies of racial nostalgia, misogyny and the passions of white nationalism.

Let's deal with the zany part first:

Instead of the usual news release followed by a public meet-and-greet in the Rose Garden to introduce his first high court selection, Trump went the route of "Celebrity Apprentice" (perhaps Miss Universe might be a better analogy), fanning rumors that he had summoned both Gorsuch and another Supreme Court contender, 3rd Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman, to the White House in anticipation of the prime-time TV broadcast he had called to announce his choice-all for the purpose of building suspense and maximizing media interest. Fortunately for Hardiman, he was not on hand for the actual announcement, which Trump delivered in the East Room of the White House from what looked like the same lectern where President Obama stood to tell the world that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

Once again, Trump put himself center stage. With Gorsuch and his wife, Louise, on hand, in addition to Scalia's widow, Maureen; Trump's sons Eric and Don Jr.; chief strategist Steve Bannon; House Speaker Paul Ryan; and several GOP senators in a hall of white faces, Trump reminded viewers across the nation and the globe that he had long promised to select a jurist "in the mold of Justice Scalia," as well as someone who "loves our Constitution." Touting his selection process as "the most transparent in history," he added that Gorsuch could serve on the high court for "50 years" and that his decisions could have an impact on American life for "a century or more."

Sadly, and here's the dangerous part: In Gorsuch, Trump has probably found his man. During the presidential election campaign, Trump listed 21 federal and state court judges as possible replacements for Scalia. In a comprehensive study led by Mercer University law professor Jeremy Kidd, Gorsuch was ranked second among the 21 in judicial qualities most resembling Scalia's. Utah Supreme Court Justice Thomas Lee-the brother of Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah-garnered the top spot.

Professor Kidd and his fellow researchers based their rankings of Trump's potential nominees according to their adherence to Scalia's legal philosophy of "originalism" (the idea that judges should interpret the Constitution according to its presumed original meaning) and their propensity to issue dissenting opinions, in the fashion of Scalia, when their benchmates were unwilling to go as far doctrinally as the potential nominees would have liked.

Gorsuch was appointed to the 10th Circuit by President George W. Bush in 2006. Since then, he has amassed a conservative judicial record that confirms Kidd's findings. His body of work has been summarized by both the liberal Alliance for Justice Action Campaign and the authoritative SCOTUS blog website. Their summaries encompass opinions, rulings, judicial votes and published articles on an array of vital constitutional issues, including:

-Religious liberty

In 2013, Gorsuch joined with five other members of a divided 10th Circuit panel to write a concurring opinion of his own in the case of Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius. The decision, subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote, held that for-profit corporations are persons under the law and can legally exercise their own religious views, even if doing so contravenes the rights of their female employees under the Affordable Care Act to receive health insurance coverage for contraceptive care.

-Abortion Rights

In a decision issued in October, Gorsuch wrote a dissent in which he argued that the Circuit Court should reconsider whether Utah's governor had acted improperly when he attempted to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood.

-The Second Amendment and the death penalty

In 2012, Gorsuch urged the 10th Circuit to re-examine and loosen its previous rulings on the right of felons to own firearms. The full court voted otherwise. Gorsuch has also been a consistent supporter of the death penalty.

-Access to the courts and attacks on liberals

As noted by the Alliance for Justice in a National Review Online op-ed published in 2005 before Gorsuch became a judge, he "attacked 'American liberals' for what he said was an over-reliance on constitutional litigation. He asserted that liberals' 'overweening addiction to the courtroom' negatively affects public policy by aggrandizing the courts and consequently dampening 'social experimentation' by the legislative branches." He has not been similarly critical of litigation initiated by right-wing organizations.

In accepting Trump's nomination Tuesday night, Gorsuch praised Scalia as "a lion of the law." In the weeks and months ahead, the Senate will debate and ultimately determine whether Gorsuch will have the opportunity to further Scalia's legacy.

Will the Democrats find the courage to oppose him? Will progressives come together as a movement to demand that they do so, as they did to derail Ronald Reagan's nomination of Scalia's mentor, Robert Bork, in 1987?

Dear Fuhrer Trump,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your total sellout to your 1% brothers, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Vice-Fuhrer, Herr Pence at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-15-2017. We salute you Herr Trump, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence