"For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be." -Robert Kagan

"I have a sense that she's one of the more competent members of the current administration and it would be interesting to speculate about how she might perform were she to be president." -Dick Cheney

"I've known her for many years now, and I respect her intellect. And she ran the State Department in the most effective way that I've ever seen." -Henry Kissinger

Welch objects to criticism of Hillary Clinton's financial corruption, and associates such criticism with trying to connect Barack Obama to Paris Hilton or questioning John Kerry's war-heroism, suggesting I guess that Hillary Clinton's financial corruption is either nonexistent or heroically militaristic.

The 2017 escalation of the war on Iraq, for Welch, was the work of President George W. Bush and not in any way of the Democratic Congress that had just been elected to end that war. Meanwhile, the 2009 escalation of the war on Afghanistan doesn't exist or isn't worth mentioning. In fact, the whole presidency of Barack Obama almost doesn't exist in various sections of this book which repeatedly leaps from accounts of Bush's outrages right into Trump's as if there was no gap between them during which the same or very similar outrages continued.

This partisanship is paralleled in its division of people into good and bad groups by Welch's patriotism. Welch explicitly claims that nations, not just actual individual people, can go through mental processes. He writes that the crimes of 9-11 traumatized a nation and its people, including Welch himself, because for the first time - and apparently the last time - violent deaths occurred in world history. And those deaths were all of "Americans," Welch writes, and therefore worth acknowledging, he implies, ignoring the 12% or so of the 9-11 victims who were not from the United States. This sort of attitude, in which mass slaughters by the U.S. military before and after 9-11 are not "traumatizing" but 9-11 is, results from an extreme and extremely accepted sort of bigotry, but it also causes it by suggesting the same view to readers.

The war on Iraq of 2003 was, according to Welch, the "first openly acknowledged preemptive war in American history," and waging it had negative effects "for our country" and apparently for nobody else worth mentioning. I wonder if any Iraqis were hurt? According to Welch, "America," and not just its government, is responsible for the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and the creation of ISIS. But Welch acknowledges that Bush was eager for war on Iraq prior to 9-11, and that his excuses for it were just that. However, Welch walks right up to the edge of claiming that believing war lies is acceptable because people are pathetic babies. He then denounces the war lies. He then proclaims his belief in them.

"With remarkable ease," Welch writes, "America's cause went from eliminating weapons of mass destruction to evicting an evil dictator to spreading democracy, because the idea that our leaders might have been wrong, incompetent, or worse was simply too disconcerting a proposition for many Americans to consider." Welch cannot even write the obvious and well-documented fact that "our leaders" were lying. He never mentions that Hillary Clinton promoted the weapons-of-mass-destruction lies. Welch goes on to make clear that he actually believes the evicting an evil dictator lie and describes the war as "America's attempt to liberate Iraq from a ruthless dictator who had killed tens of thousands of Kurds." He also believes the spreading-democracy lie but blames the Bush Administration for failing to realize that there was "no historical basis" for democracy among the primitives being bombed in Iraq. Welch even believes in the whole mission and denounces the outing of Valerie Plame as putting at risk "our efforts in the war on terror." Whose what?

This is typical Democratic partisanship. You denounce an unpopular war while supporting it. You claim the loyalty of anti-Republicans, then hopelessly try to win the votes of Republicans, while alienating independent, thinking people. Welch even admits that Al Gore's top advisor and speech writer on his presidential campaign was eager for war on Iraq and believed Gore was too, but praises Gore as radically different from Bush because he deleted a line threatening war on Iraq from a speech.

John Kerry throughout the book is repeatedly "a decorated war hero" much like Gore who becomes "a foreign-policy expert" and "one of the most respected experts on defense matters in the history of the United States Senate" who "served [defensively??!] in Vietnam."

For Welch, war is not illegal or immoral, but a nation should analyze its emotions prior to launching a war, and should make proper emotional use of its enemies: "[O]ur enemies actually help us maintain a cohesive sense of reality." Is he referring to foreign enemies or Republicans? This book suggests both. Welch refers without any attempt at evidence to "Russia's involvement in the 2016 election" and claims "We actually appointed a Russian operative to be our National Security Advisor." He laments energy invested in opposing documented outrages by Trump which he thinks should go into "the possibility that Russia is gaining control of our executive branch of government." The line between the Russian enemy and the Republican enemy is blurred, and the blame for Post Hillary Stress Disorder is dispersed.

Welch diagnoses in "the American mind" paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy. The first he believes has been created by exploitation of 911, the big real fact, while the other two have been created out of whole cloth. And the combination serves, he thinks, to explain hatred of Hillary Clinton. But all three, as far as I can tell, are generated by a wide variety of lies, while there is no such thing as "whole cloth."

Welch's understanding of envy seems to especially lack understanding: "What could Americans be envious of? Despite our national pockets of poverty, most Americans participate heavily in a vast consumer economy their parents never imagined." Let's set this comment against reality for a moment. For many in the United States life is harder than it was for their parents. It's also harder than for many around them. Poverty and economic insecurity are extremely widespread. The United States has the highest inequality and the highest poverty of any wealthy country. This almost certainly contributes to envy of wealthier U.S. citizens and, to a far lesser extent, envy of people in other nations - while contributing to a passionate patriotism that is stronger among the poor than the wealthy, perhaps in part because it covers up envy of more equal and prosperous places. Welch goes on to rightly criticize advertising for promoting envy, but the notion that it promotes it out of nowhere is a notion shared by the right wing of U.S. politics.

In Welch's view, Trump exploited women's envy of Hillary to get them to vote against Hillary, while men hated her out of pity for themselves and their need to look down on all women. This is certainly a plausible part of an explanation for the attitudes of some people, mostly people who were probably planning to vote for whoever was the most racist, patriotic, and plutocratic regardless of any specifics. And Welch himself promotes the attitudes he criticizes through the usual hypocrisies, such as mocking George W. Bush for having been a cheerleader. But the paranoid-sexually-insecure-envious-hateful-people-did-it does little better than the Putin-did-it explanation of Hillary Defeat Trauma. I would recommend, instead, the following healing steps:

Stop identifying with a corrupt government or any portion of it. Work to improve it, but don't consider that work self-improvement.

Stop imagining that social change comes primarily through elections.

Stop identifying with a political party and with a population that makes up 4% of the species you should identify with.

Recognize that an extremely broken and corrupt election system allowed Trump to "win" despite his having lost. Fix these problems before worrying about nefarious Russian masterminds or bitter insecure racists: the Electoral College, voter ID laws, the lack of verifiable hand-counted paper ballots, the Presidential Debates Commission, the corporate media, the rigged Democratic Party primaries that deprived that party of its strongest candidate according to numerous polls, the racist stripping of names from voter rolls in various states, the open criminal intimidation and incitement of violence by Trump, the disenfranchisement of people convicted of crimes, the ridiculous lack of automatic voter registration and of an election holiday and of sufficient polling places.

Recognize that Hillary Clinton was one of the few candidates awful enough to have come anywhere close to shocking Donald Trump by losing to him. She was the epitome of financial corruption and the lack of any consistent belief or integrity. She lost a couple of swing states, studies suggest, to the understandable belief among military families that she was the most likely to get their loved ones killed. She turned off all kinds of constituencies by appearing to give a damn exclusively about herself.

Face head on the apparently somehow frightening perplexity that is somehow supposed to arise in your poor little brain from the fact that lots of people also disliked Hillary Clinton because they were sexists or racists or other despicable things, and from the fact that this fact doesn't somehow erase all the facts listed above.

First, let me thank those of you who have donated to the annual holiday fundraiser so far. As always, I'm overwhelmed by your support and thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I'm not all that good at self-promotion and I'm sure I often let my friends and colleagues down by failing to promote them adequately as well. But it occurs to me that I haven't been doing my part to promote a weekly podcast/radio show that I do with my friend Sam Seder. And I've been doing it for almost two years! I also appear somewhat regularly on his other podcast Majority Report, usually on casual Fridays.

If you care to put it on your list of podcasts, you can do that by joining Ring of Fire.

Here's this week's Majority Report:

It's a labor of love for me because I adore Sam and love to talk politics with someone so smart and well-informed but it's also provided me (and his audience, I hope) an hour or so each week with a good overview of the week's major developments. We often hit on topics that I don't necessarily write about and because it's Sam, who is brilliantly funny, it's often very entertaining.

All of this is to say that aside from writing here every day and contributing to Salon, I do other things like these podcasts and activism work for Blue America PAC, all of which are an honor. But this blog is what keeps me going and your support is vital.

We are, as you know, at the beginning of a presidential campaign (oh my dear god ...) and it is the most consequential presidential campaign of our lifetimes. They're all important, of course. But this one will tell the world whether the most powerful nation on earth has the wherewithal to right itself from the worst electoral mistake it's ever made or if we've taken a very dark turn that is leading the world to catastrophe. This man in the White House and the party that is enabling him are both malevolent and ignorant. It is a lethal combination and it's only a matter of time before we reach the point of no return.

So, I hope that we all pull together and do whatever it takes to ensure that the next generations are able to look back at this and say "what the hell were they thinking?" from the perspective of a safer, more decent world.

I'll keep plugging away here and wherever else I can. And I hope that you'll keep stopping by and reading and listening. Your support means the world to me and if you are able to throw a few bucks in the Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, I'd be most grateful.

As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

Cheers ~~~ Digby

During the holiday season, people often drink toasts to health. There's something more we can do to ensure that we and others will enjoy good health now and into the future: combat climate change.

"Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century, and tackling it could be our greatest health opportunity,"

according to the medical journal The Lancet. The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change, by 150 experts from 27 academic institutions and intergovernmental organizations, including the World Health Organization and the World Bank, is blunt: "A rapidly changing climate has dire implications for every aspect of human life, exposing vulnerable populations to extremes of weather, altering patterns of infectious disease, and compromising food security, safe drinking water and clean air."

The report examines the association between health and climate change, including resilience and adaptation, financial and economic implications, the health and economic benefits of addressing the crisis, and the need for political and societal engagement, with a greater role for health professionals.

Sadly, the researchers conclude that a lack of concerted effort from governments is compromising human health and health infrastructure and services. They note some progress has been made, including a global decline in coal use, rapid growth in renewable energy installation and increasing fossil fuel divestment. But it's far short of what's needed to keep global average temperature from rising more than 2 C, let alone the more ambitious target of 1.5 C.

People in more than 90 per cent of cities breathe air that is toxic to cardiovascular and respiratory health, and it appears to be getting worse, "particularly in low-income and middle-income countries." Pollutants from burning coal and other fossil fuels are causing millions of premature deaths every year.

A World Health Organization report, released at this year's COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland, echoes the Lancet findings, noting that at least seven million people a year die prematurely because of pollution, and millions more become ill. It concludes that health gains from meeting Paris Agreement commitments would more than make up for the financial costs of global efforts to achieve those goals, "and would exceed that in countries such as China and India by several times."

The Lancet report shows the costs of inaction are rising: "About 712 climate-related extreme events were responsible for US$326 billion of losses in 2017, almost triple the losses of 2016," with 99 per cent of losses in low-income countries uninsured. Deadly heatwaves, prolonged drought, increased flooding, agricultural losses, spreading transmission of infectious diseases from insects and contaminated water, mental health issues and water shortages are among the costly health impacts of climate change.

The Canadian Medical Association and Canadian Public Health Association offered several recommendations for policy-makers based on the Lancet report, emphasizing the role of doctors and other health professionals in addressing climate change and raising public awareness. "Ensuring a widespread understanding of climate change as a central public health issue will be vital in delivering an accelerated response, with the health profession beginning to rise to this challenge," they write. Beyond informing the public, recommendations include preparing people for worsening impacts; integrating climate change and health into medical and health sciences faculties curricula; supporting an equitable transition for people who work in the fossil fuel industry; phasing out coal power by 2030 and replacing it with non-emitting sources; applying carbon-pricing instruments quickly and scaling them up; and funding research into the mental health impacts of climate change. The groups also caution against promoting natural gas as a solution because "increasing numbers of studies show risks to public health, water and air from hydraulic fracturing for natural gas."

When people get sick from contaminated lettuce or are injured because of defective products, governments and corporations promptly remove or recall the dangerous items. Granted, global warming is a much bigger challenge, but given the benefits of acting quickly and decisively to bring it under control, there's no excuse for stalling.

As the Lancet report states, "At a time when national health budgets and health services face a growing epidemic of lifestyle diseases, continued delay in unlocking the potential health co-benefits of climate change mitigation is short-sighted and damaging for human health."

Here's to climate action for all our health.

I was in Georgia on Other Business over the weekend, and I was lucky because the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke a brilliant story that pretty much shreds what was left of the credibility of both the recent gubernatorial election and the new governor it produced, Brian Kemp. The Republican candidate, you may recall, also was serving as Georgia's Secretary of State and, therefore, was tasked with overseeing a close election in which he was one of the candidates. The AJC added yet another big window into the veritable Plato's Retreat of ratfcking that was that election.

> It was Nov. 3, a Saturday, 72 hours to Election Day. Virtually tied in the polls with Democrat Stacey Abrams, Kemp was in danger of becoming the first Georgia Republican to lose a statewide election since 2006. And, now, a new threat. The secretary of state's office had left its voter-registration system exposed online, opening Kemp to criticism that he couldn't secure an election that featured him in the dual roles of candidate and overseer. But by the next day, Kemp and his aides had devised one solution for both problems, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

They publicly accused the Democratic Party of Georgia of trying to hack into the voter database in a failed attempt to steal the election. The announcement added last-minute drama to an already contentious campaign. More important, it also pre-empted scrutiny of the secretary of state's own missteps while initiating a highly unusual criminal investigation into his political rivals. But no evidence supported the allegations against the Democrats at the time, and none has emerged in the six weeks since, the Journal-Constitution found. It appears unlikely that any crime occurred.

In 2015, Kemp's office accidentally sent political organizations, media outlets and others a trove of confidential information about every Georgia voter. Kemp blamed a single employee, whom he fired. The following year, Kemp was one of just seven state election directors who rejected the federal government's help to secure their voting systems. Kemp called the offer an "overreach" by the administration of President Barack Obama after hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee. "It seems like now it's just the D.C. media and the bureaucrats, because of the DNC getting hacked - they now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian's going to tap into the voting system," Kemp said...At that moment, the computer servers that ran Georgia's election system were wide open to potential intruders. Voters' personal data, passwords that poll supervisors used on Election Day, the coding for memory cards with which voters cast ballots - all of it was readily accessible.

Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp debate in an event in Atlanta on October 23.

Meanwhile, a guy named Logan Lamb, a specialist in cybersecurity from Kennesaw State, where Georgia's servers are located, spent several months ringing the alarm bell before anyone in Kemp's office deigned to get involved. Have I mentioned that Kemp was running for governor at the time, and that a story about incompetence centered on the office he already held might have proven to be a drag on that effort?

But it wasn't until seven months later, when Lamb and a colleague found that the data still had not been secured, that officials shut off unauthorized access to the servers. Kemp said at the time that he expected the FBI to catch the "perpetrators." "There were no perpetrators," Lamb, who works for the Atlanta-based online security firm Bastille, said recently. "We are computer security professionals. We were trying to go through the process of responsible disclosure to make sure the system was secure." For months, Lamb said, "anyone could just have downloaded" - or manipulated - all the state's election files.

On Dec. 8, 2016, Kemp wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, demanding to know why the federal agency "was attempting to breach our firewall." Kemp said a computer traced to Homeland Security had executed a "large unblocked scan" of the secretary of state's website. The intrusion, Kemp suggested, was in retaliation for his refusing the government's help before the 2016 election. Johnson replied four days later. He said a worker at his agency's Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, had merely verified the professional licenses of job applicants - "a service, as I understand it, your website provides to the general public," Johnson wrote.

Kemp wasn't satisfied with Johnson's response. "I will be elevating my concerns to the incoming administration," he wrote back, and the same day, he asked Trump, then the president-elect, to investigate the Obama administration's "failed cyberattacks" on Georgia. Republicans in Congress warned Johnson not to destroy evidence of what Rep. Jason Chaffetz, then chairman of the House Oversight Committee, called a possible breach of "state sovereignty" and a violation of state and federal laws. Finally, in June 2017, a report by Homeland Security's inspector general said a digital forensic investigation found no evidence of a cyberattack.

Kemp's aides broke their silence early Sunday. At 4:47 a.m., Candice Broce, the secretary of state's spokeswoman, received a message from the online news site WhoWhatWhy, which says it practices "forensic journalism." Its reporters had heard about Wright's email and were preparing to post a story at 6 a.m. The website said it told Broce its story would describe a security breakdown in the secretary of state's office, not a failed hack by the Democrats.

Exactly one hour later, a statement appeared on the secretary of state's website, on the same page where voters search for sample ballots, find their polling place or check their registration. In all-capital letters, the headline announced: "AFTER FAILED HACKING ATTEMPT, SOS LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO GEORGIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY." "While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation," Broce was quoted as saying, "I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes."

(c) 2018 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

Imagine, for a moment, a country that no longer rebuilds or reinforces its sagging infrastructure but just can't stop pouring money into its military. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine that at all! You just have to look at the United States. This fall, for instance, the president who swore he was going to give us an infrastructure plan that would blow our minds discovered that, after a tax cut for billionaires, a ballooning national debt, and a staggering $716 billion Pentagon budget, there were few dollars left over for much of anything else.

In October, Donald Trump began talking about cutting agency spending by 5% across the board and about a possible $700 billion limit on the 2020 Pentagon budget. As December began, he became even more emphatic on that point, tweeting that he should talk to the Chinese and Russian presidents about halting an arms race and so cut down on military spending that was... well, not to put too fine a point on it, "Crazy!"

Hmm... and just how long did that sentiment survive? Well, that was Monday, December 4th. On Tuesday, the newly nominated head of U.S. Central Command, Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and insisted that any future Pentagon budget below $733 billion would "increase risk and that risk would be manifested across the force." That very day, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Congressman Mac Thornberry (R-TX) and Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) trooped to the White House for a lunch meeting. The next thing anyone knew, the 2020 Pentagon budget was to be a modest $750 billion. "The President fully supports the National Defense Strategy and continuing to rebuild the military," an administration official told CNN. "With the help of Sen. Inhofe and Chairman Thornberry, President Trump agreed to $750 billion topline."

Well, honestly, what can you expect of a Pentagon incapable of auditing itself? How could it possibly solve a total stumper of a division and subtraction problem like: What's 5% less than its 2019 budget? (And here's a little footnote to that change in numbers: Senator Inhofe walked out of that lunch and within the week had purchased "tens of thousands of dollars of stock in one of the nation's top defense contractors." Raytheon, to be exact. When that buy made news, he blamed it all on his "financial adviser," claimed to know nothing about it, and cancelled the order.)

And then, of course, there's always the purely secondary question: What is the U.S. military-its budget already bigger than of that those of god-knows-how-many-other countries combined-going to spend all that money on? Fortunately, TomDispatch regular Michael Klare has a thought on the subject. He suggests that, in the years to come, increasing billions of those dollars are going to be invested in creating a future battlespace in which "intelligent" machines fight our wars and, in the end, the only role left for humans may be the dying. In other words, we're heading for a militarized, remarkably automated, artificially intelligent hell on Earth. What about an $850 billion budget, just to ensure that we're the first ones there?

Up at the North Pole, not much is going on right now. Even the elves are on strike. "Looks like nobody's going to get any toys this year," Santa says with a frown. And he's not even baking chocolate-chip cookies either. It's that bad. What's up, Santa? "Everyone has been super-naughty during 2018 -- and not just only the kids. I'm disgusted." Here's Santa's "naughty" list for this year:

1. First off, there's always Palestine -- still a gigantic festering wound of injustice that's landed Israel on the Naughty List for the past 70 miserable years. It's a good thing that Netanyahu doesn't believe in Santa because all he's gonna get in his stocking this year is coal, phish and spam. Santa doesn't care what religion Bibi pretends to represent. After the horrors of Jenin and the horrors of Gaza? Netanyahu has proved time and again that he honors no religion at all -- except possibly for the worship of Mammon. "Don't mess with The Claus!"

2. Next there are all those stolen American elections. You evil vote-stealers are not getting on the "Nice" list this year! O'Rourke shoulda won in Texas. Abrams shoulda won in Georgia. Gillum shoulda won in Florida. Hell, even Gore, Kerry and Bernie Sanders shoulda won the freaking White House. And Israel and the Saudis had their hands in the electoral cookie jar too. But who, exactly, can Santa appeal to? The Supreme Court? Don't make him laugh. Move along, folks, no bowl full of jelly here. There is nothing "Nice" going on at the Supreme Court. In America, the Rule of Law is pretty much screwed.

3. Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Libya and Bethlehem? No wise men on camels will be involved there. And no one will be dropping down any chimneys in the Middle East either -- because there are hardly any chimneys left over there to drop down in, thanks to Lockheed-Martin, Exxon and BlackRock. So the Pentagon, the CIA, Congress and the White House will get no visit from Rudolph this year.

4. Latin America, Africa and Asia? The injustices committed here are way beyond "Naughty". Santa is extremely unhappy about this -- and so is his Boss. "Jesus Christ!"

5. Up at Standing Rock and Pine Ridge and down in Tijuana, Tomillo and the Amazon -- everyone gets toys. Leonard Peltier will be getting a bright shiny fire truck to warm up his cold prison cell. Big Oil, Big Polluters, Big Pharma and Big Banksters get nothing. It is better to give than to steal.

6. And then there are all the American homeless, all the American children living in cars, all the American slaves of the prison-industrial complex, all the American victims of hurricanes, wildfires and other climate catastrophes -- and all of America's many other society castoffs. Black lives really do matter. "Harrumph," says Santa. "There's no excuse for those corporate bastards to be all this naughty when there is clearly more than enough food, clothing, jobs, shelter and toys to go around in order to protect, nurture and love every single person in America -- and even in this whole world." Not only just that child in the manger.

You should be too.

Dear Uberfuhrer Enzi

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 killing of Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act which would have extend eligibility for disability compensation and health care for US Navy vets, 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 "Rethuglican 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 Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker,"formally the "White House,"on 01-05-2019. We salute you herr Enzi, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence