An “alt-right” (newspeak for “white supremacist”) speaker gets invited by campus republicans (of course it’s republicans) to speak at Berkeley University as part of his – according to the Guardian – “Dangerous Faggot” tour.  About 1,500 progressives, predictably, had fallen out to protest.  By all accounts the protest was peaceful.

Then, a band of about 150 people – all with faces covered – come in from off campus and pretty much attack without hesitation.  No, not the protestors, the building the speech is scheduled for.  They set fires and break windows and just generally riot until the event is cancelled.

I suspect agent provocateurs.  According to Wikipedia, an “agent provocateur (French for “inciting agent”) is a person who commits, or who acts to entice another person to commit an illegal or rash act or falsely implicate them in partaking in an illegal act. An agent provocateur may be acting out of their own sense of duty or may be employed by the police or other entity to discredit or harm another group (such as a peaceful protest or demonstration) by provoking them to commit a crime, thereby undermining the protest or demonstration as a whole.”

I can’t say for certain, of course.  All I can do is look at the situation surrounding the events of that night but what I see is a peaceful protest in full swing.  Everything is going according to plan and everything is remaining peaceful.  Then a bunch of hidden faces show up and just start rioting with no provocation?  No.  For me, it just doesn’t pass the “smell test.”  Who benefited?

Well, the speech was cancelled.  But a speech that might have reached only a small handful of bigots now gets reported on a national and even international scale.  The peaceful protestors were made to look bad and the far right was handed just what they want as a propaganda tool.  Photos and stories of the violence can be – and will be – used to show that the left isn’t all that inclusive, after all.  The action undermined the demonstration – and to a larger extent the anti-Trump movement – as a whole.

I can’t know, for certain, that the violent actors were agent provocateurs.  I just know they fit the profile.  I could stubbornly insist they were but I can’t really know.  The right can’t know, for certain, that the violent actors were not agent provocateurs.  I presume they will, nevertheless, stubbornly insist they were not but they can’t really know, either.  The rioters showed up on campus with faces covered.

The only way to know for sure would be to identify the rioters.  Not the peaceful protestors, mind you, but the mob that showed up from off campus.  I can’t really recommend that peaceful protestors suddenly try to restrain the provocateurs for certain identification but that would be the best answer.  After all, the rioters came prepared for violence.  It’s why they’re there.  For sure, peaceful protestors should try to remove the face masks of the rioters and photograph their faces.  Let’s find out who these people are…and who they work for.

I’ll tell you this; people are going to be falling out for peaceful protests many times in the next few years.  All of those efforts are going to be undermined by agent provocateurs if we can’t find a way to identify the rioters.  The result will be that the actual message of whatever is being protested in the moment will be lost, again and again.  I could use a little help, here.  Any ideas on how peaceful protestors might identify the rioters without getting themselves injured in the process?

There has been much hand-wringing and rending of clothing over the outcome of the recent “election”.  How did this happen, people are asking.  How can we stop them?  There are a lot of possible answers as to how it happened – some of them even true!  How do we stop them?  We don’t.  We can’t.  I mean, I don’t mean to be a downer, here, but they own the government and they’re going to do what they’re going to do.  So I propose a two-step plan which is really quite simple.  One, make the Republicans own every vicious thing they do and, two, prepare for the mid-terms…

Conservatives are great at evading responsibility for their own actions.  They have had thirty years to perfect the deflection.  Anything good that happens in this country can easily be traced – in their minds – to the previous Conservative administration and anything bad that happens traces easily to the previous “libtard” administration.

43 crashed the economy?  Clinton’s fault.  Obama put the economy back on track and headed in the right direction?  43’s policies finally coming to fruition.  It’s always wrong, of course, but try convincing them of that…and good luck to you.

Trump keeps promising big ole’ tax cuts for corporations and other privileged elite.  This will mean another crashed economy and more brutal cuts in services for the needy.  Unless we’re prepared to use violence – I don’t recommend violence – it’s going to happen.  So what we can do is document, in real time, the actions of the Cons in Congress.

It is the Republicans who think ethics oversight is a waste of government resources.  It is the Republicans – alone – who are attacking the American people by eliminating what little access they had to health care.  It is the Republicans who intend to dismantle every aspect of the social safety net.  The result will be rampant poverty and increased crime, both property and violent.  It’s going to suck.

But how LONG it sucks may well be up to the majority.  We need to take back at least one chamber of Congress during the next mid-term “elections”.  Listen, I know that most of the damage will have been done by then but it’s our next – quite probably our only –  opportunity to stop them.  If we spend the next two years arguing over whether Putin forced Hillary to use a private email server, we won’t be ready.

It’s three seats in the Senate.  Three.  My recommendation would be for every thinking person to use paper ballots, if possible.  The machines make it FAR too easy to dial in and set whatever result the powers that be prefer.  Vote absentee.  You can still drop the ballot off at your polling place if the sticker is important to you.  There are rumors that absentee ballots don’t get counted.  They do.  Those are just rumors, likely intended to discourage the use of absentee ballots.

But the absentee ballots create a paper trail the machines don’t.  It’s pretty much the only thing that can help us overcome our pretend “elections” and start to have our voices heard again.  So let’s stop talking about the Electoral College and the Russians and start to spread the word – today – to vote on paper via absentee ballots.

Three seats in the Senate and the attack on the American people can be…contained.  Make sure Republicans own every piece of brutal legislation they push to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the masses.  Then, make sure every thinking person votes absentee – that is, on paper.

I’ll tell you this: if nothing else, having ballots that can be counted and verified would be the worst nightmare of our ruling class…

Wow, the conservatives in Congress are SO eager to roll up their sleeves and start harming the American people they’re practically giddy.  First order of business, of course, was to try to eliminate the Office of Congressional Ethics.  That effort failed but it won’t stop this pack.  They’ll just stuff it with cronies and then not fund it, leaving it to die on the vine.  Then, they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and – just for fun – to defund Planned Parenthood.  As of this writing, they’re trying to force through Cabinet picks of the incoming maladministration who haven’t yet completed the background checks done by – wait for it – the Office of Congressional Ethics!

And they were only seated seven days ago…

I had occasion to be perusing some of my earlier writing when I stumbled across this.  I wrote it in October, 2007.  It was the end of 43’s maladministration, just as this once-great nation was slipping into yet another conservative economic crash.  I would say, today, the problem has only grown worse – making me prescient in ways I wish I wasn’t…

Here’s a prediction:  If a democrat wins the White House, the “press” will suddenly re-discover the ability to ask the “tough” questions, with follow-ups.  They’ll offer up the mea culpa that they don’t know what’s been wrong with them but they realize, now, that they have an important job to do policing the administration and they’ll promise not to make that mistake again.  And they won’t, at least not until a Republican returns to the Oval Office.  I base this prediction on my belief that the “press” is, by and large, owned by – and operated for the benefit of – large corporations.  It’s no accident today’s mainstream media attacks liberals and sanctifies conservatives.  In fact, it’s the plan.

After Watergate (the original scandal-name-gate), Republicans realized the most important impediment to their dream of perfect corporate hegemony was the free and independent press.  If multi-national corporations were to seize effective control of the American political process, they would have to minimize interference from meddlesome, puny reporters.  Enter Ronald Reagan…

When I was young, it was common for programming to be interrupted with an announcer intoning, “The following is a rebuttal to a KRUD editorial regarding…” whatever.  If a broadcaster presented an editorial opinion, he was required, as a condition of his license to use the common airwaves, to provide equal time for responsible, opposing opinions.  That’s all.  That’s it…the whole thing.  It was called the Fairness Doctrine.

“St. Reagan” (reverential fanfare here) eliminated enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine, putting an end to true “fairness” and “balance”.  Instead, we were left with a slogan.  Then the Telecommunications Act of 1985 began the process of watering down ownership rules for media outlets.  The result was more and more corporate control of “news” outlets free from any restriction of being honest or fact-based.

It took time, to be sure.  Nobody really paid much attention as one media outlet after another was gobbled up in the name of “competition”, even as the consolidation of those outlets eliminated competition.  Reporters will say (honestly, I think) that nobody ever told them to write conservative-friendly stories.  But over time, they noticed that if they wrote honest news, they couldn’t get a by-line.  Never getting printed (or any air time) means not keeping your job.  Over time, the “press” became a conservative echo chamber by simple attrition.

Control was debugged and fine-tuned during the Clinton administration.  Mainstream media manufactured “scandal” after “scandal” about the Clintons.  “FBI-gate”, “File-gate”, “Travel-gate”, “Vince Foster-gate” the list was endless because it was only limited by the fertile imaginations of the “reporters”.  Nothing ever came to fruition from any of it, except, of course, “Monica-gate”.

The test of the new corporate-controlled “news” came in the late 1990’s with the impeachment of Bill Clinton.  At the time, polls – not yet in the corporate fold – showed 75% to 80% of Americans opposed impeachment.  But conservatives in Congress insisted they had a “moral obligation” to pursue charges even in the face of constituent disapproval.  The key balancing factor was the press.

Even though the vast majority of Americans opposed impeachment, the “press” offered up a steady stream of “experts” explaining exactly why Congress had no choice.  Suddenly a personal peccadillo became a “high crime and misdemeanor”.

Now, even once-respected polling agencies like Gallup have been welcomed into the corporate fold.  The largest polling agencies can – and often do – provide polls that show any desired result.  They use tricks; samples that are too small, statistically invalid error rates (+/- 5%), or “push-polling” in which questions are asked in such as way as to elicit a certain “desirable” outcome.  Against McCain in 2000, Bush-supporting pollsters phoned “likely Republican voters” and asked, “If you knew John McCain had a black baby, would you be more or less likely to vote for him?”  John McCain’s very dark-skinned child is a) not “black”, and b) adopted, not illegitimate but the polling question alone did more damage to his campaign than he was able to counter, in part because the media had already anointed George Bush the GOP nominee and then “President” and so did nothing that might allow McCain to counter the false charges.

People will readily point out how it’s the largest polling agencies that tell us George the Lesser has a favorable rating of twenty-some percent and if they were crooked, wouldn’t his favorable rating be higher?  Perhaps, but I don’t think so.

In this country, at least the pretense of honesty must be maintained.  If polls show Bush with a high favorable rating, people might figure out the polls are rigged.  Since his approval rating is irrelevant, it hurts nothing to tell the truth and it gives the polling agencies “plausible deniability”.  That way, when exit polls – once the gold standard of polling – come out exactly the opposite of election results, pollsters can claim errors in the exit polls, not in the election results.

The same corporate-owned mainstream media that picked the “nominees” in the first place by selectively reporting which candidate would be great to have a beer with and which candidate is, say, wearing white after Labor Day (oh, the horror), backs the poll results.  In the Ukraine (ironically once a Soviet satellite), when exit polls didn’t match the actual election outcome, people took to the streets in outrage, knowing the election had been fixed.  In the U.S., we’re treated to a parade of “experts” telling us how exit polls aren’t really all that accurate.

The successful attack on the free and independent media has severely crippled our Democracy.  People – well intentioned or not – simply cannot make sound decisions based upon faulty information.  To me, the only potential solution to our current state of affairs is a return to regulations that limit media outlet ownership and the return of the Fairness Doctrine.  We don’t hear much about that from the “hallowed” halls of Congress and even less from the self-same, corporate-owned media.  But it’s a constant buzz in the blog-o-sphere.

Many people understand that the lack of an independent media is a more critical problem than any other our nation currently faces.  Is it more critical that George’s occupation of Iraq?  More critical that the lack of health care inflicted upon millions of Americans?  Is it more critical than global warming?  Yes, yes, and yes, because the shill media provides propaganda and misinformation that allows the “debate” to continue on those other issues.  We, the people, cannot be expected even to understand the problems (or the potential solutions) when we’re fed a constant diet of falsehoods.

These days I hear media personalities, like Rush, suggest that a return to the Fairness Doctrine is simply an attempt to shut down his show.  That’s just another “Limbaugh Lie”, of course.  I live in the greater San Francisco bay area where KGO radio has had a successful all-talk format for as long as I’ve been aware.  In the days of the Fairness Doctrine, they had Ronn Owens in the morning with the liberal viewpoint (yes, he was a liberal back then) and Jim Eason in the Afternoon with the conservative viewpoint.  During the noon news, they would play Paul Harvey News and Commentary (conservative) followed by Jim Hightower (liberal).  See?  Simple.  Provide balance in the programming, the Fairness Doctrine is served as are the listeners, the owners of the common airwaves.  So is Democracy…

Okay, let’s say we all agree that Russian hacking played a part in the outcome of the most recent “election”.  The corporate media seems focused on the idea that the hacking began and ended with releasing damning information about Hillary (without, I’ve noticed, any mention of why there was so much damning information about Hillary to be had) but I’ve heard little to no talk on the question of hacking into the voting machines and flipping votes.

We KNOW that it can be done easily.  We saw how insecure the machines are after Bush 43 was installed by vote flipping in the voting machines.  It’s possible to find videos on the web to this day that demonstrate how easily these machines can be manipulated.  Although much of the focus tends to be on some random person getting their hands on a device that lets one person vote many – perhaps hundreds of – times, they usually include an acknowledgement that the actual network the machines are connected to can be hacked – meaning one person could affect the outcomes on hundreds of machines in a relatively short time.

Our government tends to downplay the notion that the machines are so vulnerable.  It seems they’re hesitant to – get this – undermine the public faith in American “elections”.  But government confidence-building notwithstanding, the machines can be manipulated so easily it’s almost child’s play.  Each county gets to pick it’s own voting equipment and there are a wide variety of machines being used but they all share the same vulnerability.

As a result, I suggest we, the people, develop our own, new way of voting.  It’s actually quite simple.  First, apply for an absentee ballot.  Fill it out at your leisure, in your own home.  In fact, you can have voting parties.  See, the concept of a private vote is to ensure your privacy but it’s not an obligation.  You can sit around with family and friends and discuss each issue and candidate and mark your ballots accordingly.

Then, on election day, take your ballot to your polling place.  TRY to participate in an exit poll.  This process will do two things; one, it will create a paper trail “election” officials seem unwilling to create these days.  Two, it will show, via the exit poll, how accurately the vote totals are being counted.

I know our corporate dis-infotainment machine says exit polling may not be accurate.  Do yourself a favor, don’t ever let anyone convince you that’s true.  I mean, logically, could it be true that exit polling is only inaccurate in America and only during Presidential “elections”?  Exit polling is the gold standard of polling.  It’s how poll watchers the world over ensure the integrity of votes anywhere there might be a question regarding the legitimate outcome of an election – like, sadly, the United States of America.

If our “election” officials won’t create a paper trail, we create our own via absentee ballots.  If the exit poll numbers conflict with the results we can easily do a recount using the paper ballots we created.  Yes, it will most likely slow down the counting and delay the announcement of winners and losers.

I’ll tell you this: I’d MUCH rather get accurate information slowly than get inaccurate information quickly…