The Comey Attack

What drives people? When your professional obligation is to uphold the laws and the constitution but you helplessly undermine your chain of command and your department guidelines and your heart says to not obey because your boss is a black woman (that don't look right) and you are moved by the ideologies of racism and sexism as certainly as the electrons are moved by electric forces and you are okay with Huma Abedin being a Hillary Clinton surrogate but a Pakistani Indian American is getting too close to the president for your comfort, what do you do? You make one last ditch effort. You would rather a madman near the nuclear code than a Pakistani Indian American near the President Of The United States.

The FBI did it to John Liu, who is born in New York City. He looked too Chinese to possibly occupy the second most powerful office in the country.

This is how you know racism in America's criminal justice system is a very real issue.

On Clinton Emails, Did the F.B.I. Director Abuse His Power?

Trump And The Bomb

his former GOP rival, Marco Rubio, repeated his earlier concerns about Trump only this week, saying America can't give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual."

In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time. 

would be free to launch a civilization-ending nuclear war on his own any time he chose.

The only real protection against nuclear disaster is total elimination of nuclear weapons.

Ronald Reagan expressed incredulity that he would be allowed only six minutes to decide whether to trigger Armageddon based on blips on a radar screen. 

Although no president during the atomic age appears to have ever lost his grip on reality to such an extent that an insane nuclear act might have resulted, top advisers to President Richard Nixon tried to constrain his launch authority during the Watergate scandal that ultimately forced his resignation. His secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, quietly instructed the Pentagon war room to double check with him if Nixon contacted it to order up a nuclear strike. Nixon’s mental stability, and his heavy drinking, caused concern within his inner circle that he might behave erratically out of despair and depression. Alcoholism in a future nuclear monarch is of course quite beyond the pale.

about three serious false alarms in the United States and three in the Soviet Union/Russia that could have led to a very bad call by their leaders have occurred.

Both Putin and President Barack Obama are reminding each other, to a degree we haven’t seen since the Cold War, that they have nuclear buttons at hand.

As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded.

There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.

a common expert view that the bomb is slowly but surely spreading around the world, and that proliferation may be unstoppable unless ALL nations including the nuclear-armed countries get serious about universal nuclear disarmament.

the double-standard of the nuclear “haves,” cigarettes dangling from their lips, lecturing the “have nots” to give up smoking is unsustainable over the long term.

Altogether only 15 minutes would elapse before 850 land- and sea-based missile warheads would take flight. There would be no stopping, no recall, no turning back the salvo. In all likelihood, a return volley of Russian missiles would be triggered. The scale of the ensuing disaster defies comprehension. In a large-scale nuclear exchange, hundreds of millions of lives would be extinguished in a few agonizing hours. A global humanitarian catastrophe would ensue to seal the fate of civilization itself.

So far, most respected Republican advisers have boycotted the Trump campaign.

Trump certainly has not yet made a convincing case that we could sleep soundly with him at the helm.

2016 Is Democracy Vs Fascism

we’re in genuinely uncharted territory with Trump: we’ve simply never seen a candidate with this much disregard for typical Constitutional values get this close to the White House. There’s no precedent for what might happen if he got there. For another, if you look at how our system of checks and balances is really built, it has relatively few resources to stop an authoritarian president from violating the Constitution and getting away with it. And the third reason may be the most unsettling of all: In a democracy, the final brake on the tyrannical exercise of power is public opinion. And polls suggest the American public has never been as skeptical of democracy or as open to authoritarian alternatives like military rule as it is right now. If a President Trump really blew down the walls of our system, a worryingly wide swath of the public would likely stand behind him.

Even Richard Nixon, as close to an out-and-out crook as the White House has known, finally resigned when Congress moved to impeach him. It’s simply not clear that Donald Trump would do the same.

If he wanted to close down mosques, or have his cronies prosecute political opponents, he probably could.

The Supreme Court's role as arbiter of what’s constitutional is ultimately just a matter of tradition, and Trump has already proved his willingness to flout tradition when it happens to suit his interests.

impeachment requires both a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Considering how scared most GOP officials have been of taking on a Presidential candidate with authoritarian tendencies, it is far from certain that many of them would prove more courageous in the face of an authoritarian President. And by the time the will to impeach him has built, and the highly complex proceedings completed, it would in any case be far from clear how much of the republic there would be left to save.

countries like Hungary, Russia or Iraq did have carefully designed institutions with intricate checks and balances; but because the politicians who inhabited these systems had little commitment to liberal-democratic norms, they failed to protect democracy.

it isn't primarily the legal genius of the Founding Fathers that has made American democracy uniquely stable, but, at least as importantly, the deep commitment of ordinary Americans to liberal norms like the separation of powers. It is the people's love for democracy, not the protections their democracy affords them on paper, that is the final check on the tyranny of the majority which the founders so feared.

the Constitution cannot save us from our politics