Another TBL Poll: How Will #MAGA Kill You?

If you die during the #MAGA years of @realDonaldTrump, which of the following is most likely to be the cause?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) October 13, 2017

Or will it be a climate-change-induced weather catastrophe? Or black lung from all those new coal-fired power plants? Or getting hit by a Nazi-driven car because you had the temerity to engage in a peaceful protest? Or...?

The FBI needs to be kept under control of civilian authorities.

With the election coming in less than four days, it's too late to take any pre-election action against a rogue Federal Bureau of Investigation that seems to be trying to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump with selective last-minute leaks and innuendos, but the FBI is going to have to be put under control after the election.

The 44th President Barack Obama will not be the first chief executive to have concerns about an out-of-control secret federal police force.

Here's the 33rd President, Harry Truman, addressing the Federal Bar Association in April 1950:

"Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat."

It's probably not too much of a stretch to assume that J. Edgar Hoover was at least one of the people Truman had in mind when he suggested that "some people" would like to turn the FBI into a Gestapo-like agency. The FBI can't be expected to police itself, or limit its own power. But somebody has to do it.

"Giuliani Über Alles" by Hasidic New Wave

With Rudy Giuliani in the news again this week for his political commentary about our current President who doesn't love America in quite the same way Rudy does, we've had this little ditty from the late nineties stuck in our head:

There's a more polished version of this song at the end of Kabalogy (which is also worth it for 'The Frank Zappa Memorial Bris'), but this first public performance of  'Giuliani Über Alles' has a great energy:



If more recent memories of the man who has made a career out of being "Mayor 9/11" have driven any thoughts of his earlier association with police brutality and killings out of your memory, and if you don't know what the line about a "plunger up your ass" is about, then you need to read again about the torture of Abner Louima in 1997 followed by the police shootings of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and Patrick Dorismond in 2000 in Rudy Giuliani's NYC. Without his ability to form a new reputation on the wreckage of the World Trade Center, unrestrained NYPD abuse, brutality, and killings would be his only legacy.