The hashtag #DeleteUber has trended amongst the Twitterverse and in doing so has translated into boycott-oriented action on an impressive scale. Thousands have deleted the transportation app Uber and have shared screenshots of their acts of protest on their timelines. This controversy came to fruition on Saturday night in accordance with President Donald J. Trump’s 120-day Refugee Ban and 90-day travelers ban.

Happy Year of the Rooster!

Thank you for inviting me. Thank you to Archer Heinzen for setting this up. Of course I wouldn't have come had I known UVA's basketball team would be playing Villanova at 1 o'clock. I'm kidding, but I'll catch it on the radio or watch the replay without the commercials. And when I do I can guarantee only this: the announcer will thank U.S. troops for watching from 175 countries, and nobody will wonder whether 174 wouldn't be just about enough.

I wish I could also guarantee that UVA will win, but this is where sports monkeys around with rational thinking. I don't actually have any say over whether UVA wins. So I can turn my wish into a prediction "We will win" and then declare that "we" won as if I'd been involved. Or let's say that UVA blows it. Then I can remark that "we" decided to keep London Perrantes in the game even though he had a sprained wrist and the flu and had just lost one leg in a car accident, even though the obvious fact is that were I really the coach I would never have done that, just as -- if I fully controlled the U.S. government -- I wouldn't actually spend a trillion dollars a year on war preparations.

The sense of resistance was fierce:

“Grab ’em by the profits” . . . “Keep your hands out of my wherever” . . . “NOT DECLAWED” . . .

But it was also, oh Lord, joyous — in a scraped raw kind of way, you might say. For instance, the young woman with the bullhorn, who led the chant where I was walking, had almost no voice left as she shouted “Show me what democracy looks like!” But as soon as the marchers shouted back, “This is what democracy looks like!” she threw her vocal cords back into it, and somehow, oh, somehow, I could feel it: the birth of a movement.

Donald Trump, who lost the 2016 presidential election by at least 2.8 million votes, has announced an "investigation."  He says the federal government will look into his false assertion that some three million illegal aliens voted for Hillary Clinton last fall, allegedly costing him a popular vote mandate.

The assertion is being gleefully rejected by much of the corporate media as "a lie." 

If we thought his calls for an investigation of our thoroughly broken election system were serious, we would welcome them. 

But Trump's relentless obsession with voter fraud has very effectively shielded the corrupted electoral system that put him in the White House.  His loud shouts have completely blacked out any discussion of the massive Jim Crow registration stripping, electronic vote flipping, and slavery-based Electoral College that put him in the White House, and that have effectively neutered American democracy.

Meanwhile, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, all of whom rightfully won presidential races but then refused to fight for them, have said not a word about any of this.

Many of us in Ohio were duped into voting against our own best interests on Election Day in November 2015. Issue 2 was presented by the 1% as an antimonopoly initiative, promising to protect We the People from monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels.

Who wouldn’t vote for that?

Some saw through the smoke screen and voted against it when they realized it was an attack on grassroots democracy. But the majority went to the polls and, lulled by the propaganda, voted to make statewide initiatives even more difficult for us to place on the ballot.

It wasn’t about stopping monopolies, oligopolies and cartels. It was about stopping us. It was about choking off citizen initiatives.

Tightening the Choke Hold