Great lesson on the Strait of Hormuz

David Feldman, in his incomparable style (I started to say ‘inimitable’, but his distinct delivery isn’t hard to imitate), uses maps to lay out the supreme idiocy of Trump and Hegseth’s loud assertions that they won the war against Iran overwhelmingly and are only negotiating now to… uh, they completely and utterly won, decisively, destroyed Iran’s ability to wage war with unprecedented lethality and violence in the name of all that is holy (and the bossy f-ing pope be damned),  which is why they have agreed to a ceasefire and are negotiating terms with a nation that, whenever it wants to, can stop all oil tankers from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

It is clearly the lugenpresse [1], the lying globalists who control mass media (you know who he’s talking about…) lying about the most perfect war, more perfect, even, than Mr. Trump’s perfect call asking Ukrainian president Zelensky to “do him a favor” if he wanted the arms shipment Congress had already approved for Ukraine’s defense against Putin’s invasion. The stinking rat who made that secret phone call public, and lied about the transcript, which was perfect (PERFECT!), is going to get prosecuted pursuant to Tulsi Gabbard’s referral, and that will happen toot sweet, says Kashyap Patel, who will now be subject to being deposed in the idiotic defamation case the angry asshole brought against The Atlantic for smearing his good name (I know, what good name?). It’s all the fault of the lying goddamned commie mass media that needs to be brought to heel, clearly. These public servants are all perfect, the most perfect ever to serve this good nation. PERFECT YOU SICK FUCKING LYING TREASONOUS MANIAC BASTARDS!!!!!

[1]

NY Times releases memos showing origins of corrupt 6-3 majority “shadow docket”

As disgusted as I often am with the NY Times’ typically Chuck Schumer-like courage and integrity, they regularly publish important investigative pieces. Their in-depth reporting on Trump’s father’s criminal tax avoidance scheme is a great example [1]. (Gift link no longer available, it seems, but try this.) This one, from today’s paper, is another good one. It is a short history of the shadow docket, the new rightwing mechanism for greenlighting illegal moves by its front man, on an almost instant “emergency” basis, by issuing quick, no argument/no legal reasoning decisions that enable their interests to advance unimpeded.

These short, quick decisions were usually reserved for yes/no rulings on a last minute death penalty appeal (and were usually a thumbs down for the person to be executed). Now they are used to allow their avatar to do maximum damage in minimum time without undue delay to his/their agenda. It all started, predictably enough, to block an Obama clean energy initiative.

The chief justice and some of his colleagues were watching warily, concerned the president [Obama] was going past what the Constitution allowed him to do on his own. In a 2014 opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court warned Mr. Obama that he needed to tread carefully in setting environmental policy without congressional approval.

That statement was one of the early articulations of what would come to be known as the major questions doctrine, saying that on important matters, executive branch agencies could act only with clear direction from Congress. . .

. . . For now, the chief justice contended that the court had to act immediately because the energy industry “must make changes to business plans today.”

“Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector before this court has an opportunity to review its legality,” he wrote.

. . . Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

At 6:20 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 9, the court alerted the public to its decision, releasing the cryptic one-paragraph order.

source

The upshot is that the first time they pulled this stunt, at the behest — and insistence — of fucking John Roberts, it was on behalf of the fossil fuel industry who stood to lose half a trillion in profits over the next decade in the switch to clean, renewable energy.   Obama was far from certain to prevail on the merits of the case, but the new regulations weren’t set to go into effect for six years, meaning there was plenty of time for litigation — until a fossil fuel group in West Virginia unaccountably jumped the appeals process to get directly in front of Roberts on an emergency basis.  The “emergency” was a likely Hillary Clinton presidency.   

To protect the oil industry, its lobby, and the overall agenda of his Nazi compatriots, corporatist “balls and strikes umpire” John Roberts jumped into unprecedented action, before the dangerous Hillary Clinton came to power, to rule against Obama without any hearing on the merits, judicial review of any kind or even the fig leaf of judicial reasoning.  The rest, like AI, is history.

This point bears repeating. In weighing the pros and cons, such as they did in a frenzied 5 days of short notes passing between them, none of the justices mentioned the actual emergency before them/us:

Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

How do you say fucking fucks in French?

[1] Trump’s father, Fred Christ Trump, as reported in the NY Times, created 295 income streams for his kids and multiple companies that did all sorts of good work getting dad’s money to his offspring without any of those punitive taxes.   In the case of the Koch brothers, they created and/or fund institutes, societies, non-profits, think tanks, academic programs, ad campaigns, lobbyist groups, even a popular grassroots movement, influential in thwarting all progress toward a more perfect union, except for themselves.  

Sane as can be

Heather Cox Richardson reports:

With Iran’s announcement the strait was open, Trump hit the media circle, announcing through interviews and social media posts that the war with Iran was over and peace talks were all but done, although Trump said the U.S. Navy will continue to blockade Iran’s ports. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted that Trump posted thirteen times in an hour claiming total victory.

He claimed that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” He said that the United States would work with Iran at “a leisurely pace” to retrieve and capture Iran’s highly enriched uranium and that Iran would receive no money for its cooperation despite a report from Axios that the U.S. is considering the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for Iran giving up its stockpile of enriched uranium.

Right on cue the stock market jumped and the price of oil futures dropped. Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”

But, as Ashley Ahn of the New York Times reported, Iranian officials’ interpretation of events was quite different from Trump’s characterization. Iran’s top negotiator, speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour, and all seven of them were false. Iran rejected Trump’s claim that it had agreed to hand over its uranium stockpile, and also said that the strait was open for commercial vessels—not military ships—but would close again if the U.S. blockade continued.

Tonight on Air Force One, after the stock market closed, when asked if Iran would turn over its nuclear material, Trump said: “We’re taking it. We’re taking it. Very simple. We’re taking it. With Iran. We’re going in with Iran. We’re taking it. We will have it. I don’t call it boots on the ground. We’ll take it after the agreement is signed. After there— there’s a very big difference. Before and after. BC. It’s before, and after. And after the agreement is signed, it’s a lot different than before. We would have taken it. If we didn’t have an agreement, we would take it. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”

When a reporter asked Trump whether he would extend the ceasefire “if you don’t have a deal by Wednesday” when it ends, the president answered: “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t extend it. But the blockade is gonna remain. But maybe I won’t extend it. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

source

Incoherence is perfect for assholes

Think of it from the asshole’s point of view.  If you need to win an argument (because losing, which includes any kind of compromise, is unbearably humiliating  to you) and the facts are not in your favor — FUCK THE FACTS.   Seriously, just keep a straight face, an aggressive stance, attack your opponent and make any noises you like, grunts and squawks are fine.  

Keep doing this, never pause, never back down.   The other person will eventually grow frustrated, if you are arguing about something important — say human rights in a democracy (I just typoed demoncracy, which seems to fit our moment with the antichrist-in-chief).   When their frustration explodes, or they walk away, frustrated, you merely smile and make a mocking little dog sound as your friends applaud.

As long as you cater to the emotional cravings of those you control, people also desperate to be right, who, if in danger of being proved wrong, prefer killing you to admitting fault, incoherence is perfect.  

You can’t argue successfully against an incoherent assertion.   Incoherence is immune to persuasion of any kind.  It is self-contained, self-proving and self-reinforcing.  

When Donald Trump was an adolescent millionaire (his father paid him $200,000 a year from birth, his salary as president of various fake corporations dad set up to avoid taxes) his psychopath [1] father intercepted a carton of switchblades his son had delivered to the house.  Donald’s plan was to arm his schoolyard gang with these knives and rule the elite private school his parents sent him to.   His parents decided that a few years in a military academy would be good for the young bully’s discipline and “make him a man” of some kind.   We see how well that plan worked.  

Trump claims to have loved the hierarchical life at the military academy where he specialized in bullying the younger cadets.   There was a new crop of these young, pampered chumps every fall for Donald to torture with his winning personality.  Then, after graduation, proudly dressed in a splendid military uniform, bone spurs, unfortunately, kept him out of uniform for the rest of his life. 

More than sixty years later, the dude is unchanged.  He bullies everyone around him, except when someone stands up to him directly.  No mere box of switchblades this time, Tomahawk missiles, nuclear weapons, enraged toadies and lickspittles competing daily to prove their unquestioning loyalty to him, unlimited dark money to prosecute his thousands of lifelong grudges against every kind of enemy imaginable.  He now claims the legal right to illegally defund programs Congress funded, endangering and torturing millions and costing countless lives (poor people, disposable) and to have his underlings commit cold blooded murder and get away with it. 

He’s not crazy to believe these things since his 6-3 Leonard Leo majority granted him extraordinary criminal powers in the aptly named  Trump v. United States.  The party line ruling granted him the right to commit criminal acts, and pardon any criminal, if he can claim he did the crime as part of his core duty to advances his/their agenda.   He has replaced the Department of Justice with the Department of Retribution, his gigantic glaring face adorns its building. 

I think of my own father, a soul with many gifts and the most decent of impulses, helpless against the many traumas of his early life.   Whipped in the face by his mother from the time he could stand, growing up in what he always called grinding poverty, legally blind until the age of ten, when FDR’s program for the poor gave him his first pair of glasses to correct 20/400 vision, he considered himself the dumbest kid in his little town, even at the very end of a distinguished life. 

We argued many times over the years about whether people can change in any meaningful way.  I contend we can, and always made the case.   He insisted people cannot change in any fundamental way and that all forms of therapy only support a delusion.  I learned only recently that we were both right, and both wrong.  Many people can change, if their pain makes the need to change urgent enough.  Many people can never change, no matter how acute their pain becomes.  If you can’t be wrong, there is nothing to change.

Donald Trump is an example of the kind who can never change.   He is the perfect avatar for the interests he represents — entitled psychopaths [1] who created an ideology of “liberty” (which requires unreasoning faith to believe) and a massive propaganda machine to promote their right to own and control everything.

There is no good argument for why some should have 100,000,000 times what starving children and their struggling parents have, why children should go to bed hungry in the wealthiest country in human history.  There is no conceivable moral argument for that.  Even Charles Koch’s beloved Institute for Humane Studies never successfully made a moral case for starving poor children. 

And so, an incoherent, demonstrably false fable — makers vs. takers — the rich make the economy move for everybody, and what trickles from their pathologically greedy lips makes fine soup for the rest of us.  Booted and spurred, most of them from birth, to ride the backs of anyone less deserving than they are (in the fine image Jefferson stole from a Scottish rebel about to be hanged), these creatures found their avatar in a man willing to do anything, including bark like a pet dog pursued by hungry, imaginary Haitians, to never lose.

Are we tired of winning yet, America?

[1]

Convert to Catholicism knows way more than the pope

As every American school child knows, morality is not the concern of the American president. The president’s job is not to model or otherwise influence good or bad behavior, it is to dictate American public policy. Which makes him… a dictator? Hey, the pope was good with Mussolini and Hitler, he signed a peace treaty with them, why not the American version? Perhaps JD ought to pray on that, to God, not Peter Theil, before he opens his vapid mouth.

Very, very stable genius

Trump’s new open hostility to Catholics is kind of funny, when you consider that his vice president, JD Vance, converted and was baptized into the Catholic faith in 2019, and Little Marco, his diminutive Secretary of State, was born Catholic and has not converted to anything but Trump sycophant. Also Catholic: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, his most ardent judicial ass-lickers, outside of Aileen Cannon, who is silent on whether she’s Catholic or another kind of Christian. Second most corrupt AG in US history Bill Barr and architect of the Federalist Society 6-3 Supreme Court majority, Leonard Leo, HUGE, very religious conservative Catholics, (as well as militant theo-fascists).

Trump made a blasphemous Easter Sunday genocide threat, using the fucking f-word and insulting all Christians while also mocking adherents of Allah, then elegantly followed up a few days later, when– as the NY Times styled it, he “attacked the pope.” Then, while Trump recently sent Vance on a farcical “diplomatic” mission designed to fail, with the two filthy rich idiot real estate moguls Iran indicated were not acceptable negotiators, he sat with the man who should have been his top diplomat, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, ender of USAID and keeper of the National Archives, Little Marco, at an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Miami. Meanwhile, posting shit like this:

Me as a doctor, you fucking idiots.

(a doctor bringing Epstein back from death, Jimmy Kimmel noted the patient’s resemblance to JE the other night)

and this old favorite:

This is obviously my Star Wars costume, you fucking dummies.

In his politest manner, he tells the pope to go fuck himself, or things are going to go badly for him. Nice papacy you got there, pal, thanks to me. Would be a shame if you forced me to put my boot up its ass. His loyal Catholics are all silent, while Jesus curses them for their “transactional” Christianity.

No more stable genius ever had himself done up as a “pope” or a more magical “doctor”. You can take that to the bank, or the bankruptcy court.

I never met any of these people. HOAX, witch hunt!

Ah, for Christ’s sake…

Until Trump there was never a stable genius president who attacked numerous foes daily. Not sure an American president has ever attacked the Pope, (possibly during the heyday of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when hatred of Catholics raged) but this president is undeniably special. Heather:

Trump tonight posted on social media, in part: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump suggested the Pope was elevated to the papacy only “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” He wrote “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

Today is Orthodox Easter, and about 45 minutes after attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself in the place of Jesus, apparently healing a sick man in a bed, surrounded by a soldier, a nurse, a woman praying, and an older man. Behind him are the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and a giant American flag, while in the sky are two eagles, three fighter jets, soldiers, and what seems to be a monster.

Amid popular revulsion at what people are calling heresy and blasphemy, former U.S. representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

A minute after posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump posted an image of a Trump tower on the moon.

source

Negotiators sent by the Orange two year-old “fail”

Iran had already indicated they would not further “negotiate” with real estate mogul/pawns Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.   Trump told Iran “fuck you, that’s exactly who you get, assholes,” sending those two nincompoops, supplemented by the experienced, steady hand of the always truthful JD Vance.  JD not long ago reasonably feared Trump was our American Hitler.  Now he serves his authoritarian leader, no matter what.   Not surprisingly, the Iranians found no reason to trust the American “negotiators.”   Hard to blame them, however evil their theocracy also is.  

Here’s what Vance was spouting on the campaign trail about Democratic presidents and stupid wars, when he was not lying about brown people eating white people’s pets:

Of course, there is nothing “stupid” about Trump’s murderous rampage against Iran, whether he can give a reason for it or not. Reasons are for losers, violent, lethal action for winners. One day of failed negotiations proves, to the remaining MAGA base, that Iran is a sick, dangerous, totally obliterated theocracy, “Allah be praised” — to reprise the repeated sick, edgy, blasphemous “burn” of our epically furious two year-old-in-chief. Call it “Operation Shut The FUCK UP, Melania!” Speaking of sick burns, whoever wrote this line for Melania’s shock and awe press conference is a genius “I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.” 

Trump’s instinctual, reptilian survival reasoning is always impeccable. In this case “fuck Melania and her big fucking mouth, I’m using force to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and provoke an international standoff, provoke the rest of the world into military action to stop me, because I fucking can and because, fuck Epstein, when I had him suicided, after we managed to get that French fuck who was going to testify against him suicided in a French prison, that should have been the end of this bullshit hoax that never happened. Those little whores are all liars.”

Likewise, there is no reason to fear what these “transactional” mercenary servants of a criminally insane, demented psychopath will do in our name, except for fear itself, as was famously said in another fearful moment for our nation.  We will get through this fascist threat together, or not.  Victor Orban’s loss today is encouraging –as is him immediately covering defeat– hero that he is to Vance, Trump and our American global authoritarians.  All we can do here is organize, communicate, dissent, refuse to be quiet about the irrational, dangerous actions of our American Hitler.  Isn’t that right, JD?

“I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.”

JD Vance, untruthful? Me, sarcastic?

It’s hard to believe the vice president of the United States would lie, isn’t it? Is not as if he admitted to repeatedly lying about Haitian immigrants (in an Ohio town whose economy they had saved) eating their white neighbors’ dogs, eating their cats. He explained, after his remarks were shown to be false, that his statements, while not truthful, were to wake up Americans to the fact that we are under existential threat from brown people who are not white Christian nationalists. His expressed fear that Donald Trump is the American Hitler, (not an unreasonable fear, actually), yielded to his overweening political ambitions. To put it bluntly, the man tends to be untruthful, when he makes statements of any kind.

Vice President J.D. Vance said there was a “legitimate misunderstanding” about whether the ceasefire included Lebanon. “We never made that promise,” he said. But in fact, Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, who posted the terms of the ceasefire on Tuesday, noted that the agreement did include a ceasefire in Lebanon. He tagged Vance in the post. source

Another big lie is almost certainly under way [in Orban’s campaign in Hungary]. While Vance was in Budapest, he claimed that the Ukrainian secret services interfere in elections on the United States and Hungary — an activity that is unknown to the scholarship of the subject, to put it mildly. This was reinforcing a campaign message of Orbán: the tall tale that the Ukrainian secret services had somehow penetrated all of Hungary and were preparing a systematic electoral falsification. When, as i likely, Orbán loses the vote count, he will probably revive this story in some form. Americans might endorse it; they might copy it themselves this fall. It is a comfortable story for Trump and Vance because it inverts the historical fact: that Russia always tries to tilt elections their way. source