The New York Times published a long article the other day about the most powerful Democrat in the United States, filibuster champion Joe Manchin III. The chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is a savvy, Maserati driving, yacht dwelling man of the people who has made his personal fortune in the fossil fuel game. You might consider this a conflict of interest, a coal baron funded by Big Oil sitting athwart all plans to curtail the devastation being caused by the burning of these highly polluting, though lucrative to some, energy sources, but, as the New York Times points out, no laws seem to have been broken. It is a great benefit to have the laws carefully vetted by fossil fuel lobbyists, and studied by fossil fuel-enriched lawmakers of discernment like Manchin, lest the federal government use its power to coerce them into actions that disadvantage them in their God-given pursuit of happiness.
At every step of his political career, Senator Joe Manchin III has helped a West Virginia power plant that is the sole customer of his private coal business, including by blocking ambitious climate action.
A Times investigation has revealed the strands of the unusual relationship between Mr. Manchin and that especially dirty power plant, showing just how entwined they are.
Merrick Garland is not the Attorney General who can save democracy from the ongoing authoritarian coup by the forces who use the GOP as its battering ram. He’s not a wartime consigliere. A man of excellent reputation, he seems to believe, like Robert Mueller before him, that once the full truth comes out, in detail, America will embrace it. He believes this at a time when repeating a disproven lie about a rigged stolen election won by the loser in a landslide is a litmus test for one of our two major political parties. He proves this idealistic belief to America by hesitating, for three months now, to present the indictment of Mark Meadows to a grand jury (as required by law after a referral from Congress) for what he indisputably did by telling Congress Trump said to fuck off with their dirty little subpoena.
The DOJ investigation into Hunter Biden, seemingly over tax evasion matters, is in the news lately, competing with the shocking stories that the wife of conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is an insane, highly paid, influential Q-Anon activist/religious fanatic with close ties to the Trump White House, who was active in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, who influences her husband’s ethical decisions and that Trump is hiding seven hours and thirty seven minutes of White House phone logs, covering the Capitol riot and its immediate aftermath, from the January 6th investigation (which the Supreme Court justice in question seemingly believes, alone among his Federalist Society peers, the former president has every right to do).
It has also been reported recently that the DOJ is slowly working its way up the insurrection food chain, they’ve got the people Trump hired to stage the event to set off the storming of the Capitol in their grand jury crosshairs now, we are told and that, by and by, we may even find out that Trump hired these people. This is supposed to be reassuring, somehow, as Biden and the Democratic agenda is hamstrung by a Republican-controlled Senate (you only need to buy two Democrats when it’s 50-50 and you can filibuster to your little heart’s content). Biden can’t even get money allocated by Congress to keep fighting covid.
When the news broke in 1974 that Nixon’s secretary had “accidentally” deleted 18 minutes of incriminating Oval Office audio recordings, Barry Goldwater, a radical right extremist Republican senator (in his day) went to Nixon, with a contingent of other Republicans, and told him it was time for him to resign. Congress was going to impeach him if he didn’t quit and these Republicans were going to vote to convict him. Nixon promptly left office, to be reborn as an elder statesman. There are no Republicans currently in office (outside of the two purged members on the House January 6th Committee) who would do anything so “disloyal” to their lockstep smash-mouth party in 2022. Not if they value their political careers.
Obstruction of justice is action taken to derail a legal proceeding or investigation. It is a felony. Nixon hiding evidence against him was classic obstruction of justice, something Nixon grasped immediately, as a lawyer. It was once perfectly understood that the rule of law means nothing if powerful people can obstruct investigations into their corrupt actions. If a person intentionally acts in a way to hide their misdeeds, by destroying evidence, intimidating witnesses, threatening officials, rewarding liars who protect them, they are guilty of obstruction of justice. The obstructive acts may be a mix of legal and illegal measures and we are told that intent to obstruct justice can be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt sometimes. One standard way to prove intent to obstruct justice is by showing a pattern of behavior calculated to thwart the administration of justice. Here’s a famous example:
Trump asks FBI director Comey for personal loyalty, in a creepy one on one meeting early in Trump’s presidency. He asks Comey to let Flynn go for simply making a mistake, for those lies he told and swore were true. It is within the president’s power to fire an FBI director, so when Comey balks at taking a loyalty oath to the president, Trump fires him. The next day he hosts an Oval Office celebration with a contingent of Russians, with the press excluded, to gloat that the Flynn-Russher thing is now over. Soon thereafter his own DOJ appoints a Special Prosecutor to investigate Trump’s many ties to the Russians and their many acts to help him narrowly win a surgically crafted Electoral College majority and the presidency. Trump obstructs the investigation at every step because, you know, Article Two, which is as all-powerful as the sacred Second Amendment itself.
The Special Prosecutor documents ten instances of this obstruction of justice, including the lies told by Trump associates under oath, men who Trump later pardons. Mueller states that he cannot exonerate Trump for these apparent crimes but that it would be unfair to accuse him of obstruction, in spite of the evidence, while he’s in office. He writes that once Trump is out of office he can be prosecuted for these felonious acts.
Trump was upset with his “weak” Attorney General Jeff Sessions who had recused himself after he lied about his own ties to Russia during the campaign and early in the Trump presidency. After moaning that he was fucked, he kept badgering Sessions to “unrecuse” himself and fire Mueller. That Sessions was following “ethics” rules about recusal was an infuriating betrayal to Trump, who changed the norm to anything beyond a crime that would 100% result in prison time being perfectly cool, for loyal members of his party (others should be locked up with or without trials). Bill Barr auditioned for the Attorney General job by sending Trump a memo about how he’d rule that the basis for Mueller’s investigation is “untenable”. Trump hired Barr and they announced that the Mueller Report was a complete and total exoneration of Trump, for everything. Nothing to see here. Liberals lose, go back to gnashing your teeth, hapless, weak, woke cucks.
Fast forward a few years and a re-election bid Trump lost, in spite of every effort to rig it in his favor by limiting absentee voting, and slowing down mail delivery, during the most deadly phase of the pandemic and spreading lies about massive election fraud. Trump removed fifteen boxes of sensitive information from the White House, including Top Secret documents, when he left office, petulant about still being the president in spite of his substantial loss in the election. For over a year his lawyers negotiated with Biden’s DOJ about those boxes and returning the stolen contents to the National Archives. Negotiated… with an ex-president who committed an illegal act, over what he’d give back, how much more time he needed to finish photocopying everything, etc. Negotiated.
When Ginni Thomas’s texts to Mark Meadows were revealed the other day, with Meadows reassuring her that the King of Kings would rule in favor of good over the wickedness of the corrupt Left, it was another proof of what Trump has been insisting on all along — when the evidence comes out, the best people can get fucked. You hide that dangerous material! No tax return, no school transcripts, no White House visitor logs, no phone logs, no disclosures from anyone he forced to sign an NDA, no financial statements,no obeying subpoenas, no top secret documents returned without first laywering up and delaying it by a year, nothing. Article Two and Bill Barr, bitches.
So, the only logical thing is to negotiate with him over how much he wants to compromise. If he doesn’t want to be reasonable, there’s really no way the Department of Justice can force him to. We have the rule of law here, after all, all of us who embrace this ideal must remain above the appearance of political motive, even when we’re locked up in Gitmo.
Merrick Garland must be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the folks who run the prestigious annual awards for actors and those involved in every aspect of high budget film-making. Garland is just less talkative than the others on the board of the Academy Awards.
The Academy today officially announced it will launch an “investigation” into the hard slap in the face to an awards presenter delivered by this year’s best actor, Will Smith, moments before he got a standing ovation from his peers on being awarded top actor honors. Millions worldwide saw the full-body bitch slap delivered live a few days ago (except here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave), followed by an impressive display of verbal toxic masculinity, and anyone can see it in perpetuity on various platforms, but, you know, as the Academy must have reasoned, we have to follow the facts, and the law, and protocol, and ensure due process for everybody so that the rights of all are protected and to show that all wealthy celebrities are equal, under our laws, bylaws and customs. This is America, the land of fair and impartial investigations (right, Merrick?).
In our advertorial culture, where the wealthiest interests have a billion ways to influence public opinion, no citizen can rely on anything, meaning that whatever we say or think is just as good as the exact opposite, which we can also insist on with impunity, if the timing is right, with no consequences for our credibility. If you walked into this pay-to-play world from a place with traditional values about truth, fairness, the need for facts to back an argument, you’d think you’d gone mad.
It’s part of a deliberate strategy, you can watch Putin do it every day (we are liberating Ukraine from Nazis! — wait, from US/Ukraine chemical weapons, from NATO…) and, of course his “not a puppet, not a puppet” whatshisname, the GOP leader. If you have any doubt about the strategy of calling critical thinking into question being deliberate, look at this short fake news clip:
We have Trump recently publicly asking Putin to take a pause in deNazifying Ukraine to give him some dirt on Biden. And why not? He did this without consequence when he withheld military aid to Ukraine in his perfect call to Zelensky (and Barr did his best to bury the verified, urgent whistleblower complaint). He did this as a candidate when he said, spontaneously, during a nationally televised debate “Russia, if you’re listening…” and within a few hours Russia provided some dirt on Crooked Hillary (kudos to pardoned felon Roger Stone). He did this regarding the over 100 acts of coordination between his campaign and Russian agents, documented for all-time in the Marco Rubio Senate Committee report. He does variations on this every time he transactionally lies to gain some kind of political/personal advantage, including his Big Lie, (not the one about the disputed size of his dick) about a stolen election. 39%, we’re told, fervently believe this destructive whopper from the master of accountability-free obstruction of justice.
The Department of Justice, headed by the supremely cautious Merrick Garland, has given no sign it is investigating Trump’s now well-documented plan to sow the news cycle with outright lies about a stolen election, strong arm state Republicans into flipping electors, recruit members of Congress to repeat this lie, block the certification of Biden’s “stolen” victory based on the millions of Americans who pollsters showed passionately believe this lie, summon an angry mob to Washington D.C., use a crackpot legal theory to put a “constitutional” fig leaf on a last ditch attempt of elected Trump diehards to overturn the will of the American people as he whipped up and unleash an angry mob to hang Mike Pence, after putting out a false statement the night before wherein Pence “agreed” to hold up the certification. We’re told it’s hard to show the former president had “corrupt intent” in doing all these things. There’s a puzzler for you, law and order fans.
The DOJ has, however, allowed Barr-appointed special prosecutor John Durham to finish investigating the “oringes” of the fake Mueller witch hunt, on the grounds that it would have seemed “political” to interfere with an openly political investigation launched by Trump’s gunsel to create more doubt about fucking Mueller’s totally “political” investigation. Durham turned up very little in an investigation that went on longer than Mueller’s. He found no deep state conspiracy to fuck Donald Trump. Then we get this, today, from a long expose in the Washington Post about Hunter Biden using his father’s name and position to get millions of dollars from foreign oligarchs:
Hunter Biden’s overseas work has been the subject of heightened scrutiny. He has been under federal investigation as part of an inquiry into his taxes, with witnesses called before a grand jury as recently as last month. Federal prosecutors had been attempting to determine if he failed to account for income from China-related deals, The Post has previously reported, although it is unclear whether that is still a focus. Republicans, meanwhile, have pointed to the Biden family’s business deals in China, along with Hunter Biden’s past membership on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, as potential conflicts of interest.
Wondering why Congress’s contempt citation for Tea Party Jesus/Trump follower Mark Meadows has not been followed up on, in over three months? The law, after all, requires DOJ to present the case to a grand jury. Wonder no more. Look, it’s all fake, OK? And now, a word from your rightful masters…
Since news broke that Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent dozens of text messages to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows promoting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans have pooh-poohed calls for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the election and its aftermath.
“He’s a jurist who has a lot of integrity,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He’s going to make that decision and he has the right to do it.” Over on Fox News, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) argued, “I’ve watched Clarence Thomas for years and I’ve always seen him do the right thing.”
We shouldn’t have to guess whether Thomas will “do the right thing.” For far too long already, the justice and his wife have been allowed to play fast and loose with ethical standards.
Thomas will always “do the right thing” according to his far-right belief system, in which this innocent victim of a “high tech lynching” must do whatever he can to advance the cause of his deeply religious, yet always “transactional,” tribe.
BP, Shell and Exxon have poured nearly $100 billion into Russian fossil fuel projects since its 2014 invasion of Crimea.
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Doha Forum in Qatar, asking oil- and gas-producing countries to up their output to reduce reliance on Russian imports. This comes as new data reveal Western oil giants including BP, Shell and Exxon have poured nearly $100 billion into Russian fossil fuel projects since its 2014 invasion of Crimea. The analysis was released by Global Witness, Greenpeace USA and Oil Change International.
Bear in mind that fucking Charles Koch (still open for business in Russia, one of thirty transactional US corporations ignoring the boycott, the profit motive never sleeps!) was the heir to a fossil fuel-based fortune created by his Nazi admiring father. Fred Koch, a man without love, instilled the spirit of war in his sons David and Charles, along with a tireless work ethic. He was a founder of the John Birch Society (direct fringe forerunner of the modern Q-tainted GOP) and an engineer who invented a technology that enabled him to use the dirtiest (and cheapest) crude oil to make top shelf fuel oil for even greater profit. His method polluted much more than others, because the crude he started with was filthy. That’s why you have to dismantle to Administrative State, they’re going to try to coerce you, take your liberty, tell you how much poison you can pump into the air in the bare knuckled fight for ever more personal billions.
Our oligarchs working with Russian oligarchs? What a surprise!Not much reporting on this story, as BP, Exxon and their fellow toxic polluters make record profits during a “supply chain crisis” as gas prices soar worldwide, because… Biden. What next, tax these “persons”?
How we came to this sorry situation here in the US, where absolute bullshit flies and is accepted by millions as truth, is laid out beautifully in a history of the fossil fuel industries cutting edge innovations in public relations, going back a hundred years. The entire season three of Drilled, tracing the development of the influential PR juggernaut, is worth listening to, but check out this fantastic summary of how the fossil fuel industry won the war against “climate change alarmists”. An amazing bit of history and reporting by Amy Westervelt. Here’s her description of the series: A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted and reported by award-winning investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. It’s all in the public relations, baby.
If you have any doubts about the power of an endlessly repeated narrative, no matter how little sense it makes, ask the tens of millions of Americans who sincerely believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Christ’s chosen protector of children from blood drinking pedophile socialist fascists.
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had the perfect opportunity last week not to act like a bunch of Nazi jackals. They simply could not resist the opportunity to rail at a black woman federal judge with overwhelming credentials to be the next Supreme Court Justice (including her temperament and demeanor, the opposite of petulant, hissing Boof Kavanaugh’s). They had the chance to demonstrate that they still have the capacity to make decisions based on things other than partisan zealotry . They blewit.
Wake up and take a look at the headlines in the paper, if, like me, you cannot refrain from doom scrolling. I also check youTube for a quick, surveillance capitalism-curated primer on what people who don’t read the paper think is important and whoa!, there’s Will Smith charging up to a comedian and smacking him in the face on live TV then threatening him if he doesn’t take Smith’s wife’s name out of his fucking mouth. He angrily says this twice to make his point. The comedian behaved with great dignity, after Smith, who initially laughed at the in-poor-taste joke (at the expense of his wife’s alopecia), lunged on to the stage, Jack Ruby-like, and slapped Chris Rock, hard. Rock was philosophical “…that was the greatest night in television history” he said while managing not to rub his stung cheek.
Americans, of course, did not see this moment of TV history — you know how the fucking “f-word” can destroy a young life (it clearly destroyed mine). You can see it here:
On a similar censorship note, Putin’s Supreme Court has closed down the Russian archive that documented all the atrocities of the Second World War. That’s what you do when fighting Nazis. Here’s Brook Gladstone with the story The Death of Historical Memory.
Speaking of Nazis, the Washington Post had a long piece entitled Inside Ted Cruz’s last-ditch battle to keep Trump in power about hard-line Tea Bagger Lyin’ Ted Cruz losing friends after his ardent defense of the Big Lie (spread by Cruz who announced, on January 5th and 6th, that 39% of Americans believed his lie) and his pivotal, essential role in the January 6 insurrection conspiracy. My first thought was — Cruz had friends? One was J. Michael Luttig, the former federal judge, a movement conservative (as they call themselves) for whom Cruz, and John “Greenbay Sweep” Eastman, once clerked (don’t worry, Cruz and Eastman are still cool). Cruz said of Luttig “he was like a father to me.” Luttig was the author of a NY Times op-ed defending Barr’s decision to do Trump a favor in dismissing Mike “Lock Her Up” Flynn’s guilty plea (fucking Comey should’ve done the right thing), and his discretion in calling the lies Flynn pleaded guilty for telling “immaterial”. He has since come out against Trump’s riot at the Capitol, advocates closing loopholes in the Electoral Count Act that Cruz attempted to drive a convoy of anti-vax trucks through, and had some unflattering things to say about Cruz, about whom there is little flattering to say.
Unless, of course, you are Ginni Thomas, who used her protected First Amendment right to voice any opinion whatsoever, in this case in a series of texts to Trump’s chief of staff urging him to fight the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, the certified, recounted results of which horrified this apocalyptic right wing Christian extremist. Ginni is famously married to movement conservative Clarence Thomas. Thomas, always taking his cues from his master, the brilliant, evil Antonin Scalia, has refused to recuse himself from cases involving his wife’s high-powered political activism (among other things she’s on the board of the secretive non-profit that brokered the deal between Trump and the Evangelicals prior to the 2016 election [1]). Clarence Thomas did, however, recently disclose that Ginni had recently taken in over $600,000 for such work, as required when updating his financial disclosure forms. Now she’s being politely asked by the January 6 Committee to come in and invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, over and over. She will likely demand a subpoena, that she will refuse to obey, but presumably Clarence has her back if the case makes it up to his rarefied, unappealable court, the group of lifetime appointees that claims to enforce its own ethical obligations.
The Trump Six on the Supreme Court have been fairly loyal to the incompetent, insane fuck who appointed half of them, ruling (often on the Shadow docket, no debate, no legal reason needed) in a way sure to make America as great as it was in the era of de jure segregation, back alley abortions for the poor and homosexuals Biblically stigmatized, out of faithful loyalty to what the top preachers claim Jesus loves and hates, the only guide needed by these carefully vetted zealots.
Speaking of loyalty oaths, former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yavonovich revealed the other day that Trump’s goons, before smearing her reputation with lies and having Transactional Trump unceremoniously remove her from office, tried to get her to sign an oath of personal loyalty to the leader of the GOP. A loyalty oath? As we call it the Führer Oath:
“I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.”
Seriously though, Cruz had friends?
Cruz, with a damning placard implicating Ketanji Brown Jackson as a RACIST
[1]
Ginni Thomas sits on the board of directors for the powerful, secretive, right-wing political activist nonprofit Council for National Policy — here is their deal with Trump in 2016:
NELSON: . . . Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something like a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don’t have a war chest, you don’t have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don’t have a strategy. And all indications are you’re going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return –
GARFIELD: We have a shopping list.
NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it’s basically got three items.
The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon’s wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal.
The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis.
The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that’s how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.
One of Trump’s most vocal lackeys in the run-up to the MAGA riot was Alabama’s Mo Brooks. Clad in a bulletproof vest, as he later admitted, he exhorted the January 6th Stop the Steal crowd to spontaneously surge down to the Capitol and “kick ass and take names,” to get back what was stolen from them, the greatest president in American history, a man who simply could not losein an honest fight.
Predictably, the transactional Artist of the Deal was not going to take any shit, even from somebody who had so loyally serviced him. Brooks, who Trump had endorsed, is running third in the polls in Alabama and so the great man recently decided to rescind his endorsement.
Trump’s absurdist soundbite was that Brooks had become “woke”. But, of course, it soon came out that Trump had rescinded his endorsement, in large part (Brooks running 3rd in the polls also large) because Brooks, surprisingly a lawyer, told him a few months back that it was impossible to rescind Joe Biden’s presidency and reinstall the rightful loser, Donald Trump, as Trump had demanded. “Rescission” was the word Brooks kept returning to, a technical word Trump must have learned as courts applied recission to strike oppressive clauses from Trump contracts. Brooks clarified that Trump wanted him to rescind the election. How a congressman would do that is hard to say, but his refusal, obviously, was intolerable so Trumpie did what Trumpie always does when a lackey removes his lips from Trumpie’s ass , pitched a lying hissy fit worthy of his boy, Boof “Crucified by the Clintons” Kavanaugh.
Foof… the fucking Orange Polyp and his entitled ilk are exhausting…
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