In yet another reminder that Jeff Bezos is among the four or five biggest pieces of human shit walking the planet today, the reason I had to construct the little two cropped shot collage of the headline and the caption of the picture of Amy Coney Barrett in the previous post (instead of the perfectly lined up screen shot I was ready to snap when Bezos’s indomitable ad popped up) is that Jeff Bezos, pioneer in radical ads that you can’t make go away by clicking the X, ads that you have to wait for while they play in their entirety, undefeatable fuck you ads immediately forming an unstoppable loop on your phone and you can’t fucking get rid of them, blocked the top third of my screen.
You know Bezos needs the money, because being the second richest guy ever to live is never going to be enough for a malignant fucking tumor like Bezos. We must remember the terrible pressure on people like Bezos everyday in the highly competitive circles in which they run with their fellow psychopathically greedywinners. Take care not to tax them!
Irony is dead, yo. Justice Coney Barrett made this claim at the fucking Mitch McConnell Center sitting right next to McConnell until she got up to speak. McConnell who had saved her a seat on the high court as well, and ram-rodded her historically quick-stepped nomination through the recently non-filibustered (by McConnell) confirmation on a partyline 51-49vote during the middle of the 2020presidentialelection.
To think that a judge of great integrity would participate in a sprint for an illegitimate Supreme Court seat, during voting in a presidential election, well, that’s partisan hackery right there, that!
Anyway, as Mark Meadows texted to Ginni Thomas in the days leading up toTrump’sMAGA riot at the Capitol:
“This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
Keep in mind that the legal standard for recusal (applicable to every American judge outside of the unappealavle top nine) is an APPEARANCE of impropriety or conflict of interest. From today’s New York Times:
Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”
Extremists will be extremists, especially if they believe the entire world is against them and they have to fight by any means necessary, as these right-wing, USA! USA!!! chanting motherfuckers herealways do, in their divine struggle.
The result of Stalin’s campaign was a catastrophe. In spring 1933 death rates in Ukraine spiked. Between 1931 and 1934 at least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the U.S.S.R. Among them, according to a study conducted by a team of Ukrainian demographers, were at least 3.9 million Ukrainians. Police archives contain multiple descriptions of instances of cannibalism as well as lawlessness, theft, and lynching. Mass graves were dug across the countryside. Hunger also affected the urban population, though many were able to survive thanks to ration cards. Still, in Ukraine’s largest cities, corpses could be seen on the street.
Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show
Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.
The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.
On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
On a separate but related note, why hasn’t DOJ indicted Mark “Tea Partiers for Jesus” Meadows for his months’ old contempt of Congress?What the fuck, Merrick?
Ginni Thomas, wife of überconservative Supreme Court justice and victim of a “high tech lynching” Clarence Thomas, is an überconservative political activist who fancies herself an ardent follower of Jesus Christ. She would follow Jesus anywhere, apparently, including the overturning of so-called democracy. She worked closely with the deeply religious Donald Trump and communicated many times with his pious Christian final chief of staff Mark Meadows after the election was stolen by Satanists. The two exchanged fervent texts in the days after the Donald’s loss to Joe Biden in an election that horrified them both. Some of these texts were turned over to the January 6 Commission and written about in detail in today’s Washington Post. The fervent Christian tone of many of these texts citing the intercession of the King of Kings and casting the middle-of-the-road Joe Biden as the embodiment of evil has ’em saying “oy, for Christ’s sake!”
At the center of those who supported Trump in 2016 were the thousand Evangelical leaders who were told by the Council on National Policy (the secret far-right nonprofit organization that Ginni Thomas sits on the board of) to hold their noses at the stench of the prolifically sinning spray tanned Flawed Vessel, in exchange for sacred promises that would advance their Christian fundamentalist jihad. To cement this unholy alliance Trump swore to appoint religious Christian Supreme Courts justices who had been carefully vetted for conservative Christian values by Leonard Leo [1] at the Federalist Society (a Catholic, true, but we can’t always be choosy when fighting evil), appoint only Protestants to the president’s religious advisory council (created to promote interfaith dialogue and cooperation), to get rid of a poor woman’s right to abortion, cut taxes on the wealthy and the rest of the Jesus Agenda, all approved personally by the King of Kings.
It should come as no shock that the extreme right is full of messianic Christian evangelists who believe Jesus Christ wants the US to be a conservative Christian theocracy, the Framers’ so-called explicit First Amendment right of religious liberty in the be damned to hell. Christian fundamentalists have long been associated with far right campaigns of all sorts, going back decades. Why does every American president dutifully attend the Christian prayer breakfast where they can piously hobnob and pose for smiling pictures with far-right religious fanatics/lobbyists? Only Jesus, and the secret donors, know.
Here is an excellent piece by Greg Sargent, commenting on the shock of the conservative Joe Scarborough on reading the Thomas-Meadows texts that cast Trump’s struggle to remain in power in messianic terms, in the black and white total war terms of America’s white Christian punitive versionof Sharia law.
Leonard A. Leo is an American lawyer and conservative legal activist. He was the longtime vice president of the Federalist Society, where he is co-chairman of the board of directors. Leo has led campaigns to support the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.Wikipedia
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the horror show of outraged GOP members on the Senate Judiciary Committee making fiery sound bites for MAGA nation by attacking a supremely qualified future Supreme Court justice (Manchin and Sinema permitting). I knew the Democrats would be unable to make these bigots shut up, improvisationally challenged corporate institutionalists that many of them are. Chris Hayes and his team assembled a nice, hideous little collage of angry white senators attacking the nominee about her race, a passion play that no doubt played bigly with their Trump-addicted fan base.
Clarence “Black Klansman” Thomas called questions about his ongoing sexual harassment of Anita Hill during his confirmation “a high tech lynching.” Now these Trumpists are going old school, making open racism (particularly against women of color) great again, no need for tech of any height: so you’re Black so you support CRT instead of Originalism, the Christian way; what about violent crimes committed by your people, rape and murder, and RAPE and RAPE; and what about this children’s book accusing babies of being racist, babies for Christ’s sake? [1] You fucking wrote it, didn’t you? Didn’t you, you fucking liar?
The clip, starting with Tennessee genius Marsha Blackburn (“tell us honestly about your hidden agenda to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our abortion jurisprudence”) runs just over a minute, and as you listen, try to picture any of these provocative, idiotic “questions” asked of one of the carefully vetted right-wing judicial activist ideologues appointed, filibuster-free, by Putin’s favorite totally exonerated American president.
[1]
Lyin’, Toadyin’ Ted, in prime form, like when he said to the dignified Attorney General “give me a break, Garland… You admitted that giving a Nazi salute is protected expression under the First Amendment and you’re making a big deal about a little Nazi salute, oh, my God, the guy did a Nazi salute! What’s America coming to, MAGA nation, when you can’t even give a goddamn Nazi salute to some know-it-all fucking metrosexual quinoa eating smart guy at aschool board meeting?”
This turd literally has no idea what decency is, or good citizenship, or the American ideal.
The truth is important, for its own sake and to advance intelligent decision making. It is impossible for the governed to give informed consent about anything if important information is hidden. Those who don’t know all the facts can’t decide anything knowingly, can’t meaningfully consent to anything.
Would it have hurt a presidential candidate if the voters knew he paid off a porn actress and a Playboy model to keep quiet about having sex with him while he was married to his third wife? We’ll never know, but keeping that damaging information secret certainly didn’t hurt him in the polls. The only person who paid any price for the crime of using campaign funds to buy the silence of hired adulterous sex companions was the henchman who did some time in jail carrying out his Evangelical Christian-endorsed master’s wishes for absolute secrecy.
The best policy for those who would hide shameful or otherwise damaging things, it appears, is simply not to be transparent. It doesn’t take a dictator to realize this. Here’s an example from the recently elected DA of NY County, Alvin Bragg. He decided he didn’t want to risk being the first to criminally prosecute Donald Trump, it was too dangerous for him, or for whatever his reasons are. He kept everything nice and opaque as he brazened his way through quietly dropping the case.
His predecessor, a fairly cowardly (or just compromised) man named Cyrus Vance, Jr. hired two experienced, specialized lead prosecutors to try Donald Trump for his regular, fraudulent, wildly changing valuations of his properties. Vance convened a criminal grand jury, put the crack legal team in place to collect the evidenve and then announced he would not run for reelection as Manhattan DA. His successor, Alvin Bragg, appeared to be dragging his feet on the criminal prosecution of Trump’s business empire. The grand jury hadn’t heard testimony for weeks, there was rumbling as the gathering case suddenly stood still. Then the two top Trump prosecutors resigned.
Bragg immediately announced that his criminal probe was going forward, that the two lead prosecutors who’d resigned would be immediately replaced by a lawyer who had defended many powerful white collar defendants in Trump’s position. In response to requests for the resignation letters, he claimed he could not release them because they contained information that might compromise the prosecution of Trump. A ridiculous claim, since no experienced prosecutor would include compromising info in a resignation letter. Bragg refused to release the letters, but he appeared to be letting the grand jury’s term expire, quietly running out the game clock, ending the prosecution before an indictment could be filed. In this case, appearance was soon confirmed as reality.
Eventually things come out. Sometimes it is decades later, but in this case, only a few weeks. The NY Times published Mark Pomerantz’s resignation letter yesterday. It reads, in part:
As you know from our recent conversations and presentations, I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did. . .
. . .You have reached the decision not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time. The investigation has been suspended indefinitely. Of course, that is your decision to make. I do not question your authority to make it, and I accept that you have made it sincerely. However, a decision made in good faith may nevertheless be wrong. I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position. . .
. . . To the extent you have raised issues as to the legal and factual sufficiency of our case and the likelihood that a prosecution would succeed, I and others have advised you that we have evidence sufficient to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and we believe that the prosecution would prevail if charges were brought and the matter were tried to an impartial jury. No case is perfect. Whatever the risks of bringing the case may be, I am convinced that a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice. As I have suggested to you, respect for the rule of law, and the need to reinforce the bedrock proposition that “no man is above the law,” require that this prosecution be brought even if a conviction is not certain.
Jesus, no wonder Bragg tried to keep the letter secret. It questioned his good faith belief that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute (while refusing to call further witnesses for even more grand jury evidence) and makes a pretty good argument for that questioning. Bragg openly saying he had decided it was too risky (for his career) to prosecute Trump, and fail, would not have flown, virtually noAmerican politician would have done that. So, you do next best thing — tell a few lies, keep everything nice and opaque and count on the two second attention span of overwhelmed consumer/citizens who will soon turn their shattered attention to the next titillating outrage. It happens every few seconds in our frantic 24/7 news cycle. No worries. I’m just sorry I wasted my vote on this lying sack o’ non-transparency.
Authoritarians, who infantilize their followers by making them believe in a black and white world without any gradation or nuance, protect their sensitive followers from the psychological harm of unpleasant truths. Demagogues aggressively arm their supporters against harsh things in the past, like massacres, pogroms, unprovoked wars or genocide, things that could embarrass, shame or humiliate them.
Turkey made a law criminalizing the mention of the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians early on in WWI. Calling this mass murder, this “ethnic cleansing”, an act of genocide will land you in prison in Turkey. Never fucking happened. Holocaust denial anyone?
The unspeakably cruel Middle Passage (Africa to the New World, chained, naked, in a coffin-sized space under the deck), and the lucrative employment and torture of American slaves from Africa were actual, horrific, well-documented, centuries-long practices that happened, with reverberations into the present in terms of quality of life, life expectancy, wealth inequality, psychological and physical safety and a host of other issues. Horrific, the amount of guilt and anguish knowing any of this could cause innocent white schoolchildren.
In the US the party of aggrieved white people is convinced that the real victims of so-called racism are the innocent white people who never owned slaves yet are being made to feel shame, discomfort, chagrin, guilt, anguish and so on when the subject of the ‘peculiar institution’ is discussed by the merciless advocates of Critical Race Theory. The solution is as simple as the problem to an authoritarian — the subject of the Peculiar Institution may not be discussed in a way that could cause anyone to feel shame, discomfort, chagrin, guilt, anguish or in any way like a bad person. Talk about snowflakes…
The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 [2]? Relatively few Americans (outside of Black descendants of those massacred) heard about this massive atrocity until almost a century after it took place, accounts of it wiped from newspaper archives to ensure the children of the men who murdered countless souls, machine gunned some, bombed and burned down their entire neighborhood, then put them in an open air prison camp outside of Tulsa, would never feel shame, discomfort, etc. The massacre came in the context of the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan in the wake of World War One, though discussion of any of that could also cause shame, discomfort, chagrin, denial, anger etc. Here’s a footnote for those with a strong stomach [1].
Holodomor, the Stalinist terror famine that killed millions in Ukraine from 1931 to 1932? Not a deliberate act of vengeance by Stalin, a tragic mistake by bureaucrats that led to many deaths during that famine, the 3.9 million Ukrainians who died were not alone, many other Soviet citizens also died, plus, they were killed by fellow Ukrainians, plus, they were not loyal to the Soviet state that conquered them. So you see? Fuck Ukraine.
The My Lai Massacre [3], covered up by men famed for their integrity, guys like Colin Powell, was one of many, many such massacres in Vietnam during which locals were murdered by American boys crazed by the cruelty of a war where the enemy could be anybody, a war that no American really understood the actual reason for, except for the armament profiteers. How much shame, discomfort and guilt I have always felt when I consider that my government sent young men, a couple of years older than me, to a place where they’d be driven insane and wind up doing such things, in my name. Better to make it go away!
Postcards, issued in 1911, featured the hanging of African-American farm wife Laura Nelson and her castrated son from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma—an event that later inspired the activism of Woody Guthrie. Another postcard showed the burning of an unidentified Black man in Durant, and was captioned “Coon Cooking.” In 1917, 17 white members of the International Workers of the World were flogged, tarred, feathered, and turned loose on the prairie by Knights of Liberty dressed in black robes and masks. By 1921, according to historian Scott Ellsworth, a revived Tulsa Ku Klux Klan claimed an active membership of 3,200.
source(National Endowment for the Humanities, obviously an anti-white hate group…)
[2]
The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. Alternatively known as the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, the event is considered one of “the single worst incident[s] of racial violence in American history”, and is believed to be one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the history of the United States. Wikipedia
[3]
The Mỹ Lai massacre was the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by United States troops in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on 16 March 1968 during the Vietnam War. Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division. Wikipedia
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