Heather Cox Richardson, in a post describing the mounting evidence of an extensive seditious conspiracy and an insurrection to keep Trumpie in power highlighted the increased determination of the Republican Party to turn the clock all the way back to pre-Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment days with the so-called Independent state Legislature Doctrine. This doctrine is a variation on the old slavers’ states’ rights argument, publicly embraced by four of the Trump Six so far. The theory would allow Republican-controlled state legislatures to throw out any votes they didn’t like and send their own electors in 2024. They’d use this legal theory, codified in state law, instead of staging a series of frivolous lawsuits and launching a desperate riot. Here’s the fucking religiously and politically zealous bagpiper, William Pelham Barr:
Trump’s attorney general William Barr has just published a book detailing how Trump lied about the election and threatened democracy. And yet, on a tour to sell the book, Barr on Monday told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie that he would nonetheless vote for Trump if he were the Republican nominee in 2024. “Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” he said.
When my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, late in his life, his doctor told him that most men who live to be eighty will develop prostate cancer but that it grows very slowly at that age and they will generally die of causes other than prostate cancer. His doctor recommended “watchful waiting”, keeping an eye on the slow, inexorable advance of this common cancer in older men. Sure enough, something else killed my father, undiagnosed liver cancer, though saying it that way is a bit unfair to the several highly regarded specialists he saw regularly in the last two years of his life, it actually was diagnosed, in the ER, six days before he died.
A few decades later, I myself watchfully waiting, in this case for the results of an MRI on my prostate, an MRI done because my prostate specific antigen levels were quite high. The test results were quickly emailed to me, along with a bill for $162 (thank you, Medicare… the US Gold Standard…) for the short visit with my urologist to set up the MRI (bill for that to follow). I have learned that reading medical test results without knowledge can be needlessly stressful, so I am watchfully waiting for the call from my doctor to tell me what the MRI results mean for my immediate futire.
In this waiting mode you can invent stories, more or less likely, that may or may not explain the delay in hearing from the doctor — though we have no idea about any of these theories. If it was good news, the MRI showed everything nice and benign on the old prostate, the doctor would have immediately called to tell me, no? Since it’s not good news, next step biopsy to confirm cancer suspicion from MRI, he’s waiting to have a few minutes to talk to me since the discussion is longer than “good news, it was benign”. If it was bad news, another theory goes, he’d have called right away. No, wait, he’d give me a day or two in my preferred fool’s paradise before dropping the bad news that I need to have a long needle repeatedly inserted up my ass and jammed into my prostate, likely followed by cancer treatment of some kind. Or any other story I can imagine, including a list of stories involving complications in the doctor’s own life that have caused him to fall behind in updating anxious patients. Since each theory is equally plausible, and equally implausible, I put the whole theorizing out of mind now that I’ve emailed my doctor telling him I have my fingers crossed until he tells me what the MRI results mean. Figure of speech, “fingers crossed”, since I am clearly typing with uncrossed fingers.
I think, philosophically, that everybody has to die of something. I also recall the foamy urine I was seeing five years ago, foam that got so thick it looked like the head on a well-pulled pint of Guinness, foam you could piss deep holes in as you went. Ending with a smiley face in the foam was always fun. That foamy urine, with the swelling of the legs, turned out to be symptoms of a rare kidney disease that taught me a new word — “idiopathic”. What does idiopathic mean? It means we don’t know what causes it, as to the pathology of this disease we are, as they say, idiots. As to the cure? 33% of the time a short course of chemotherapy (at around $25,000 a bag) knocks it out, and I was in that lucky 33%, and lucky too that Obamacare hadn’t been repealed.
That constant itch on the inside of my left scapula? A dermatologist told me the name several years ago but I never retained it. It’s neurological, not topical, I recall that — put what you like on the skin, the itch is caused by a signal sent from a nerve, so nothing will really help with the itch, outside of a good scratch, which I was advised only makes it worse. In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism we live in, I was discussing this itch with Sekhnet, as she scratched it, and soon had videos about Notalgia Paresthetica sent to me, for my edification, or shopping pleasure.
Fucked though so much of this world is, designed by the greediest for the benefit of the greediest, with applause and hero worship for the most successfully greedy, the mass of humanity not only viciously screwed but driven mad by deliberate lies that benefit the worst people alive at any given time, spread with increasingly ridiculous ease by those paid to do it, for the enormous profits of selected far-sighted tech billionaires … we don’t want to leave it. This miraculous world is not the problem, the problem is that we must all leave it one day. The only consistently useful practice available to most of us is taking care of ourselves and our loved ones as well as we can, and watchful waiting.
Cyrus Vance Jr., recently departed DA of Manhattan County (also known as New York County), was either a bit of a coward, corrupt or both. Prior to Trump’s run for president he helped out with making a bad story go away for the future transactional strongman. Vance dismissed an investigation into apparent violations of the law by Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. after they made wildly false claims, fraudulently false claims, to sell apartments in the failed Trump SoHo. A generous bag of campaign money landing on Vance’s desk is said to have preceded Vance’s decision to dismiss the criminal probe into what appeared to be a clear cut set of illegal, profit-driven lies told by the Trump siblings.
Vance’s belated principled decision to begin a criminal investigation of Trump’s shady business practices was launched late in his tenure. Once it got up to speed, two specialized white collar and RICO prosecutors in place and the grand jury investigation in full swing, Vance announced that he would not run for re-election, leaving it up to his successor to actually prosecute Trump. Current DAAlvin Bragg, absent secret reasons that he’s also hiding, ones that would make him look better than any other politician vetted for cowardice and practical flexibility, the bona fides for the job, is another one. At first he lied about his intentions, even hiring a new lead prosecutor, a white collar criminal defense attorney, a few days before dismissing the grand jury that was apparently, according to the two prosecutors whose resignation letters Bragg will not release, ready to indict DonaldTrump for a few of his many crimes in a life of unaccountability..
I’ll let Glenn Kirschner describe exactly why Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg appears to be a sad pile of shit.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson commemorates the anniversary of the famous clash on an Alabama bridge during the fight for voting rights, a fight that was set back fifty years by John Roberts and four other Federalist Society “originalists” who, in 2013, overruled a 98-0 Senate vote and the approving signature of the conservative Republican president who signed the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. (Sickening details of that unappealable polite, hack decision here [1])
March 7, 1965 was called “Bloody Sunday” because of the spilled blood of beaten protesters peacefully seeking the right to vote that is guaranteed in the Constitution. That blood was shed by Alabama state troopers and policemen, who turned massive violence on a peaceful crowd, making a goddamned point about the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of Blacks.
Here’s a snapshot, from Heather’s piece last night. The whole thing is a great, thought-provoking read, like all of her Letters from an American, unless you are offended by the notion of so-called cause and effect and the incendiary idea of history itself.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bull whips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis, and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
[1] a little snapshotof how the clock gets turned back by a tiny, powerful, determined elite:
Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:
recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.”
Why the federal government stopped protecting Blacks from organized terrorism150 years ago
When we talk about the present, armed men, aggrieved, demanding the right to carry their guns wherever they choose, in the name of enforcing freedom, we are also talking about any number of epochs in American and world history. After such men seceded from their country and went to war to enforce their version of freedom — the state gets the final word on whether we can hold slaves or not and what we are allowed to do to them — they were damned if they were going to let some federal government they had already seceded from tell them what to do.
After the Civil War it was up to Congress, the white supremacist President who succeeded Lincoln and, most especially, the Supreme Court, to decide how things would be settled for former slaves (and everyone else deprived of guaranteed constitutional rights by a state) for the next century. It wasn’t long after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and to enforce it, the XIII, XIV and XV Amendments were made part of the Constitution, that the Supreme Court settled matters by putting the key to enforcement of all three, the XIVth Amendment, into an almost century long judicially-induced coma.
A few years after the war the rest of the rapidly expanding, war-ravaged nation soon lost any interest in protecting the rights of newly equal citizen Negroes, whose day as the “special favorites of the Law,” in the words of the Supreme Court (in thecruelly ironically titled 1883 Civil Rights cases), was fittingly at an end. It was decreed that freed slaves must simply get the same rights all poor, powerless white citizens enjoy, no more and, well, actually, a few less.
As a result of the 5-4 Slaughterhouse decision in 1873, and the even uglier one in U.S. v. Cruikshank, the protections of the XIVth Amendment (as well as XIIIth and XVth) were effectively nullified. Blacks, and anyone else whose newly established XIVth Amendment rights were violated, were barred from the federal courts for more than ninety years pursuant to Slaughterhouse. Corporations, ironically, were the main beneficiaries of the XIVth Amendment until the late 20th century. States were deemed the sole enforcers of criminal violations of civil rights for almost a century, pursuant to the ruling in a series of cases starting withCruikshank.
The Slaughterhouse cases were initiated by white butchers who the court went out of its way to point out were not the former slaves for whose benefit the lofty and complex XIV Amendment had been crafted. The court then took pains to set out, in a familiar, crabbed, judicially perverse manner, exactly how limited the rights of federal citizenship guaranteed in the Amendment really were, so called “intent of the framers” (most of whom were still around) be damned. As often in supremely biased Supreme Court split decisions, the dissent had the better of the argument and now appearsprescient.
But the unappealable 5-4 majority ruled and that was the law of the land for a century – under a tortured interpretation of the Constitution the doors of the federal court were virtually closed to XIVth Amendment cases, unless the plaintiff was a corporation. The 5-4 decision in Slaughterhouse was as good as, and even more binding than, the historic 9-0 decision in Brown v. Board of Education almost a century later.
The Slaughterhouse court went out of its way to hold that an American’s federal rights were extremely limited, the right to use ports, to travel freely from state to state, to be protected from piracy on the high seas and the right to use navigable interstate waterways. The rest, left up to the states.
Justice Stephen J. Field, writing for the three other dissenters, offered a well-reasoned, far-sighted defense of the principles of liberty guaranteed by our laws. Fields pointed out the obvious “intent of the framers” of the amendment:
This legislation was supported upon the theory that citizens of the United States as such were entitled to the rights and privileges enumerated, and that to deny to any such citizen equality in these rights and privileges with others, was, to the extent of the denial, subjecting him to an involuntary [83 U.S. 36, 92] servitude. Senator Trumbull, who drew the act and who was its earnest advocate in the Senate, stated, on opening the discussion upon it in that body, that the measure was intended to give effect to the declaration of the amendment, and to secure to all persons in the United States practical freedom.
After referring to several statutes passed in some of the Southern States, discriminating between the freedmen and white citizens, and after citing the definition of civil liberty given by Blackstone, the Senator said: ‘I take it that any statute which is not equal to all, and which deprives any citizen of civil rights, which are secured to other citizens, is an unjust encroachment upon his liberty; and it is in fact a badge of servitude which by the Constitution is prohibited.’
And:
In Corfield v. Coryell, Mr. Justice Washington said he had ‘no hesitation in confining these expressions to those privileges and immunities which were, in their nature, fundamental; which belong of right to citizens of all free governments, and which have at all times been enjoyed by the citizens of the several States which compose the Union, from the time of their becoming free, independent, and sovereign;’ and, in considering what those fundamental privileges were, he said that perhaps it would be more tedious than difficult to enumerate them, but that they might be ‘all comprehended under the following general heads: protection by the government; the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject, nevertheless, to such restraints as the government may justly prescribe for the general good of the whole.’
This appears to me to be a sound construction of the clause in question. The privileges and immunities designated are those which of right belong to the citizens of all free governments. Clearly among these must be placed the right to pursue a lawful employment in a lawful manner, without other restraint than such as equally affects all persons.
However, 5-4 it was, and for almost a century the privileges and immunities, equal protection of the law, and guarantees of due process the XIVth Amendment was designed to protect, were limited almost exclusively to corporations. The Cruikshank case put the final deadly nail into the coffin of the rights of freed Blacks to be protected from terrorism, making it explicit that only the states could prosecute murders within their borders.
Cruikshank led a large white mob of Confederate veterans, on horseback with at least one cannon, that overwhelmed a group of Black Union veterans guarding the county seat in Colfax, Louisiana. The vastly outnumbered Blacks were defending their recent electoral victory, the whites, intent on overturning the election results, slaughtered countless Blacks, many of whom had already surrendered. As enraged mobs will do, when engaging in “legitimate political discourse”. No white man would go to prison for this slaughter, under the law of Louisiana, or the Ku Klux Klan Act which had been designed to prosecute such atrocities (and had been extremely effective during the short period of its enforcement).
The final word on the lasting meaning of the Civil War, three constitutional amendments and numerous laws guaranteeing equality before the law, went to a narrow majority of one vote on the Supreme Court. C’est la vie, one supposes. History shows that if we make strong laws to ban the study of historical subjects that are shameful, we don’t need to feel shame about the past, or worry about its loud reverberations in our own time. So simple!
The white men of the Confederacy who went to war to defend states’ rights to keep the Blacks in chattel slavery were not wrong to be terrified of the righteous retribution people they tortured for hundreds of years might rightfully visit upon them once free. That there was little of it was no reason not to fear a bloodbath. They themselves would have wished to do no less to their former enslavers, finding themselves no longer in chains.
After the war was lost Confederate veterans formed white terrorist gangs for a preemptive strike against a potentially powerful enemy. From the KKK point of view it was terror motivated survival, common sense to use terror against a terror they rightfully feared. They dressed up in disguises (many of them were respectable local professionals), ride at night, in numbers, shoot into their houses, their churches, whip the snot out of them, burn their houses, burn crosses, if he is an outspoken man they grab him at gunpoint, whip him bloody, sometimes, before they killed they tortured, cut off body parts, ears, nose, lips, fingers, breasts, genitals, then, if a man, castrate him, set him on fire and hang him slowly, so he can do one last dance for the boys. Pregnant women’s could be sliced open during hanging, a KKK twofer. Their argument: they’d do no less to us if they had the chance!
The irrefutable logic of hatred, the echoes that are so easy to hear in their populist modern day version.
Their logic is always the same, if we don’t dominate them they’ll seek justice against us, just like we would if theroles were reversed and they had the power.
The roots of the klan, a crazed terrorist organization if there ever was one, was the terror of righteous retribution, the recognition of what they themselves would have done in the freed slaves’ position, after centuries of rape and brutality, their anguished Jeffersonian mortal terror of a just God’s certain, terrible punishmentof a long crime so wicked.
No reason to traumatize our own kids by making them read descriptions of this ugly war that needs to be fought everyday… ban history.
Barr is just the latest in the parade of former Trump officials to wash their hands of him long after their public condemnation would have done any good: John Bolton, John F. Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Reince Priebus, Nikki Haley,Gary Cohn, Omarosa Manigault Newman, Michael Cohen, Anthony Scaramucci, H.R. McMaster and many more.
But nobody in the administration did more to enable Trump’s deceptions and assaults on democracy than Barr. He buried the Mueller report while issuing a public summary that misrepresented it; he alleged the Obamaadministration “spied” on the Trump campaign, and he appointed a prosecutor who is, years later, still trying to prove true Trump’s paranoid fantasy; he scoured the world for evidence to discredit the Trump-Russia probe; his Justice Department gave credibility to Rudy Giuliani’s ravings about the Bidens in Ukraine; he tried to give favorable treatment to Trump cronies Michael Flynn and Roger Stone; he justified the violent assault on peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Square; he made unfounded allegations against “antifa” and assembled a militia-like force of often-unidentified federal police in D.C. And on, and on.
Before you bother watching an interview with this pugnacious, ethically retarded culturewarrior, take a moment to readthe op ed.
What do they want revenge for? Assholes, complete fucking assholes, who say they are driven by revenge. There’s a lamppost for every one of those vicious bastards, in the kingdom of just, bloody revenge. Take it to the bank.
The terrible thing latelyaboutmy desire to avoid having to fight over triflesis that I’m even procrastinating about things like calls to merchants where I have credits of hundreds of dollars because I don’t want to fuckinghear:
“well sir, under corporate policy you needed to redeem all credit within 90 days, which has expired by one year, as you can plainly see, so you will have to talk to corporate if you have a problem.”
And I go “I thought I was talking to fucking corporate”
And they’ll say “no, corporate is corporate and we’re customer service, there’s no direct connection. We have no authority over corporate, we can’t connect you with corporate, our system doesn’t allow it, so you have to call corporate directly because that’s corporate policy, sir.”
And the galling thought of that likely conversation with an otherwise nice, completely powerless kidmakes me go fuck no, not today, you fucking corporate Nazi fucks…
Thoughhistory teaches us that in the end Nazis will lose, while they are in the ascendancy they can make life very, very bitter.As we can see with just a glance in any direction.
gratuitousblahg 