Friendship is like our Republic, if we can keep it.
Author Archives: oinsketta
Class Action against DeathSantis
Heather had too much news in her Letter from an American last night. Here’s another important story:
Today, three of the migrants Florida governor Ron DeSantis flew from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard filed a class action lawsuit against DeSantis, secretary of the Florida Department of Transportation Jared W. Purdue, the state of Florida, the Florida Department of Transportation, and others, for planning and executing “a premeditated, fraudulent, and illegal scheme” to exploit vulnerable migrants—in this country legally—“for the sole purpose of advancing their own personal, financial and political interests.”
The suit alleges that the defendants trolled the streets outside a migrant shelter in Texas offering humanitarian assistance, “then made false promises and false representations that if Plaintiffs and class members were willing to board airplanes to other states, they would receive employment, housing, educational opportunities, and other like assistance upon their arrival.” Once they agreed, the plaintiffs put them up in hotels away from the migrant center where someone might tell them they were being abused.
The defendants allegedly paid $615,000 to charter two private planes ($12,300 per passenger) and told the plaintiffs they were being sent to Washington, D.C., or to Boston. While on the plane, the defendants gave the migrants “a shiny, red folder that included other official-looking materials, including a brochure entitled ‘Massachusetts Refugee Benefits’” full of false information.
The migrants were dropped on Martha’s Vineyard in the evening without food, water, or shelter, and with no one aware they were coming. Then the defendants disappeared and refused to answer calls from the plaintiffs to learn what was going on. This, the plaintiffs say, was “cruelty akin to what they fled in their home country.” They allege the defendants violated their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The next day, DeSantis claimed responsibility. Since then he has claimed on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show that the migrants traveled voluntarily and that they signed consent forms, although he could explain how he had authority to move migrants from Texas when he is the governor of Florida only by saying that migrants come to Florida, but “the problem is we’re not seeing mass movements of them…. It’s just coming in onesie-twosies.” So he had those likely to come to Florida rounded up in Texas.
Today he called the lawsuit “political theater.”
Another fake commie witch hunt by left wing fascist cucks! Radical Left, Christ hating, name calling drama queen fucks!
Me, as we teeter on the possible threshold of one-party rule, by an angry party that embraces an absurd lie about a stolen election and is hell-bent on revenge, I keep thinking of the Nazi knack for mocking and dismissing. Also, their unhesitating use of any lie that pops into their collective head. Jews on line for the gas chamber were told by their Nazi handlers at “Camp Auschwitz” that they were going to have a hot shower, men and women together, and then would be given a hot meal and allowed to rest. That false and misleading statement was quite a whopper, as it turned out. Or, as defenders of such things would say “political theatre” by partisans keen on making honest Nazis look “evil”.
Nobody
The DISCLOSE ACT
Heather Cox Richardson explains:
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced yesterday that the Senate will vote later this week on the DISCLOSE Act, sponsored by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), which requires super PACs and other groups that do not have to disclose their donors—so-called dark money groups—to identify those who give $10,000 or more during an election season. It would also prohibit foreign entities from contributing at all. In a blow against those who have helped to pack our courts, it would require anyone spending money to advance the candidacies of judicial nominees to disclose their donors, too.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, such advocacy groups can take unlimited money from individuals, corporations, or other entities so long as they don’t directly coordinate with a candidate, and they do not have to identify who the donors are. “Their ruling has paved the way for billions in unlimited campaign contributions by Super PACs and other dark money groups over the last decade,” Schumer said. “Ordinary citizens, meanwhile, have had their voices drowned out by elites who have millions to spare for political donations.”
Pointing to the recent $1.6 billion donation to a new right-wing political advocacy trust, President Joe Biden noted that the public found out about that donation only because someone tipped off a reporter.
Republicans are expected to oppose the bill.
Of course, what they will likely do in opposing the bill is filibuster it, on behalf of their dark money benefactors. Just the way anti-lynching laws were blocked from being publicly debated by the likes of Strom Thurmond, on his feet blustering for hours while peeing in a bag attached to his leg.
Damaged souls
Both of my parents were damaged souls, as are my sister and I. It is a struggle to do certain things, because of the damage. To resist anger when we feel unfairly judged is hard for everybody, harder for me and it was harder still for my parents, whose struggle with intense frustration only ended when they died.
My parents were severely damaged because when they were young, instead of a soft hand on them when they were hurt, they got harsh blows from a mother who was very damaged and physically aggressive when angry. In the case of both of my grandmothers, I have no idea what damaged them. They were beating their children long before their entire families were murdered by other damaged people, following the lead of a charismatic uber-damaged person who told them to destroy everyone like my family.
Trauma is, sadly, a common part of our experience as humans, it is also part of our shared experience and history. Lucky are those few who grow up without experiencing any trauma. A girl can have a wonderful childhood, grow up to be a fairly happy young woman, and one day, minding her own business, fall victim to a vicious predator, which will traumatize her, no matter that her life has been so kind to her so far. Her trust in strangers will be snatched from her forever, she will never walk alone down a street again without fear.
Knowing that people who act like destructive assholes are acting out of their damage is little help, of course. Being damaged confers no right to damage anyone else, but it is also sometimes irresistible, to someone in great pain, to inflict pain on somebody else. I’m not just talking about whipping a baby in the face, breaking a sturdy wooden stick over a child’s ass or throwing them on the ground and kicking them over and over. You can inflict exquisite pain merely by refusing to extend mercy when it is asked for. The beauty of this form of sadism is its subtlety.
“You assume my silence means I am refusing to extend mercy, because everything is about YOU. I am very busy, I am thinking about a lot of other things, I have responsibilities and things I have to do every day, I have people who depend on me. Unlike you, I do not enjoy the leisure to sit and brood, and write, and draw, and play the piano, and cook, and imagine, while doing so, that I live in a better, higher world where creativity for its own sake is of great value. I live in the real world, and in that world you suck up your childish personal feelings, you forget about things you say ‘hurt’ you and you just move on like an adult, instead of being a pathetic, dependent, needy little worm. I am strong, you are weak, why would I surrender to you?”
Of course, you will seldom get this kind of detailed response unless you press someone for it. Once you get the indignant summary of their total innocence, and your utter unworthiness, you will know the story in better detail. The damage done to them made them ignore you when you needed understanding and sympathy. That’s easy enough to follow, but what do you do then?
I wake up thinking about this quite often. Friendships seldom last a lifetime, and when they begin to fray this is the kind of thing I wake up thinking about. Why is it so hard for a friend to just acknowledge that it was wrong to do something that hurt me, wrong to tell people an untrue story about our respective roles in the death of our friendship?
I consider the cycle: we are all sometimes hurt, develop defenses, get hurt again, build walls, try different strategies, get hurt again, fortify our fortifications. I think the only way out of the cycle, if we care about the other person in the conflict, is extending the benefit of the doubt, having an honest exchange, reaching mutual understanding. I also realize the vulnerability required in this process is impossibly threatening for some people. Too painful for those who insist they are what they are, take it or leave it, nothing fundamental can change about them, plenty of people love and admire them and that it’s your problem if you need more than they are capable of giving you. On one level this is absolutely true.
My father, a man who stuck to that formulation of life, had deathbed regrets about living that way. “I think now of how much richer my life would have been,” he said in that raspy dying man’s voice, “if I hadn’t seen the world as black and white, if I’d been able to see all the nuance, gradations and colors that are actually life…” Then he died.
Personally, I think making the effort not to die that way is important. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. It is much easier to act like you’re not damaged than to live with the damage done to you and trying to heal it. That there, to me, is one of the great tragedies of the human world.
Another homerun by Heather
She begins:
In 1761, 55-year-old Benjamin Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and later wrote that he expected the young monarch’s reign would “be happy and truly glorious.” Then, in 1776, he helped to draft and then signed the Declaration of Independence. An 81-year-old man in 1787, he urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had written.
“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-17-2022
endlösung
The Germans, with their knack for putting a lot of meaning into a single compound word, have a word for “final solution” — an infamous plan that was almost a decade in the making before it was carried out. That word is endlösung. It was used by Herr Hitler to describe his ultimate plan for the virulent enemies of the Thousand Year Reich, but he was coy about what it actually meant, lying to suit the occasion, until it became grimly clear what he meant — the forced relocation and mass murder of millions. By then, well, that was the final word on the mostly secret Final Solution.
I just read a brilliant February 2017 account, by Ron Rosenbaum, of the failure of German media, and German politicians, to ever get a hold on the slippery liar who would become their infallible leader for all twelve years of its glorious Thousand Year Reich [1]. He was, in the alarming manner of our own Donald J. Trump, normalized, even in his most bizarre, clownish, insane moments.
There are some, I suppose, who still believe that Hitler’s military machine that conquered much of the world with its blitzkrieg, lightning war, a maniacally fast overrunning of nations by soldiers literally flying on speed, (a drug called Pervitin [2] was widely distributed to keep the wehrmacht triumphantly on the offensive), was Germany’s greatest hour. Such people are, as a lawyer friend might put it, not unsympathetic to Nazism.
What is MAGA’s endlösung, er, endgame? They want states’ rights, except when it comes to abortion, gay marriage, contraception, interracial marriage, voting rights, unlimited dark money in politics, repudiation of Climate Alarmism, end of all government “entitlements” and regulation, enforcement of cannibis prohibition and so forth. All those are well within the federal government’s right to regulate everywhere at once, according to the unique and purely “transactional” legal geniuses of the extreme right-wing judicial fraternity known as the Federalist Society. Standard rules for elections for federal office to ensure full voting rights for all citizens? States’ Rights! Medical insurance/health care for poor people? States’ Rights! Pollution? States’ Rights! Guns? States’ rights! The unappealable right of a state legislature to overturn an ugly election result? States’ Rights!
During the Third Reich, when Herr Hitler was making Germany great again, the Nazis realized the importance of having a uniform, lockstep, one party government, judiciary, media and culture. Again, German had the word for it: gleichschaltung. Rosenbaum describes it:
But swiftly, oh so swiftly, the order of the day became “gleichschaltung” — “realignment,” or forced conformity, savage normalization. Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists made it their crusade to get the German body politic “adjusted” to the new reign of terror. “Gleichschaltung” meant normalize or else.
The first German profession to fully Nazify, expelling all Jews, Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, etc., was the German doctors. They were quickly followed by German lawyers. Soon it was the civil service and everything else. If you wanted to advance, or even keep your job, as long as you weren’t a Jew, you swore an oath of personal loyalty to Herr Hitler. In a very short time, it became normal that every clerk you met, every teacher, every policeman, every judge, was a Nazi who has taken a blood oath to whatever the Führer had decided to do that day.
So we have many MAGA candidates running on the proven lie that the 2020 presidential election (and not any others on those same ballots) was riddled with fraud, rigged, stolen from the rightful winner who got a record (for an incumbent) almost 74,000,000 votes. Biden, not really the president, not REALLY, you know, if you consider how much outright fraud there was (none was actually demonstrated, outside of a few aged Floridians casting multiple votes for F POTUS), and all the allegations, well, you can’t ignore the millions who honestly believe that the REAL lie is that the election was fair. They are literally running on the Big Lie.
The Big Lie was perfected by Hitler’s PR genius, Minister of Public Enlightenment Aryan Superman Dr. Josef Goebbels (popularly known as the Poisonous Dwarf). Comparisons are odious sometimes, but when the foo shits…
[1] Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post” February 5, 2017 • By Ron Rosenbaum https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/normalization-lesson-munich-post/?s=03
[2] Pervitin was Nazi Germany’s wonder drug, one that was designed to enable pilots, sailors and infantry troops deliver superhuman performance. Soldiers who took Pervitin stayed awake for days at a time, walked for miles without resting, and felt no pain or hunger. Today we know this drug as methamphetamine, or crystal meth. (from top google hit, oddly enough a site called Amusingplanet.com, under the title: Pervitin: the Wonder Drug that Fueled Nazi Germany
1https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/05/pervitin-wonder-drug-that-fueled-nazi.html)
Update on American Eichmann, Jeffrey Clark
The DC Bar Association Ethics Committee is investigating whether to take disciplinary action against Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s most loyal DOJ employee, a lawyer who was willing to send a letter from DOJ to multiple states asserting lies in order to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Ruth Marcus writing in yesterday’s Washington Post describes Clark’s response to the disciplinary committee.
The document reads like something the Federalist Society would submit if it had created an artificial intelligence program to draft legal pleadings. The bar doesn’t have authority to discipline Clark because that “would intrude on the President’s exclusive and unreviewable authority over federal criminal and civil investigations occurring during his term of office.” The bar can’t act “because the President has an absolute right to seek legal and other forms of advice as to the discharge of his responsibilities under the Take Care Clause.”
Disciplining Clark “would intrude on the President’s exclusive and unreviewable authority to remove and appoint senior officials of the Department of Justice.” It would violate the separation of powers, the supremacy clause, the confrontation clause, the equal protection clause, the due process clause and the prohibition against bills of attainder.
Also, he argues, it would trample on executive privilege, law enforcement privilege, the major questions doctrine, the political question doctrine, Clark’s “official immunity” and his freedom of speech. The Senate’s acquittal of Trump at his second impeachment bars the charges. Even Hunter Biden’s laptop makes a surprise appearance.
https://wapo.st/3dobVYg1
DeSantis and Abbott need to be prosecuted for this malicious taxpayer funded PR stunt
Texas governor, MAGA Man Greg Abbott and Florida strongman governor, MAGA man Ron DeSantis, are the new MAGA Abbott and Costello. Their latest hilarious prank was sending 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Florida, and then, at $12,000 a head, flying them to Martha’s Vineyard, with a film crew to document the libs of Martha’s Vineyard being owned by their own hypocrisy.
Leave aside the Florida taxpayer money DeSantis spent on this stunt, more than half a million dollars, leave aside the transparent cruel mockery of sending a film crew to get campaign footage, leave aside that these two fucks waited until they were within the DOJ’s 60 day no announcements of Investigations into political candidates period.
To get these people legally fleeing violence and oppression in Venezuela on to the airplanes for their publicity stunt, DeSantis promised them work, food, living places and help with their asylum applications. Instead they were sent to an island off the coast of Massachusetts where they would be unable to appear for their scheduled asylum hearings in various faraway locations.
Nazi comparisons are odious, of course, even when talking about the inhuman hijinks of our modern-day MAGA Abbott and Costello. However it’s hard not to think about the postcards Jews were forced to write to their families about how good everything was and how happy they were, before being loaded into cattle cars for transport to the death camps. Or even comparisons to our own murderous racists who, in the early 1960s sent southern Blacks to northern cities with similar false promises of work, new homes and freedom. When they arrived in the northern cities they were met by nobody, they were simply fucked. This happened here 60 years ago, and it happened right here the other day. Check this shit out:
The fool actually brought this lawsuit
F POTUS brought yet another lawsuit to obstruct justice, on bogus, frivolous, murky, dubious, ambiguous, unsworn legal claims. Claims in equity, actually, fairness harm that can’t be adequately remedied at law, according to F POTUS’s hand picked MAGA judge.
Check out the title of this transparent operation to block an ongoing criminal and national security investigation. You can’t make this shit up.
gratuitousblahg 