Author Archives: oinsketta

Harsh truth or anodyne truth-lite?

Individuals can always spin things any way they please, since many things are strictly matters of taste and preference.   One is urged to accentuate the positive, be cheerful, not dwell on depressing or painful things!   When times are tough, look forward to a fabulous holiday, a great meal at a fantastic new restaurant, a cool new car, the pleasures a life of hard work can provide.

The same story can be told in many ways, even by readers of the same newspaper.  In one story, we are facing the worldwide march of triumphalist fascism as our habitat is being quickly boiled into a toxic miasma.  In that story, our moral obligation, if we are not fascists or those who profit from the destruction of our biosphere, is to do everything we can to avoid this awful fate for every living creature on the planet. 

The story can be told with a different emphasis: radical alarmists alarming people to advance their radical agenda.  Sure there are some bad, dishonest politicians here and there, even evil ones, sure some countries execute drug addicts, and gays, force raped girls to give birth to their rapists’ baby, commit modest genocides, sell off the rain forests that are the lungs of the planet to corporations that will bulldoze the trees to graze animals for slaughter, but there are also people doing wonderful things and life is beautiful.  Actually, it’s the radical alarmists who are alarming everybody!

The attitude behind this second version of the story is that it’s better to believe that everything is going to be fine and what we are seeing all around us its not really as bad as it looks.   I believe this myself, but not to the extent of denying we’ll have fascism shortly unless we prevent Republicans, who already have a nakedly partisan 6-3 Supreme Court (the last three chosen strictly for their extreme partisan cred) from capturing one or both houses of Congress.  In fact, unless we pick up a Manchin-proof majority in the Senate, we’re heading straight over the filibuster waterfall to the fascism of a heavily armed one party theocracy.  

Fascists don’t care about saving the environment or anything else that humanists, or humans, consider important.  Fascists care about only triumph and dominating their hated enemies.   Fascism is the harnessing of the human tic to go to war in a rage, making that lowest impulse the iron law of the land.

Calling Republican office holders and candidates fascists just because they promote what they all know is a destructive lie, in the interest of regaining absolute one-party control of everything, may seem hyperbolic to some.  Consider:  if you repeat a lie that makes people angry, and those angry people form a violent lynch mob that maims and kills people, and afterwards you defend that lynch mob’s right to try to kill people they believe betrayed them, and you are required not to break the party-line wall defending the lie and the mob, and you vote in a bloc to hurt your political opponents, who you vilify, and leave every problem to get worse so that you profit politically, is there a more accurate word than “fascist” to describe you?

Mel Brooks has a genius definition of comedy and tragedy that rings so true it hurts.   “Tragedy is when I break a fingernail.  Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.”   A slapstick sight gag vs. actual personal suffering, no matter how minor.

How you view and tell the story is determined by your personal experience and your emotional needs.   Humans can always find an anodyne truth-lite way of spinning stories that would otherwise terrify them.  Just ACC-cen-tuate the positive!

The positive, to me, is truth, honesty.  If you are talking about what really happened, as opposed to what you want to believe happened, we can discuss anything you like.  Nothing is out of bounds, nothing can’t be solved, if we agree on the facts of what we are talking about.  If you insist on an anodyne version that lets culpable parties off the hook, that makes you feel better — at the expense of reality — that’s your wonderful belief and God bless.   Just don’t try to insist on that bullshit to someone like me.

Replay in light of recent Supreme Court chicanery

Lightly reworked version of something I posted here back in March.

In the wake of the radical 6-3 McConnell/Koch/Trump Supreme Court’s recent raft of inconsistent, arbitrary but always partisan, right-wing Christian rulings, I came across this post I wrote a few months back, about exactly how, after the Civil War, the war to preserve the Union (the war of Northern Aggression, if you believe the South will rise again), a “conservative” Supreme Court overruled Congress’s best attempts to promulgate a new, post-war Bill of Rights, applying the rights of citizenship to everyone born in the USA, or naturalized.  This updated Bill of Rights would apply to each state, as the original one applied to the federal government.   

The First Amendment, forbidding the government from establishing a state religion, for example, would apply to state governments as well as to the federal government.  Any right you had as a federal citizen must be respected by every state, as a baseline for your rights.   That was the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, who were all still alive, could have testified to their exact intent.  After coming up with two distinct baskets of fundamental rights, the Supreme Court stepped in to limit the scope of federal citizenship to four rights, including the right to freely migrate from state to state. The rest, they ruled 5-4, was totally up to the states.  That was the law for almost a century.  

When we talk about the present, armed men, aggrieved, demanding their sacred Second Amendment right to carry their guns wherever they choose, in the name of 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 — our 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 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 (which led to the creation of the Department of Justice), into an almost century long judicially-induced coma.

A few years after the Civil War the rest of the rapidly expanding, war-ravaged nation, in the grips of an economic crisis, 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 a case ruling on the Civil Rights Act), was fittingly at an end.  It was decreed that freed slaves must simply get the same rights all poor, powerless white citizens enjoy, (well, not quite that many rights). 

As a result of the 5-4 Slaughterhouse decision, an even uglier one in U.S. v. Cruikshank, and a couple of others, the protections of the XIV (as well as XIII and XV) were effectively nullified.   Blacks, and anyone else whose new XIVth Amendment rights were violated, were barred from the federal courts for more than ninety years pursuant to Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank.  Corporations, ironically, were the main beneficiaries of the XIVth Amendment until the late 20th century when individuals were finally able to use it for its intended protections.  States were, until 1964, deemed the sole enforcers of criminal violations of civil rights for almost a century.  A century of unpunished lynchings in most states.

The Slaughterhouse cases were initiated by white butchers who the court went out of its way to point out were not the intended beneficiaries of the lofty and complex XIV Amendment, the freed slaves were.   The court then took pains to set out, in a judicially perverse manner, exactly how limited the rights of federal citizenship guaranteed in the Amendment really were, the 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 appears prescient.   

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 and amendments designed to expand equality (one day even women would become constitutionally almost equal) the doors of the federal court were closed to XIV Amenmendment 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 completely up to the states. Not what the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had intended, granted, but good enough for a one vote majority to make unappealable law for almost a hundred years.

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 of citizenship, equal protection of the law, and the guarantee of due process the XIVth Amendment was designed to protect, were limited mostly to corporations. The Cruikshank case, which was decided before the Slaughterhouse cases, put a final deadly nail into the coffin of the right of freed Blacks to be protected from terrorism, making it explicit that, in spite of federal civil rights laws and the new Department of Justice to enforce those laws, 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 day before Easter Sunday, no less. 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.  Women and children were killed next. Dozens of corpses were left festering on Easter Sunday. 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 any other law.

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!         

What a courageous Congress could do to rein in a rogue Supreme Court

Hard to imagine a courageous Congress, I know, but the size of the majority decides alot, in courage and on ability to pass laws. One dick like Sinema, one twat like Manchin and there goes your ability to legislate, either of those vote with the 50 lockstep Trumpistas and Biden is weak and unable to pass laws, implement policies

A bigger Democratic majority in both houses in 2023 will enable senators to carve out the filibuster for voting rights, avoiding climate catastrophe and rebalancing the. Supreme Court. McConnell promptly did away with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees right after Trump’s inauguration to install three 51-49 right-wing Christian extremists. The Koch-packed court, chosen for demonstrated loyalty to a set of ultra- conservative values, must be expanded. Federal voting rights must be protected, steps to halt the ecosphere’s destruction must start. There is no other option, really.

Meanwhile, here are some good ideas for a strong Congress to do, from a Harvard Law School professor who was on a panel, speaking to Dahlia Lithwick on her excellent podcast Amicus (link below🙂

Nico Booy (faculty, Harvard Law School): But in the past, when Congress and the court have been in conflict and Congress has been motivated to do something, Congress has so many weapons at its disposal to ensure that our democracy is run by a legislature and not by a court. So Congress can strip the court of jurisdiction. It can strip the court of its building. It can strip the court of its summer recess. It can strip the court of its clerks. It can say, if you want to strike down our democratic laws, do so yourselves. Rather than relying on these 24 year olds, they can strip the court of it’s discretionary jurisdiction. It can strip the court of the power to enjoin laws. It can say no more federal courts can enjoin national laws and a nationwide system without a super-majority of the Supreme Court. It can change the court’s jurisdiction. It can put the court’s jurisdiction in the D.C. Circuit. Congress can do all sorts of stuff. And in the past, Congress has done so. When Congress was worried about the court invalidating Reconstruction, it simply took the case out of the court’s hand and said, Court, you no longer have jurisdiction over these cases.

The problem we’re facing now is a Congress unwilling to fight back, not a Congress incapable of fighting back. And I think the conflict is something that Congress needs to embrace, because I think, as you were correctly, identifying the status quo is going to lead to an unsustainable system in which everyone is being forced to give birth, in which we’re all going to burn, because we’re not doing anything about climate change in which no one can vote except for members of the Supreme Court.

https://slate.com/transcripts/STFOYk8vVnAwYWwveUN0SjRBTXk3aWZuTUR5NnpzUkZ0ejB4VnFUdDZFZz0=

TPD- Tyrannical Personality Disorder

Fascists select leaders with what I think of (the current DSM is mute on this one) as Tyrannical Personality Disorder.  A person with TPD simply does not take any shit, never backs down, is always right no matter what, doubles all risky bets whenever challenged, gets ugly, public revenge 100% of the time on anyone who crosses them, or might.   The GOP has become, finally, the party of TPD.   Reactionary extremists are always this way — they have a vision of unchallengeable power that must be implemented by any means imaginable.  Often they will say contradictory, even opposite, things, sometimes simultaneously.   The “logic” of fascists, of all TPD types, is almost always incoherent.  In the absence of reason, there is only will, and, in their eternal war weltanschauung, the triumph of the superior will. 

The reactionary drive to now make it a federal crime for pregnant women and girls (and trans men with wombs, I suppose) to travel from a state where abortion is banned to a state where abortion is legal is now in the news.  Millions of religious Christians, and those who exploit their religious beliefs, say every fertilized egg is a sacred life, so, now that we have the unappealable  power to make it law, all must behave accordingly.   Jesus Christ said so, you goddamned sick fucks!  Perfect fascist logic.

There’s an 1873 Supreme Court case, aptly referred to as Slaughterhouse [1], from five years after the 14th Amendment was ratified.   The 14th Amendment was passed to make it illegal for states to deprive anyone born in the US, or naturalized, of the full rights of US citizenship.  If the Constitution gives everyone a right to free speech, freedom of religion, down the non-exhaustive list of enumerated rights the federal government may not infringe, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, no state could abridge these rights either. The first section reads:

‘no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’   

The Slaughterhouse cases were decided, 5-4, and the majority went out of its way to underscore that the 14th Amendment had been written to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, not a bunch of white butchers.    But while they were elucidating constitutional matters they stopped to draw a sharp, calculated line between the rights of federal citizenship and state citizenship, a line that virtually nullified and struck down enforcement of the 14th Amendment for almost a century.

The court held, 5-4, ignoring the clear intent of the framers (who were all alive to ask) that the rights of federal citizenship were but four: the right to use ports, the right to use navigable interstate waterways, the right to be protected from piracy on the high seas, the right to freely migrate from state to state.  All the rest of the privileges and immunities of citizenship, the one vote majority ruled, was completely up to the states.  States’ rights, you dig.  As a result of this ruling and a few similar ones, no lynching was punished for the next ninety years.  The good old days.

Now today’s strict “textualist” Republican extremists want to cross off one of those four inviolable enumerated rights of federal citizenship. No right to interstate travel for women with a fertilized egg in their womb. Amy Coney Barrett cares so much about the sacred unborn that she will go to the mat for this one!  She will be joined by the Thomases, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and possibly a reluctant, but also irrelevant, John “arbitration clause” Roberts.

TPD, yo, provoke it at your peril.

[1]  It arose from a series of cases brought by a group of disgruntled slaughterers contesting Louisiana’s monoply on slaughterhouses.

Ten years later a member of the Slaughterhouse majority, Joseph Bradley, would solemnly opine, in ruling against the Civil Rights Act, that there comes a time when Blacks “cease to be the special favorites of the law” and must be regarded as “ordinary citizens” (though with far fewer rights, obviously).

Hub and spoke conspiracy, DOJ

The J6 committee has been laying out a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, while leaving all other Republicans elected on the same ballots in place. The wide-ranging conspiracy did not culminate in the storming of the capital on January 6th, the riot was a violent Hail Mary when everything else had failed. Trump continually lied (and continues to) about massive voter fraud, pressured state electoral officials from Michigan to decertify Michigan electors. He did this openly and publicly. Slates of fake electors from several states Trump lost were submitted on official looking falsely sworn papers, a plan was hatched to seize voting machines, impose martial law, Sidney Powell was poised to become a special counsel to prosecute voter fraud that didn’t exist in any significant numbers, legal memos were drawn up advocating illegal actions to keep the angry losing candidate in power, actions their author admitted even this supreme Court would rule 9 to 0 against. The head of Trump’s Secret Service detail, a lying scumbag named Tony Ornato, was promoted to Deputy Chief of Staff while still working for the Secret Service which Trump had converted into his personal praetorian guard. Oddly all Secret Service texts from January 5th and 6th have been permanently deleted. In a lucky coincidence for the deranged former president, all of Trump’s phone records and burner phones from those days were also lost. Whoops!

The conspiracy has too many tentacles to list here, but at the center of each one was the personal ambition of one man, Individual One, to do everything imaginable to stay in power after losing an election. This kind of conspiracy, with many arms and many disparate actors who don’t necessarily know each other, all working toward the same goal is called a hub and spoke conspiracy and Glenn Kirschner has been describing exactly this for many months in regard to prosecuting Trump’s many pronged attack on democracy.

Former DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that DOJ must begin a hub and spoke conspiracy investigation and begin prosecuting some of these malefactors, several of which are running for reelection. Should have been done a year ago, but in a couple of months Garland will demure because of the DOJ policy of not interfering with upcoming elections. Here’s Weissmann, explaining why this is not a typical top down pyramid conspiracy simply to storm Congress and Stop the Steal:

Instead, what the hearings have revealed is evidence of a plot orchestrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the White House and elsewhere — including players from the Mueller investigation like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani as well as new players like Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman. The “spoke” of the Jan. 6 riot should be seen and investigated simultaneously with the other “spokes”: orchestrating fake electors in key states, pressuring state officials like those in Georgia to find new votes, plotting to behead the leadership of the Justice Department to promote a lackey who would further the conspiracy by announcing a spurious investigation into election fraud, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to violate the law.

source

Isolation can kill

Isolation, like many things, can be good or bad.   On the good side, you have the uninterrupted time to be introspective, to ponder things that may perplex you and the quiet to work out difficult life puzzles.  On the bad side, extended isolation can drive a person mad because when there is nothing but yourself to distract you from your troubles your mind starts to cannibalize itself.   

The UN declared the isolation of solitary confinement, for more than 15 days, to be torture.  Our history and traditions support the practice of solitary confinement, an estimated 80,000 US prisoners are held in solitary confinement under a variety of rationales as I type these words.  Here’s a bit on the deeply rooted history and traditions piece that the most authoritarian on our doctrinaire 6-3 Supreme Court like so much:

The practice of completely isolating prisoners began in Pennsylvania and New York, and goes back to a theory proposed in the early 19th century, said Peter Scharff Smith, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights.

Quakers in Philadelphia proposed that if prisoners were kept in complete isolation, they might find redemption and rehabilitation by concentrating on their weaknesses without distraction and ultimately become closer to God. Taking up the theory, Pennsylvania built a wheel-shaped prison in Philadelphia designed to ensure that every prisoner was completely alone.

One famous visitor to this prison, called the Eastern State Penitentiary, was Charles Dickens. In 1842, he wrote in “American Notes” that life in the prison was “rigid, strict, and hopeless.” The prison is still standing but has not been used since 1971.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/solitary-confinement-form-torture

I suspect this early 19th century reasoning is good enough for the Federalist Society Six, should the issue of solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment (maybe cruel, but certainly not unusual, Kavanah, J.) come before the court so deeply rooted in our history and traditions, and why not?   First liberals complain about conservatives taking away the so-called right to privacy, and then, when the state provides absolute privacy, Social Justice Warriors whine about that too!  

Solitary confinement is one thing, and an extreme and terrible form of isolation, but social isolation is a kind of torture too.  In the old days (and probably to this day), religious communities would excommunicate people they deemed assholes, send them out of the community and into nature where they could fend for themselves or die, or both.  

We live in a time of extreme social isolation for many millions of us.  In this isolation we are constantly goaded by the relentless, stupid war over everything.  This war mentality has been greatly exacerbated by the lockdown and the idiotic zero sum war of principle, waged by mask and vaccine skeptics, over how to best combat a deadly pandemic.  Guys like the inimitable Charles Koch have spent hundreds of tax-free millions to make sure we live in a black and white world of existential conflict to the death, with no solutions available to any but the few who benefit from the mayhem.  The more armed hate groups, the better, for untouchable guys like Koch. 

The natural response to this determined, public, endlessly repeated stonewalling of every possible solution is widespread disaffection, despair and anger which bursts into rage pretty easily.  This rage, which has nowhere else to go, is turned on each other, and on ourselves.   We live in a time of mounting American deaths of despair, by drug overdoses, by guns, by just going out and shooting random people until the cops come, and if you are Black, you are instantly a successful suicide by cop.

In a time of unprecedented social isolation, a handful of genius American entrepreneurs have monetized American loneliness by creating a virtual world of unlimited like-minded friends.  Online we can even have followers, just like actual celebrities.  Even this little-read, unknown blahg has over 300 followers.  Would they march with me to the gates of Hell?  Not one, I’d wager, but, shit, I have a small army of noncommittal followers, which nobody can deny.

Instead of communities, and a small group of people we can count on in times of trouble, we have the illusion of a gigantic community of people who think and feel just like we do.   They share the same political views, the same moral stances, the same shopping habits, the same tastes in food, drink and culture.  We may never see them in real life, but isn’t it nice to know we are not alone?  I mean, if it wasn’t for the mass illusion that we are part of a vast network of like-minded friends and followers, many more of us would probably be suicidal at this point in the long, ugly, ceaseless war of each against all that has been forced on us by our most powerful citizens.   Maybe the mass illusion itself is a cause of despair, we know that these “friends” are not real and we think back sadly to when we had real friends we could be honest with, who could console us, personally, having been in our actual, offline lives for years.   

Trust?  Despair? Benefit of the doubt? Silence?  Abstractions, like death, that we are free to endlessly contemplate or run from, in our chafing isolation.  Thankfully, we all have each other.

The impartial administration of justice

We jump to conclusions about people’s guilt, sometimes, in spite of our justice system being based on the presumption of innocence.   We jump to these conclusions, in part, because some citizens are presumed much more innocent than others in our impartial justice system.

Just because all of former president Trumpie’s phone records and burner phones from January 6th are lost, and all Secret Service texts from January 5th and 6th were deleted, apparently after they were requested by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, and just because the former president recently phoned a witness who is about to testify to the J6 Committee, for a reason none of us knows, it doesn’t mean there is anything funny going on.   Trump and his people view the law as a transactional thing which presumes everyone innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  If there is no trial, there is always reasonable doubt.  If you can influence public opinion and stop the trial before it starts, or work closely with the jury in case, God forbid, there is a trial, you are innocent!

Bernard Kerik, a convicted felon (for crimes committed while Giuliani’s police commissioner) who spent time in the can, was in the January 6th Willard Hotel war room?   He’d been pardoned, washed clean as a newly baptized baby.   So had Flynn, Bannon, Stone, Manafort, Jared’s father, Jack Johnson, Susan B. Anthony and dozens besides.

The AG of Texas, Ken Paxton, has been under federal indictment for felony securities fraud for SEVEN years.  No trial yet, presumed innocent.   Nothing stopped him from using his office to submit a far-fetched emergency legal challenge to the US Supreme Court arguing that the voters in Texas had been victims of massive anti-Trump voter fraud in states that swung to Biden in 2020.  Lyin’ Ted Cruz and other elected Republicans in national office signed on to the Hail Mary case, which was quickly dismissed (for lack of standing or the slightest legal coherence) by even the 6-3 Federalist Society majority.  They clearly had bigger fish to fry, like eliminating privacy rights, which are, like, totally unenumerated in the actual text of their sacred originalist Constitution.

How long ago did the IRS give Trumpie a controversial $70,000,000 tax rebate for massive business losses?  Pretty long ago, they’ve been auditing that giant rebate for years, are apparently still puzzling over it.  Two second search result:

Between 1984 and 2004, he used actual losses, loss write-downs from previous years, and other accounting dodges to pay virtually nothing in federal income taxes. From 2005 to 2007, this latest Times scoop reveals, he did finally pay about seventy million dollars to the Internal Revenue Service. But then, in 2010, he demanded a full refund for those tax payments. And the I.R.S. acceded to his request: it paid him $72.9 million, including interest. This 2010 refund seems to be at the center of an auditing dispute between Trump and the tax authorities that has dragged on for almost a decade. It also appears to be the money that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, was referring to in his 2019 testimony to Congress, when he recalled Trump showing him a huge check from the U.S. Treasury and remarked that Trump “could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.” [1]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trumps-seventy-three-million-dollar-tax-refund-is-the-biggest-outrage-of-all

Again, if you are powerless, you will immediately be liable to pay in full whatever fines and penalties the IRS imposes.  There is no negotiation, no discussion, no appeal and the fines and penalties continue to be stacked on top until you pay every dime.  If you are a smart cookie like the Orange Polyp?  Hah!  Different story, baby.

Those protesters of police killing of unarmed Blacks, assembled at Lafayette Square?  Terrorists!   The full force of Bill Barr’s ragtag federal law enforcement army forcibly drove them from the street so the president, who was screaming for governors to “dominate the streets!”, could look strong and stroll for a photo op with a bible.  None of the arrested protesters was charged with anything, after being gassed, charged by feds on horseback, handcuffed and thrown into paddy wagons to be dragged in for processing.  The “peaceful tourists” who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, as was their patriotic 1776 right to legitimate political discourse?  Allowed to leave the crime scene in peace, back to their hotels, back to homes all over the country the next day.   800+ were later rounded up and arrested, at the cost of tens of millions in investigation costs and DOJ work hours.  Many of these outraged pawns will spend time in prison, but not one person who sent them into a rage over the bullshit claim that Blacks stole the presidential election from them, incited them to come and be wild, paid for their hotel rooms, is on trial for anything, or even indicted for anything.

The impartial administration of justice at the Department of Justice that Merrick Garland is intent on restoring, almost two years in, after four years of an openly lawless Department of Justice shamelessly carrying out a giant, vindictive two year-old’s every whim?   

(cue the crickets)

[1]

In the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Trump’s businesses, some of which he had greatly overpaid for when he bought them, racked up more than a billion dollars in losses, and four of them ended up filing for bankruptcy: three casinos in Atlantic City and his Plaza Hotel, in New York. In 1995, as he emerged from this wreckage, he declared a tax loss of more than nine hundred million dollars, which the I.R.S. allowed him to use in subsequent years as an offset against any profits his businesses made. So even in years when the Trump Organization did well, his loss carryovers reduced his tax bill to zero.

source linked above

We waited until you losers lost

Recall that immediately after McConnell, McCarthy, Graham and other top Republicans publicly denounced Trump’s riot on January 6th, Congress went on a brief break.   The House drafted articles of impeachment designed to make sure the insane, riot inciting bastard was disqualified from ever running for president again.   McConnell waited a few days before returning to Washington to accept the articles of impeachment officially, right before Biden was sworn in.

It’s too late, McConnell solemnly argued as the impeachment trial began, Trump has already left office, we can’t impeach a former president, as a procedural matter the charges must be dismissed.   Mueller had concluded after a long investigation that though the evidence of obstruction of justice against Trump was strong, that he was prevented by a DOJ memo from recommending prosecution of a sitting president.  The proper venue for doing that, he wrote, was Congress, which was, sadly, controlled by Trump’s flying monkeys.   McConnell intoned during the quick second impeachment trial that the former president could be investigated, indicted and tried for any crimes he may have committed, now that he’d left office.  After the four day rope-a-dope, Republican senators acquitted Trump on the technicality that the House had not served the articles of impeachment in a timely manner.  More Republicans voted to impeach a Republican president than at any impeachment in US history (generally party line votes) but too few to make sure Trumpie was done, and facing criminal charges as an ordinary corrupt oligarch, or mob boss, in private life might.

It is striking how quickly law enforcement grabs people with no power and how carefully it proceeds against the powerful.  If you are an anonymous driver with a broken tail light, there is reasonable cause to legally pull you over, and if you are not judicious in how you express fear of police who are almost never held accountable for overkill, you can be legally killed, for a variety of standard reasons.   If you are a wealthy white male scofflaw with an army of lawyers, and a political machine behind you, you can enjoy absolute freedom for years before anyone comes looking at you for crimes everyone knows about.

Now, after the most recent J6 hearing, we know why the Stop the Steal January 6 organizers never got a permit for a march from the rally at the Ellipse to the Capitol.  Trump was hiding the planned march so he could argue that it was just a spontaneous outpouring of love for him and the police that sent thousands barrelling down Pennsylvania Avenue to Stop the Steal and hang the disloyal coward Mike Pence so that president pro tem Chuck Grassley could do the right thing and throw the presidential decision to the House, which under a never used rule, could install Trump in spite of his huge electoral loss.  The hundred or so out-numbered police who wound up in the hospital?  Never mind them, the riot was about patriotism, law and order, freedom from tyranny!  As we see time after time, a coherent narrative is unnecessary when passionate feelings are in play.

Notice how none of these people testifying to the January 6th Committee, people who offered damning testimony about the fevered machinations of Trump and several crazy dead-enders plotting to keep the Apprentice star in power after he lost, NOT ONE, came forward while illegal plans were being hatched, during the second impeachment trial or at any time since.  One and a half years later, Patsy Baloney needed public pressure from Liz Cheney and a subpoena to become a frank, candid, supremely careful witness to weeks of Trump’s insane conspiracy theorizing and illegal actions planning.  

True enough some of these shocked patriots, both White House insiders and journalists, published tell-all books, several of them best sellers, which laid out much of the sordid story of an unhinged loser just claiming he won, at the urging of “an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani” (one of Liz Cheney’s best lines), Sloppy Steve “Build the Wall scam” Bannon and folks so clearly insane they are now called “the crazies” by “normal” Republicans — traitor Mike “Declare Martial Law” Flynn, clearly mad Sidney Powell, passive, silent, seething Mark “we might be able to stay in power” Meadows, Lin Wood, John Eastman, Jeff “Let me put my pants on” Clark and others.  I saw one, that white mustached asshole John Bolton, another “I told you so” guy who refused to testify, in part because he was paid a large sum to withhold everything he knew about Trump’s madness until publication day, publically venturing his latest opinion of coups d’etat, Trump, the J6 hearings and the hundred failures of Biden.  I declined to watch.

When Trump lost virtually all of the five dozen RNC-financed post election cases his spokes-sphincters claimed the courts had never reached the merits, that all sixty lawsuits were all dismissed for procedural reasons (mostly lack of a scintilla of evidence for any claim).  “If only courts had heard the actual arguments!” they argued.  The actual arguments were so frivolous and weak, and unsupported by credible evidence, that defending herself against strong claims of defamation Sidney “Unleash the Kraken” Powell said nobody in their right mind could have taken any of her legal claims seriously.

Of course not.

Bannon got slapped down in his latest eleventh hour attempt to postpone his contempt trial that starts Monday.  The crime of contempt of Congress was committed, 100%, by a defiant Bannon who is still bravely talking shit, between breaks for actual diarrhea.   The Trump-appointed judge underscored Bannon’s guilt when he agreed with Bannon’s desperate lawyer that since there are no legal defenses for Bannon what is the point of even going to trial?

The question on millions of minds is where is Merrick Garland, as the J6 committee lays out more and more damning evidence, sworn to under oath by hundreds of eye witnesses.   Garland appears regularly defending other DOJ actions, to protect asylum seekers’ rights, to protect school board members threatened by angry Trumpists, to protect LGBTQ persons under attack by new discriminatory state laws, to protect what’s left of a woman’s right to abortion and so on.  Witness tampering? Obstruction of Justice?  Obstructing an official proceeding?  Planning and launching an armed insurrection to overturn the results of a valid election?    Nothing, Dogg? 

Nice exhibit for Bannon’s second emergency motion to delay his contempt trial

Because it’s no fair if your own words can be quoted against you in a so-called court of law. Even with a Trump judge you can’t get a break, they seem intent on using your protected speech against you. I think Bannon should have included this prejudicial clip with his motion to delay his criminal contempt trial by several months. Any Trump appointed judge ought to see the irony.