It doesn’t matter how stupid certain politicians are, if they rage the right way during national moments of fury. What does the party of White Christian grievance and revenge have to say to its base (al-Qaeda in Arabic [1]) to stay in power? Things like this work quite well, when directed toward angry folks with a lot of pent-up fear and faith in Divine retribution:
[1]
the base
A network of Islamic fundamentalist groups, founded in 1988 and associated with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. The name comes from Arabic, meaning literally ‘the base’.
From: Al-Qaeda in The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Instead of giving the Republican senators a stark choice last week between voting for the bipartisan January 6 Commission and facing a majority Democratic House Select Committee investigating the MAGA riot, with the power to subpoena whoever they want and broadcasting their sworn testimony live on television (with no veto from GOP reps, who could include insurrectionists Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor QAnon, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, etc. — see full list of House 2020 election-contesting Select Committee contenders at [1]), we read that Democratic leaders are still fretting about the right way forward.
There’s still a ghost of a chance, some optimistic Democrats appear to think, that six more Republicans will come forward to sacrifice their careers, and possibly endanger their families’ lives, by voting for the evenly bipartisan commission Republicans in the House demanded, and got.
Here’s a headline, reporting the most recent “action” by the Democrats:
Pelosi Weighing Options On How To move Forward With Jan. 6 Commission.
I know that the Democrats, like the Republicans, work for corporations, that not alienating wealthy mega-donors is the name of the game, and that they rightfully don’t want to look like like McConnell’s lockstep, vindictive, truth-defying Trumpist zombies, but WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK is wrong with Democratic leadership?
Vote A or you will get B, motherfuckers.
What is hard about framing a simple choice like that? It presents the only two choices open to anyone who wants to fight to preserve democracy. If not A, we must do B, there is no third option, no compromise possible with a party of blustering zealots and cringing careerist cowards.
Mind you, this filibuster was over something that should not have been partisan, like wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic (“Auschwitz!”), or getting vaccinated (“traitor!” “wimp!!!”) should not have been partisan. “Should” is a quaint word from a bygone time, a precatory word from the old world of norms, a word with no legal force or power. Still, it is hard to imagine (the above examples aside) anything more bipartisan than investigating on attack on Congress, Republicans and Democrats and their staffs all fled an angry mob of normal tourists on an normal mission to hang Trump’s loyal vice president and anyone else they found.
It benefits only their leader to cover up an investigation into the roots of the riot that overran the police, surged into the Capitol after breaking windows and doors and actually halted a joint session of Congress that was about to finalize the peaceful transfer of power. The peaceful transfer of the presidency has been a hallmark of American democracy since the founding. Until a particular wealthy compulsive liar refused to accept the voters’ verdict and decided to send a mob to stop it.
There is also, of course, the matter of learning for sure exactly who organized, paid for, and planned the attack that breached the Capitol. The organizers and financiers of the dress rehearsal for an all-out insurrection are all still out there. They have to be encouraged that, so far, but for a few of their pawns arrested and on their own, the mad plan worked so well and nobody is coming after the instigators so far.
If you don’t think the riot was serious as terminal cancer, consider: if the tens of thousands of Trump supporters who swarmed the mall had followed the boldest 800 or so over the barricades and into the Capitol, there quite likely would have been state funerals for Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi and others.
One thing I will say for Trump’s followers in Congress, and Nazi-types in general, they boldly and forcefully confront enemies and never publicly back down. They fetishize boldness. Boldness is a hallmark of the in-your-fucking-face provocative style of fascist/klan rallies. McConnell will never back down from his comment that 100% of his focus is on obstructing anything Biden and the Democrats try to do. There is no sniffing the wind, no deliberating, discussing, debating. They (or their leader) make a decision, no matter how stupid, and boldly stick to it. If it turns out to be wrong, they simply make it a rallying cry, to “trigger” the other side, their hated enemies. It works well for a solid 39% of Americans, we can say that for it.
Even fucking Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post ran this editorial, not long after Trump demanded a filibuster of a commission to investigate his riot and McConnell asked for the filibuster as a “personal favor,” and it was so.
“HOPEFULLY, MITCH McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are listening!” Once former president Donald Trump ordered Republican leaders in Congress on May 18 to block an independent commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, the fate of the panel was sealed. On Friday, 35 Senate Republicans, including Mr. McConnell (Ky.), delivered the fatal blow by upholding a filibuster. But that must not be the end of efforts to get to the bottom of the most serious attack on U.S. democracy since the Civil War.
Having tried bipartisanship on an issue of such critical importance, Democrats must now undertake their own investigation. Just as President Biden used reconciliation to enact covid-19 relief in the face of GOP obstruction, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should use her authority to appoint a select committee to investigate what happened on Jan. 6.
Such a committee, used in the past to examine such issues as the response to Hurricane Katrina, would have its drawbacks. It would be composed of members of Congress and not experts. Mr. McCarthy would likely use his appointments to lard the committee with members intent not on getting at the truth but protecting Mr. Trump. And it might be more difficult for the public to accept its conclusions. But Friday’s vote — in which Republicans prevented the commission bill from even coming to the floor for debate — leaves Democrats with little alternative. The country needs answers to such questions as what led to and who was responsible for the attack on Congress, and why there was a delay in getting reinforcements to the Capitol to help besieged police officers.
During negotiations over the commission bill in the House, which passed with bipartisan support, Republicans got everything they asked for, including equal representation on the commission. Democrats were prepared to offer further concessions in the Senate. But most Republicans, as Friday’s vote made clear, would just as soon forget about the day thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol and assaulted police officers as they tried to stop Congress from certifying the presidential election results. No doubt, they know that much of the responsibility for the riot lies with Mr. Trump, and they are loath to incur his wrath or that of his base.
In a closed-door meeting with his conference, Mr. McConnell argued that a lengthy commission wouldn’t be good politics heading into the midterms; he engaged in extraordinary arm-twisting, going so far as to tell wavering Republicans that their support to filibuster the bill would be a “personal favor” to him. It worked: Only six Republicans voted to advance debate on the commission: Bill Cassidy (La.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio), Mitt Romney (Utah) and Ben Sasse (Neb.).
Ms. Pelosi suggested during an April interview with USA Today that she might move to establish a select committee to investigate Jan. 6 if efforts for an independent commission failed. A statement she issued Friday in response to the Senate’s vote makes no mention of a select committee but stated that “honoring our responsibility to the Congress in which we serve and the Country which we love, Democrats will proceed to find the truth.” Proceed they should.
But only after A LOT more hand-wringing over the “right way” forward, like the agonizing year-long deliberations over whether Trump’s documented obstruction of justice, by itself, was enough to justify an impeachment (Nancy decided it wasn’t — an impeachment for extorting the new Ukrainian president and contempt of Congress — a political entity even more unpopular that Trump– would rally more Americans to the cause of impeachment, since it was more tangible and understandable than an abstraction like Obstruction of Justice, she argued).
Here’s a thought:
Maybe Joe Manchin has another good idea, or the coy Kyrsten Sinema will get inspired to offer any idea.Actually, Sinema reared her adorable little corporate head the other day, during a bipartisan Border Wall photo op with John Cornyn (R-Tx) to say this (which does not actually qualify as an idea):
“Well, as folks in Arizona know, I’ve long been a supporter of the filibuster, because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation, rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies.”
Wait, here’s her idea!(from an April 2021 interview with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal in which the senator for Arizona big business– she always listens to Arizona business leaders, she says — spelled out what needs to happen, instead of modifying the sacred Senate procedural rule so skillfully used by reactionary obstructionists)
“When you have a place that’s broken and not working, and many would say that’s the Senate today, I don’t think the solution is to erode the rules,” Sinema told the Journal. “I think the solution is for senators to change their behavior and begin to work together, which is what the country wants us to do.”
Brilliant. Simply change human nature. I feel much better now.
How 35 obstructionists can uphold a filibuster is another head-scratcher, maybe one of those moderate centrists can explain to the rest of us.
Free gold, losers!
[1]Any of these 139 Trumpist patriots who voted to block confirmation of Biden Electors in the House would be an excellent candidate for the House Select Committee to investigate Benghazi, er, the January 6 MAGA riot. Many supported a commission to investigate election “fraud” before Biden could be sworn in, all later voted against a bill to form a bipartisan commission to investigate the riot that they helped inspire. (I know Frank Lucas and Lloyd Smucker are in there twice, they deserve to be, great men, both).
(Also, formatting with this fucking intuitive WordPress editor was close to impossible for an old man like me… these are screen shots of screen shots, good luck making a collage, or formatting columns, with this ingeniously re-designed program… it’s so brilliantly simple to work with their innovative “blocks”…)
My mother died a long, slow, painful death from endometrial cancer. She did not want to talk about death, though she often asked, rhetorically, why she felt so awful all the time. I understood that I was not supposed to mention death, or the deadly cancer eating its way out from the lining of her womb.
My mother always gave my father a hard time about his napping. He’d fall asleep a few times a day and, when I was visiting, my mother would point at him and complain. It turns out he was dying of undiagnosed liver cancer the last few years of his life, which could well explain his more frequent naps, but that’s another story.
As my mother got closer to the end, she found herself exhausted during the day and would often fall into a nap. I asked her if she’d changed her opinion of napping.
“Oh, I LOVE to nap!” she said with a big smile.
One day toward the end of her life, when she was trying to sleep off some unbearable pain, I went quietly into her room with my guitar and began playing a soft, soothing vamp, something like this one:
Her breathing seemed to become more relaxed as I played. I played softly for a few minutes, hoping to help her to sleep. Suddenly she sputtered and opened her eyes on the pillow.
“What IS that?!” she said crossly, “it sounds like you’re tuning your guitar!”
I withdrew from her bedroom and didn’t try that shit again.
A guy like Rupert Murdoch doesn’t even have to try. You just put it out there under the banner of the newspaper you own, the one with the fourth largest circulation of any US newspaper (as of 2019, anyway) et, voila, millions influenced! Tulsa “massacre” a hundred years ago? BULLSHIT. Biden’s a liar like the rest of them, trying to divide us with hate.
This one you have to see to believe, the clip is less than two minutes long. It is not remarkable because the claims of the Post are incendiary, or because of clever editing of the president’s remarks or the heavy laying on of editorial spin. It is amazing because they don’t even bother, the title does all the work — read the headline and you’ve digested the story. Case closed, fucking Biden’s a divisive liar.
What is divisive, according to Murdoch, is presumably the president’s assertion that politicians in most states are trying to restrict the right to vote. He’s presumably lying when he falsely claims that voting is an essential right of democracy.Maybe Biden was lying when he called the orgy of racially motivated mass-murder in Tulsa a “massacre”, rather than the more popular, race-neutral “riot” usually applied to uprisings (real or imagined) of Black people.
Biden’s divisive and false Tulsa speech
I know it gets tedious, me constantly trying to bring facts and reason into a conversation where hot-blooded patriots are ready to kill as many fellow citizens as it takes to avoid their worst nightmares, where a single lie does the work of all of your so-called libraries, all your maddening so-called facts. A violent mob doesn’t need the truth, they need the fuse lit.
In Tulsa, one hundred years ago, a false accusation against 19 year-old Black man Dick Rowland lit the fuse. Rowland’s crime? He’d gone to use the only colored bathroom in segregated downtown Tulsa, and in the elevator, he supposedly made a seventeen year-old white girl, Sarah Page, who was operating the elevator, shriek.
What happened next remains murky, according to historians and reports about one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. Rowland may have accidentally stepped on Page’s foot, prompting her to shriek. Or tripped and bumped into her.
When the elevator doors reopened, Dick Rowland ran, and a clerk in Renberg’s called police.
Rowland was arrested and accused of assaulting a White girl. Though the charges were eventually dropped and Page later wrote a letter exonerating him, the accusation was enough to infuriate White Tulsa.
Three hours after the Tulsa Tribune hit the street with the headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” hundreds of White men gathered at the Tulsa courthouse, where Rowland was being held.
Black World War I veterans who wanted to protect Rowland from being lynched rushed to the courthouse to defend him. A shot was fired and “all hell broke loose,” a massacre survivor recalled later.
“As the whites moved north, they set fire to practically every building in the African American community, including a dozen churches, five hotels, 31 restaurants, four drug stores, eight doctor’s offices, more than two dozen grocery stores, and the Black public library,” according to a 2001 report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. “By the time the violence ended, the city had been placed under martial law, thousands of Tulsans were being held under armed guard, and the state’s second-largest African American community had been burned to the ground.”
The white lynch mob went on an eighteen-hour rampage, a pogrom, during which, with the assistance of law enforcement, they murdered a few hundred blacks while burning down a 35 block black neighborhood in Tulsa. The mob employed airplanes to drop incendiary devices on buildings and American citizens. Whites were deputized to join the free-for-all arrest and murder of hundreds of Black citizens, people not even accused of any crime, outside of being “n-words” with no rights a white mob was bound to respect. Virtually every home in Greenwood was destroyed, along with dozens of prosperous black-owned businesses. Thousands were left homeless, the area, reduced to smoldering rubble, looked like a city ravaged by American fire bombs in World War Two. The thousands of Tulsans detained under armed guard after the massacre were all, coincidentally, Black. The brutality of the attack is sickening to read about. The exact number of dead is impossible to reckon, bodies were dumped in the river, the sites of mass graves are still being searched for, a hundred years later. No member of the murderous mob was ever arrested, tried or convicted of anything [1].
Black men in Tulsa are marched under armed guard during the race massacre on June 1, 1921. (Department of Special Collections/McFarlin Library/University of Tulsa/AP)
Dick Rowland, the intended victim of the original lynch mob, was not among the murdered Blacks.
While smoke still rose from the ashes of Greenwood, Tulsa’s sheriff, Willard McCullough, and his deputy, Barney Cleaver, one of the first Black lawmen in Oklahoma, hustled Dick Rowland out of town.
Though witnesses and memory can be unreliable, particularly years after the fact, we have this:
Ellouise Cochrane-Price, the daughter of massacre survivor Clarence Rowland and a cousin of Dick Rowland, claims Dick and Sarah not only knew each other before he stepped on the elevator but were in love and were planning to defy Oklahoma’s ban on interracial marriage.
“They were planning on getting married,” she told an audience at the Oklahoma Black Caucus gala last month. “They had spent many Sundays over my grandma’s house, at family dinners.”
When the White mob gathered outside the Tulsa courthouse, she said, “the mayor, the sheriff and the marshal were aware that Dick had not attacked Sarah. There had been no attempted rape of any kind. However, that information was not given up or not received by the mob that was gathered to hang Dick Rowland.”
In September 1921, the charges against Dick Rowland were dropped, according to records.
Charles Franklin Barrett, the Oklahoma National Guard adjutant general whose troops were called into Tulsa during the rampage, concluded the massacre was caused by “an impudent Negro, a hysterical girl and a yellow journal.”
Now as Rupert Murdoch and his fellow yellow journalists and right-wing entertainers claim — we have that deranged, violent demagogue Biden, digging up this ancient filth, dividing and lying to this great nation, and smearing our good name with feces and calling our finest white citizens the descendants of murderous racists. How are we supposed to heal when insane, doddering, “woke”, “politically correct” old men like that are divisively and lyingly picking at long closed scabs? The past is called the past because it’s in the fucking past. Jesus… what don’t you pathetic history-citing eggheads not understand about how the world actually works?
[1]
Outside of the corrupt Tulsa chief of police, who lost his job for “negligence” in not stopping the massacre, often called the “riot”:
[John A.] Gustafson was found to have a long history of fraud pre-dating his membership of the Tulsa Police Department. His previous partner in his detective agency, Phil Kirk, had been convicted of blackmail.[123] Gustafson’s fake detective agency ran up high billings on the police account. Investigators noted that many blackmail letters had been sent to members of the community from the agency. One particularly disturbing case involved the frequent rape, by her father, of an 11-year-old girl who had since become pregnant. Instead of prosecuting, they sent a “Blackhand letter.”[124] On July 30, 1921, out of five counts of an indictment, Gustafson was found guilty of two counts: negligence for failing to stop the riot (which resulted in dismissal from police force), and conspiracy for freeing automobile thieves and collecting rewards (which resulted in a jail sentence).[125]
Not to question anyone’s credibility, but over the weekend pardoned felon Mike “Lock Her UP!” Flynn, speaking at a four day QAnon conference in Dallas (he took an oath to “Q” on July 4, 2020, nuff said) told a crowd that a Myanmar-style military coup in America “should happen here”. Flynn, who insists Trump won the popular vote and Electoral College in 2020, was one of the keynote speakers at the For God and Country Patriot Roundup, along with his former attorney, Kraken-releaser Sidney Powell, and Texas Representative Louie Gohmert and he was only answering an audience question honestly.
When the clip was played on fake news, it was, of course, made to sound bad and Flynn immediately shot back that reporting he supported a military coup in the U.S. was a “boldface fabrication” and that his words had been taken out of context:
“Let me be VERY CLEAR – There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not at any time called for any action of that sort,” Flynn said in a post on Telegram, a social-media app that has been favored by far-right groups.
“Any reporting of any other belief by me is a boldface fabrication based on twisted reporting at a lively panel at a conference of Patriotic Americans who love this country, just as I do,” Flynn added to his 227,000 subscribers.
Kooks like Liz Cheney immediately tweeted mean things about Flynn.Flynn, of course, was helpless to fight back, having been banned from Twitter by the radical left on January 8, 2021, after wholeheartedly supporting the Stop the Steal riot of January 6.
If you read Flynn’s Wikipedia page… well, no comment. I don’t want to be taken out of context. I suggest a quick skim. All the quotes below are from that article. Here’s a paragraph that jumped out at me, from a Trump campaign rally in 2016:
During the speech, Flynn attacked Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton; he encouraged the crowd to chant “Lock her up!”; saying “Damn right! Exactly right! There is nothing wrong with that!”[7] He called for Clinton to withdraw from the race, claiming that “if I did a tenth of what she did, I’d be in jail today.”[58] He repeated in subsequent interviews that she should be “locked up”.[106] While campaigning for Trump, Flynn also referred to Clinton as the “enemy camp”.[58] Six days after the speech, Flynn stirred up a controversy by retweeting anti-Semitic remarks, which he later apologized for and claimed were unintentional.[113] During the campaign, Flynn also posted links to false articles and conspiracy theories relating to Clinton on Twitter,[114] including the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.[115]
Pizzagate, you will recall, was the forerunner of the full-blown Trumpist QAnon conspiracy movement. It turned out there was no basement in the DC pizza place where Hillary Clinton and fellow powerful Democrat Satan-worshipping pedophile cannibals allegedly locked children in the basement for sex and blood drinking purposes, it was a sick fantasy hatched by people who wanted to LOCK HER UP (as Jair Bolsonaro later did to his popular opponent in Brazil, shortly before the election). Now the baseless conspiracy about the child sex trafficking pizza joint is a footnote, and the starting point for the massively popular theory, embraced by millions, who believe, as the mysterious “Q” teaches, that Donald J. Trump is the only thing standing between decency and Tom Hanks fucking and killing every child he can get his disgusting hands on.
Apparently mad as hell, after Obama forced him to retire from the military for his hard-ass management style [2], Mike Flynn went on to make considerable money working for Putin and the dictatorial leader of Turkey, among other clients. While working for them he served as a campaign advisor to presidential candidates Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker, Ben Carson, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, and finally, the last Republican standing, Donald Trump. Little known fact:
In July 2016, it was reported he was being considered as Trump’s running mate; Flynn later confirmed that he had submitted vetting documents to the campaign and, although a registered Democrat, was willing to accept the Republican vice-presidential nomination if chosen.[108][109] However, Trump instead selected Indiana GovernorMike Pence.
Pence, of course, famously went on to betray Trump, in a way Flynn never would have. Trump didn’t listen to Flynn and Powell (and America’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani) when they urged him, days before the Capitol riot, to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose martial law and retain power after traitors claimed he “lost” the rigged, stolen 2020 election. For some reason, Trump hesitated — and the moment to seize power was gone. Alas!
Fortunately for Mr. Trump, there are millions of very angry Americans who believe Q are ready to go to war to reverse the stolen 2020 election and rescue America from the grips of antifa, BLM and the likes of fucking Tom Hanks. The declared neutrality of moderate, centrist Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in this fight will be a huge help to the cause. USA! USA!!!!!
Ya gotta love Mike!Flynn, NOT Pence!
[1]
Communist mouthpiece Business Insider added a gratuitous inflammatory editorial comment (that I prudently decided not to emphasize myself, in the interest of objectivity — what point to mention that Flynn’s 22 days as presidential national security advisor was the shortest term in US historyfor someone serving in that vital role?) after General Flynn straightened out the fake news:
“I am no stranger to media manipulating my words and therefore let me repeat my response to a question asked at the conference: There is no reason it (a coup) should happen here (in America),” Flynn wrote Monday.
Flynn served as national security adviser under Trump for 22 days before resigning. In 2017, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with a Russian ambassador, though he later retracted his plea and was pardoned by the former president last November.
[and then — more incendiary, defamatory lies by CCP mouthpiece “Business Insider” !]
As CNN reported Monday, Flynn continued to repeat false claims about the 2020 election during last weekend’s convention, saying, “Trump won. He won the popular vote, and he won the Electoral College vote.” Trump won neither the popular vote nor the Electoral College vote.
More baseless Deep State smears against one of Trump’s best people:
In a private e-mail that was leaked online, Colin Powell said he had heard in the DIA (apparently from later DIA director Vincent R. Stewart) that Flynn was fired because he was “abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc.”[71] According to The New York Times, Flynn exhibited a loose relationship with the truth, leading his subordinates to refer to Flynn’s repeated dubious assertions as “Flynn facts”.[73]
At a moment when 60 votes are required to overcome even a 35 vote filibuster (parliamentary rules rule!) to obstruct debate, eleven senate weasels cast no vote one way or the other.
While every vocal Republican senate supporter of Trump’s mad theory that in spite of bipartisan certification of the election the presidency had nonetheless been stolen from him (Cruz, Hawley, Johnson, Cotton, Tuberville, Kennedy, Scott, along with less vocal Hyde-Smith, Marshall and Loomis [1]) showed up to vote to kill the January 6 Commission, nine other Republicans opted for abstention (“neutrality” on the issue by simply not casting a vote — so much for Schumer’s vow to force all obstructionists to show their faces while voting), along with two “moderate” Democrats who didn’t vote:
Patty Murray (D-Washington)(citing personal family reason for missing vote)
Kyrsten Fucking Sinema (D-Arizona)
From Sinema’s Wikipedia page:
Sinema urged Senate colleagues to vote in favor of the proposed January 6 commission to further investigate the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. In a statement, she said, “we implore our Senate Republican colleagues to work with us to find a path forward on a commission to examine the events of January 6th.”[106] But she was one of two Senate Democrats who did not vote on it, the other being Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who cited a “personal family matter” for her absence.[107][108] Sinema did not give a reason for missing the vote.[109]
Nor did her spokespeople give a reason, when reporters inquired.
The nine Republican senators who opted for “abstention” were:
Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee
Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri
Republican Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana
Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina
Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma
Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota
Republican Sen. James Risch of Idaho
Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama
Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania
Profiles in fucking courage, yo.
[1]
These patriots all voted to dispute the Electoral College certifications in one or more states, after the Stop the Steal riot that violently interrupted the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021:
What happened to loud-mouthed Trumpists Ron Johnson from Wisconsin and Tom Cotton (R- Arkansas)? Apparently they were as cowardly that day as the useless Mike Pence…
[2]
Manchin, by the way, voted for the confirmations of Jeff Sessions (52-47), Neil Gorusch (54-45), Boof Kavanaugh (50-48) and yes to a federal law to ban abortions after 20 weeks (51-46). On the other hand, the “centrist” from West Virginia voted with the rest of his party against the hurried confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett (48-52, straight party-line vote), as did fellow “moderate” Kyrsten Sinema. Manchin also voted “no” on the confirmation of Betsey DeVos (50-51) for the cynically ironic post of Secretary of Education.
This story snuck by fast, leaving barely a ripple, but coming on the heels of the Department of Justice appealing Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling that Bill Barr’s disingenuous “deliberative” Mueller memo must be released to the public, it is alarming. The Washington Post:
The American Civil Liberties Union of D.C., Black Lives Matter, other civil liberties groups and individual protesters accuse Trump and senior officials of driving the June 1 events. Military, federal and local police forcibly cleared the square using batons, clubs, horses, pepper spray, smoke and fired projectiles 30 minutes before a citywide curfew began. Images of violence drew a national backlash against Trump’s calls for “overwhelming force” to put down those he called “THUGS” and domestic terrorists. The nation’s top military official later apologized for walking with Trump before television cameras that day.
Lawyers for the ACLU said that despite legal precedents, the government’s defense would “authorize brutality with impunity” in the heart of Washington at one of the most symbolic spaces within the seat of the federal government.
DOJ lawyers argued a few days ago that the case must be dismissed. They argued that the ACLU’s lawsuit over the June 2020 violent dispersal of a peaceful crowd so that Trump could walk to a photo op must be thrown out because the President and Attorney General were acting within the scope of their authority, Barr exercising the “paramount” government interest of protecting the president when he ordered federal anti-riot police to use force to drive a peaceful crowd from Lafayette Park.
The Washington Post notes that right before Trump’s walk to the church to menacingly hold up a Bible:
Trump called on governors to “dominate your city and your state” in the hours before the crackdown, adding, “In Washington, we’re going to do something people haven’t seen before.”
Earlier, he tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” as protests raged in Minneapolis. Trump also threatened that if demonstrators outside the White House breached its gates, they “would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs and most ominous weapons I have ever seen.”
Finally, the suit asserted that even as police moved on the square at 6:43 p.m., Trump spoke a few hundred yards away in the Rose Garden, saying, “[If] a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”
The ACLU had the better argument, that peaceful protesters have rights that prevent the federal (or state) government from burning, beating, shooting or giving them asthma attacks with chemical irritants:
The lawsuits seek damages and a court order declaring that authorities conspired to violate civil rights statutes and the First and Fourth amendment rights of protesters injured after being burned, beaten, shot or put into respiratory distress.
As Trump told his riled up supporters during his #Stop the Steal rally on January 6:
“When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by very different rules.”
Presumably the same goes for lawful protesters, when they represent something as ugly and divisive as police accountability for the murder of unarmed, unresisting citizens — when they refuse to stand down in the face of concrete threats and ultimatums, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.
The DOJ, because, as it points out, the current president would never use violence against peacefully protesting anti-racists, moves to dismiss the case against Barr and Trump on those grounds, and on the grounds that Barr and Trump were acting completely within the scope of their duties when they used violence against a crowd, after numerous ugly provocations and threats by the president and the Attorney General, culminating in a calculated show of unconstitutional force to violently and “illegally” deprive citizens of their rights.
Compare Trump and Barr’s response to the peaceful protest on June 1 to the federal response to the January 6 riot, during which a violent crowd of excited normal tourists fought police, breached, overran and vandalized the Capitol to prevent the final certification of Trump’s loss to Biden. Because, when you’re with president Trump, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.
Nothing to see here. If you have asthma, don’t go to a peaceful protest that might be broken up by unaccountable government force including pepper spray, smoke bombs, stun grenades, tear gas and the armed charge of horse-mounted anti-riot police — in defense of the president’s unlimited right to provoke and order violence. You have to use common sense!
I am thankful that American court cases, however otherwise messed up and biased our system of justice is, are still decided based on the available evidence, facts proved in court, beyond a reasonable doubt. The ideologues on the Supreme Court can sometimes employ narrow legal theories to overturn a trial judge’s findings, invalidate or uphold a law, but judges in our trial courts are generally constrained by the facts in evidence in the case before them.
Some of our judges are heroic in this perilous moment when a Big Lie is better than the truth to millions of our countrymen. I think of federal judges like J. Nicholas Ranjan, appointed by Trump, who nonetheless took days to write a 140 page appeal-proof ruling dismissing Trump’s evidence-free voter fraud case as the seamless tissue of bullshit it was.
Another judicial hero is Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a trial court judge on the DC federal court. The trial judge’s first job is fact-finder, the court establishes the facts of the case before applying the law to the facts in evidence. Appeals courts review only alleged errors of law by the trial court. It is extremely rare for an appeals court to disturb the findings of fact by the trial judge.
Judge Berman Jackson’s fact finding sets out a great deal of detail in her rulings, she illustrates her decisions with vivid facts from the record. She recently denied the motion for pre-trail release filed for enthusiastic Trump rioter, Karl Dresch, after weighing the facts before her.
Here are few of the colorful facts she provided to support her findings, excerpted from many letters in support of Dresch’s motion for pre-trial release, from a long footnote of examples:
T.L. (pastor of a local church): “[Defendant and his wife] are not yet members of the church.” “We have shared a few meals together, and [defendant] has done some work for the church. . . . That is the extent of our relationship.” “[As] a fairly quick judge of character . . . I do not believe that [defendant] is any real danger to our community or government. I ‘think’ that [defendant] got wrapped up in a movement and made some very foolish decisions.”
A.P. (defendant’s longtime family friend): “While [defendant] may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and got swept up in the unfortunate events of the day, I cannot imagine that he had any intent to inflict injury to persons or property.”
P.L. (defendant’s longtime friend and local attorney): “[Defendant] has very strong political views concerning government, in particular the legislative and executive branches, and law enforcement.” “[T]o be candid, [defendant] has occasionally exercised rather poor judgement.” “I have never known [defendant] to be violent in any way nor do I believe him to be flight risk nor a person who would obstruct justice.”
S.F. (casual acquaintance of defendant for past two years): “I can vouch for [defendant’s] sincere friendly character, morals and integrity over the time I have known him.”
In laying out the facts that support her decision to detain Dresch as a flight risk, and a danger to society, she includes a few pages of his social media posts, here’s one, from January 7:
On January 7, 2021, defendant commented on an unidentified post that “Mike Pence gave our country to the communist hordes, traitor scum like the rest of them, we have your back give the word and we will be back even stronger.”
and:
Bro you shoulda been there . . . . the news is all fake . . . and just to correct shit . . we wasn’t violent but we took the capitol . . . . antifa didn’t do it they may have had some idiots undercover in the crowd but it was us that got in . . . and we didn’t fuck shit up . . . I seen a broken window . . . we picked up water bottles and shit cleaned up . . it was grand . . . best day ever . . . I think it was a good show of force . . . look what we can do peacefully, wait til we decide to get pissed.
Of course, there is also a detail like this. In his home in Calumet, Michigan:
Among other items, agents located several hundred rounds of rifle (7.62) ammunition, a Russian rifle, shotgun shells, a shotgun, and an Atlanta Braves backpack. The ammunition was located in multiple places throughout the house, including the dining room, the master bedroom, an upstairs hall room, and inside the backpack. Specifically, the backpack contained a Pilot gas station receipt from Hagerstown, Maryland dated January 5, 2021, a Metro SmartTrip card, and 8 boxes of 7.62 ammunition, containing a total of 160 rounds. The boxes matched the boxes of ammunition found in the house. The firearms were identified in the Michigan State Police Report as a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun and a Russian-made SKS 7.62 mm x 39 caliber rifle.
The Judge then turns to Dresch’s motion to set him free until the trial and analyzes the applicable law, in light of the facts.
Defendant argues that that government lacked sufficient grounds to move for his detention under the Bail Reform Act. Section 3142(f)(2) states that the judicial officer shall hold a hearing upon motion of the government or its own motion in a case that involves “(A) a serious risk that such person will flee; or (B) a serious risk that such person will obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice, or threaten, injure, or intimidate, or attempt to threaten, injure, or intimidate, a prospective witness or juror.”
Then she sets to work ruling that the section 3142(g) factors support detention on the grounds of dangerousness by clear and convincing evidence(and here, due to formatting limitations, I will not indent, but the following is all from the May 28 decision)
A. The nature and circumstances of the offense charged
The United States Capitol was not open to the public on January 6, 2021.
There was important business going on, though, because on that day, in accordance with Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, a joint session of Congress was convened to certify the vote of the Electoral College in the 2020 Presidential Election.
This was after every single one of the fifty states, including those under Republican control or with Republican election officials, had certified its own count, and after court challenges to those counts or certifications had been rejected by more than sixty courts across the country – by state judges, and also by federal judges appointed by Presidents of both parties, including former President Trump. Vice President Mike Pence, also a Republican, was present and presiding, as the Constitution required. See U.S. Const. art. II, § 1.
The United States Capitol Police, federal law enforcement officers surrounding the building, and the members of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department who were summoned to assist, were overcome.
Defendant was one of many individuals who made their way through the barricades and past the officers who were attempting to keep the crowd away from the building. He was one of the individuals who entered the closed building. And that day, the certification process prescribed by the Constitution was interrupted as members of Congress of both parties and the Vice President had to be spirited to safety or were forced to barricade the doors or hide.
(back to me) These facts are not in dispute. The “normal tourists” who forced GOP elected officials to flee for their lives and barricade themselves in safe rooms while these normal tourist crowds, after smashing their way into the tourist attraction, roamed the halls chanting “hang Mike Pence” and calling for “Nancy” to come out and face the music, had been whipped up by Trump and the most extreme members of his remaining extremist support group. Like this guy:
The judge quotes defendant again:
Ok all you conspiracy theorists . . . don’t worry I loves you all just setting the record straight. antifa did not take the capitol. that was Patriots . . . don’t give them the thunder, we the people took back our house, the news is all bullshit. and now those traitors Know who’s really in charge.
As to Dresch’s likely future actions, the judge cites the incendiary power of Trump’s ongoing lie:
Defendant’s promise to take action in the future cannot be dismissed as an unlikely occurrence given that his singular source of information, (“Trump’s the only big shot I trust right now”), continues to propagate the lie that inspired the attack on a near daily basis. See generally From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk (last visited May 27, 2021). And the anger surrounding the false accusation continues to be stoked by multiple media outlets as well as the state and federal party leaders who are intent on censuring those who dare to challenge the former President’s version of events.
She sums up, a few pages later, after reciting defendant’s criminal history, including a drunk driving high speed chase (he did an impressive 145 miles an hour crossing from Michigan to Wisconsin to evade police) that landed him in jail, he served prison time in both states:
Given defendant’s offer to return to Washington to engage in a similar effort to disrupt democratic processes again, his warning that authorities here cannot reach him at home, the utter contempt he showed for law enforcement and the safety of the community during the high speed chase, the threatening remarks directed at an individual who was reporting participants in the attack to the FBI, defendant’s other convictions for obstructive conduct, and his knowing possession of multiple weapons and a considerable supply of ammunition after two felony convictions, the Court has clear and convincing reasons to believe that defendant poses a danger to the community that cannot be alleviated by the imposition of any conditions.
The court of public opinion may contain tens of millions who sincerely believe that Tom Hanks traffics and rapes children, then kills them and drinks their blood, and that because of heinous freaks like the falsely smiling Hanks, our country is in mortal danger and only Donald Trump can save us.
The American court of law, so far, has been fairly consistent in requiring proof, beyond the sincerely, even passionately, held opinions of those who honestly believe that their violence is necessary to save us all from Satanist, pedophile, cannibal, socialist, fascist, antifa, BLM culture warriors, dangerous monsters like blood-drinkers Tom Hanks, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, George Soros and company.
As the narrator of this tale, or the plaintiff in a related medical malpractice nuisance suit, I have the great advantage that you won’t need to squint or strain to see the fingernail sized permanent divot on the bridge of my nose. You can see what I’m peeved about at a glance, even in low light.
This lifetime scar gives me instant credibility as the teller of this particular story, and a bit of pathos too. Juries like pathos, if they shudder to imagine having been subjected to the same thing the plaintiff was forced to undergo.
It’s always a mistake, of course, to believe that a gratuitous scar on one’s face, inflicted by a doctor who has not performed the medical procedure he prescribed, the one authorized by insurance, is a legally cognizable injury.
Let the lawyers fight it out, I say.
“Is this scar going to fill in?” I asked the confident doctor three weeks after the surgery, a single gouge deep into the bridge of my nose, to remove a basal cell invisible to the naked eye, a large round wound which was then cauterized instead of stitched.
“No, that’s about as good as it’s going to look,” he said, with admirable candor.
My next question was based on the four or five previous Mohs surgeries I’d had to remove much more visible, deeper, more advanced basal cells (the most benign form of skin cancer). Each of these surgeries had taken several hours, as opposed to the 30 minute procedure his surgeon had done on my nose.
“I was supposed to have Mohs surgery, which removes one thin layer at a time to preserve as much healthy tissue as possible and minimize scarring. Your surgeon basically took a small, sharp ice cream scoop and scooped out all the surrounding tissue in one pass, down to the cartilage,” I said.
“Yes,” said the doctor. In that moment I didn’t have the presence of mind to say anything more. I suppose my psychic efforts were focused on not cauterizing the good doctor’s nose right then.
The doctor’s attitude about the prominent scar in the middle of my face was a slightly impatient “no skin off my nose, pal.” His body language said “are we done here? Any more rhetorical questions?” He thought for a moment then told me about a powerful prescription cream that reduces scarring.
“But your insurance won’t pay for it,” he told me a moment later. The kindly doc then sent his nurse off to find a few of the free sample tubes the pharmaceutical company rep had left him a case of. The cream, which came with no instructions except his nurse’s “apply in a very thin layer”, seemed to irritate the scar which became increasingly uncomfortable until I stopped using the stuff.
In the debate over “socialized” medicine we often hear the critique about the “rationing” of medical care not provided on a competitive, profit-driven “free market” basis. Healthcare, in Communist nations like Great Britain, Canada, Japan, France, etc. is rationed, we are told, because everyone is presumed to be equal when it comes to health care and so there is often a line for some procedures. While it’s true that the wealthy can skip the lines, even in those countries, by going to a private doctor, health care for most is still “rationed”. Here, under our system, the level of care you are “entitled” to is rationed by your ability to pay a monthly health insurance premium. The more you pay, the higher the quality of care you are entitled to, the less rationing you will be subject to.
Here in America every doctor, even the kind orthopedist I’ve visited a couple of times for the arthritis in my knees, knows exactly the level of your insurance coverage as you sit discussing medical options. “Unfortunately, your insurance won’t pay for it, though it works very well to keep the knee pain-free for six months or so while you strengthen the surrounding muscles,” she said of an injection she proposed. She nodded when I told her I’d be on Medicare soon, hopefully. Medicare will absolutely pay for the shot, she told me with a smile.
A cardiologist, who revealed himself as a mask-shunning Trumpist during the pandemic, billed almost $12,000 for each of the four procedures I had on veins in my calves. He’d told me confidently “your insurance will cover it.” My insurance paid him almost half. Not a bad hour’s work for those first three veins. I had a mirthless laugh when I got my “Explanation of Benefits” for the fourth and final venous ablation. He’d billed $12,000 and received zero. His office, apparently, had failed to renew the authorization to be paid. I guess their lawyers will have to fight it out, and good for them both.
A doctor working for a patient with low-cost health insurance (dictated under the ACA according to your declared income, the only choice a low-income patient has is to accept the offered insurance or reject it — and have none), knows exactly how much of the amount his office bills will be paid by the insurance company. This dermatologist motherfucker had every incentive, based on the small fraction of his billed Mohs surgery fee he’d receive, to get me in and out of his office as quickly as possible. Thus incentivized, I was in and out quickly. Even though the surgeon couldn’t see the tiny spot he was supposed to remove.
He called in the dermatologist for a quick consultation, they looked at the photos of the two biopsies (the second had been necessary because the first was done in haste) and concluded it was there, just next to that broken blood vessel. I had a strong reflex to hesitate, as if in a moment of precognition.
“If you can’t see it clearly, I’d rather wait a few months until it’s visible,” I said with mild panic, knowing that these slowly growing cells can be there for a long time with no terrible effect. The confident dermatologist told me that they concurred, knew exactly where the basal cell was and that there was no need to put off the surgery. Like a schmuck, I sat back and let the surgeon hurry to gouge out the entire surrounding area, taking out a circle of healthy tissue to ensure he got the basal cell.
I was in and out of the office in just over a half hour, less time than even the first phase of Mohs surgery usually takes, as I know from experience, having had the procedure now five times out of six. Cah-ching.
As for Dr. “No Skin off My Nose”, what are the odds that a patient with a scarred face, given one more small scar for good measure (and to maximize the good doctor’s billable hours) will have the ability to coherently make a case that a doctor who prescribed surgery A, had that surgery (as well as a skin graft to minimize the scar)authorized by the patient’s insurance and then provides surgery B, including the burning of the flesh around the unnecessarily large wound, deserves a little shit, from his medical ethics board and a payment from his malpractice insurance carrier for the nuisance he inflicted (I have pain at the site of the surgery months later, in addition to the small crater) to the guy whose nose he brutalized?
It may take me a little while longer, but this slick, confident operator needs his smug fucking face cauterized too, just a little.No? After all, it is really no skin off my nose.
