Author Archives: oinsketta

The Rule of Law, MAGA style

It is a terrible thing to be a lawyer for a crazed, antisocial serial criminal with no impulse control who is also a compulsive liar.  In a court of law, where rules, facts introduced as evidence and actual laws applied to those facts decide the merits of the case, it is difficult to legally defend someone who keeps changing their lying arguments and continually implicates themselves and their accomplices with careless, incriminating public statements.  If the criminal defendant is a braggart who cannot stop publicly taking credit for things that are flagrantly illegal, your nightmare as a lawyer gets worse still.

Here in the USA, the Constitution is the source of all law binding the federal government, and through the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, every state government as well.   No government entity in the United States may deprive a person of life, liberty or property without a notice of its intent to do so and a hearing at which the accused may be heard.   This is called due process, the requirement of legal notice and an opportunity to be heard before any punishment is imposed. 

The process you are due, as someone in the United States legally (or illegally, for that matter) is — you must be charged with a crime and then given the opportunity to be heard by a judge before you can be imprisoned, fined, have your property seized, be deported, etc. 

The president had his myrmidons round up a few hundred seemingly random Hispanics, shave their heads, put them into orange jumpsuits and chains.  They then staged a photo op, marching these supposedly dangerous criminals onto a plane to be flown to a notorious penal colony-style prison  in El Salvador.   They staged a photo op on the other end, of these men deported without due process, or any process at all, actually, being marched off to the overcrowded supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador.

The family of one of these men, Abrego Garcia, a legal resident married to an American citizen, raising an autistic five-old child as well as two kids from his wife’s previous relationship, made an emergency motion in federal court to have him returned to the United States.  According to the testimony, Garcia has been, as most poor immigrants are, a model citizen, with protected status here because of credible threats of violence and death by gangs in El Salvador.

You may be familiar with the self-contradicting piece of doggerel  offered by the Trump administration in federal court to justify its actions, what I call the Nazi line about this case.  Call it the MAGA line if you like, but read a few histories of Mr. Hitler’s Germany and you will see no difference in technique.   Garcia was deported due to “administrative error” the administration admits, yet, Trump’s DOJ and all of his spokesmen and surrogates insist Garcia is also a member of the violent MS-13 gang.

Important thing to remember, MAGA arguments, like Nazi arguments, do not need to make any sense in the conventional sense of the word sense.  Picture the poor bastard lawyer who’s got to make this ridiculous clerical error/ but still terrorist, argument. He’s got to argue this in front of a judge not disposed to ignore the plain text of the US Constitution in order to approve clearly illegal actions by a flagrantly lawless government of lackeys serving a vengeful and ignorant madman.

Check out what he is forced to say, this poor bastard Trump DOJ lawyer. When I read this out loud to Seedj she said, “he’s not going to be in that job very long .”  I have to give this man props for his candor.

Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.

“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”

At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”

Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.

“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.

“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.” 

Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.

source

BREAKING (wind) on Fox!!! Obama JUDGE!!!

Within minutes of a federal judge ruling that a man given asylum in the US, based on a reasonable fear of death if forced back to El Salvador, and sent to a notorious El Salvador prison without due process of law, must be returned to the US by April 7, FOX was on the case. The man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is a legal resident married to an American, with a disabled five year-old child. He was illegally deported to the country he was given asylum from, El Salvador, and must be returned to the US, ruled the judge. I made it through sixty seconds of the BREAKING Fox story. Here’s what I learned.

“An Obama-appointed judge” made this decision, obviously (a judge appointed by a Kenyan, Muslim, DEI pick who was never the legitimate president and was one of the unrepentant Central Park Five who should have all been executed.)

The Trump administration admitted in court that Garcia was deported after an “administrative error but insists he is a member of MS13”    Try wrapping your head around that sentence.

The first talking head the Fox anchor turns to for more “facts” is an indignant female Nazi who begins:  “He is not some Maryland father, as the Mainstream [Jew] Media would have you believe.  He’s a member of MS13 who was involved in human trafficking.”

Josef Goebbels himself, at his most operatic, couldn’t have spun it all better in just over a minute. The man currently in an El Salvador concentration camp, a work prison at 300% prisoner capacity, was not ruled reasonably fearful of his life if forced to return to El Salvador (as he was, hence, his status here, hence the ‘administrative error’) and deserves to rot there indefinitely because he’s out of US jurisdiction, we have no way to get him back, and he’s a… terrorist and human trafficker, whether the victim of an administrative error or whatever else hysterical left-wing lunatics want to claim about his so-called illegal deportation and so-called denial of so-called due process. If the Fuhrer does it, and you think it’s illegal, and you don’t immediately shut your big, stinking mouth, we have a nice, crowded, foul-smelling cattle car for you.

Fox and its Nazi propaganda-spouting ilk is the primary news source for much of America, and every one of this country’s frequently betrayed low information voters, also known as The Base (al Q’aeda, in Arabic).

A short, but factual, version of the story is here.

Nazi immigrant  explains why inferior immigrants have an unfair  bias toward democracy

It’s hard to overstate how stupid this painfully awkward “genius” Nazi psychopath (apartheid South Africa’s military service evading Elon Musk) actually is. I hate to kick an unstable, abusive, bullying, anti-worker, “anti-woke,” antisocial warrior while he’s crying, but why not? I may be suffering from PDS, Psychopath Derangement Syndrome, but, if I’m not mistaken, these two shorts showcase this one’s particular, eh, genius, as well as his charming speech impediment:

Below, if you have the stomach for it, is a nice, weepy illustration of how brittle the myth is that obscene wealth makes someone a “winner”, unlike the tens of millions Americans who work multiple jobs every day to afford health care for their families. Winner or whiner, you be the judge, jury and executioner. What a despicable idiot punk… not surprising that his Nazi grandfather, Joshua Haldeman [1], relocated the family from Canada to South Africa a few generations ago, after grandpaw’s idol lost World War Two. Presumably 1950s Canada wasn’t bigoted enough for his refined taste in racial and eugenic matters.

[1] (from Wikipedia link above) During that time [1943-1948], Haldeman formally made statements discouraging the publicizing of the prevalent antisemitism in [his] party.[18] However, he also gave a speech defending a decision by a party newspaper to publish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic fabrication claiming an International Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. In his speech, Haldeman said “that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.”[1] He would later claim apartheid South Africa was leading “White Christian Civilization” against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” he claimed they controlled.[1] . . .

. . . Weeks after the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, Haldeman self-published The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa, a 42-page response to the massacre. The United Nations passed Resolution 134, the body’s first official condemnation of apartheid and the beginning of decades of diplomatic isolation. Later Haldeman self-published a second book alleging international conspiracies: The International Conspiracy in Health targeted fluoridation, vaccinations, and health insurance.[1][22]

If only we were not living in a post-truth culture

Truth, critical thinking and adherence to the facts matter more now than at any time in our history.  Senator Sheldon Whitehouse lays out an irrefutable case for Trump’s cynical weaponization of the government against the People.  The case is irrefutable, except by calling Whitehouse a hysterical, sick, dangerous, partisan lunatic, and somehow discrediting, among the lowest information Americans out there, the truthful and factually detailed report he delivers to the Senate, and to the People, in this latest installment of The Scheme.

Death by corporate medicine (part 1 of many)

Corporate medicine is medicine conducted, primarily, for the profits of shareholders in the corporation.  Health insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, death prevention in general, forms the most lucrative sector in the American economy. To be sure, decent medical results are required, usually, for a corporately held medical group to stay in business, but make no mistake: the primary goals of the board of directors and CEO of the corporation are for doctors to see as many patients as possible, do as many expensive tests and  surgical procedures as possible, bill for every contact with a patient and make the most money for the corporate “person” that employs the medical staff, invests in the medical technology, conducts public relations and fundraising in the community to be seen as self-less healers.

You will notice fewer hospitals with an ombudsman or patient advocate.  These skilled professionals calm down patients who are upset, make them feel heard, resolve conflicts that can complicate healing.  They also avoid lawsuits against hospitals and doctors.  None of these outcomes are as important as a good security system to remove agitated patients who demand things of doctors or medical staff.   I will be writing about death by corporate medicine again soon, but for the moment, here’s one example of corporate medicine that might seem subtle, though it doesn’t feel that way to the patient.

The patient (me) was scheduled for an emergency cystoscopy, the insertion of a miniaturized camera into the penis, down the urethra and into the bladder.   I’ve had these before, they sound much more nightmarish than they actually are.  The phrase associated with things like cystoscopies is “most patients tolerate” the procedure, often with an initial grunt.   I was nervous about this emergency test, since my urethra was still painful from an unnecessary surgery conducted on me two weeks ago by a surgeon who, although charming and a great salesman, never did any test before plunging into my urethra and tearing the tissue therein.

I was told by my new urologist that if I arrived one minute after my appointment time the emergency cystoscopy would not be done.   I arrived ten minutes before my appointment time.  I then waited ninety minutes for my appointment.   During those ninety minutes I urinated five times.  I was nervous, and annoyed to be kept waiting this long.   I had to go again and again because my bladder doesn’t empty easily, but every one of these pisses was pretty much pain free, especially compared to the relentless pain of the last two weeks.  Then I was escorted in for the cystoscopy.  I told the attendant that a lab report on my recent urine culture was back and that if I had an infection I probably wouldn’t be having a cystoscopy.  He turned us around and took me into a regular consult room.

When the doctor finally arrived, I had one thing to say, a final word to clear up our initial misunderstanding.  I told her I needed ninety seconds.  I wanted to make it clear that I respected her longtime colleague, and my longtime urologist, and that we’d been having a mutual bad day the last time I saw him, that I was under pressure from recently diagnosed kidney disease, the inability to walk and other medical issues.  She cut me off about ten seconds in, I was by now, apparently, her last patient of the day.  She was not interested in rehashing any of this, she said.  She told me I had a massive urinary tract infection and that was the cause of my pain.  Obviously we weren’t going to insert a scope into a painfully inflamed urinary tract.

I could have been told that ninety minutes earlier, by the doctor’s smart, engaging personal receptionist.  The knowledge that I wasn’t going to have to tolerate a painful (initially) procedure  might have saved me two or three trips to the bathroom.  It certainly would have spared me some anxiety.   But that kind of thing is strictly the patient’s concern, not anyone else’s, in a corporate setting where your doctor is seeing twenty other patients a day.

Because I had urinated so many times while in her office, because I had a massive infection, the doctor assumed that I was still in as much pain as a few days earlier when I was still recovering from an unnecessary procedure (as the surgeon conceded afterwards, I need a different one) that had torn tissue in my urethra.   Based on the lab results of a urine culture and her assumption about urinary urgency and pain, she prescribed the Cipro and told me to take two pills, phenoazopyridine, three times daily, to help with the urgency and pain of urination.

I was unable to convey to her that balancing my water intake (after days of trial and error, 48 ounces seems to be the sweet spot) is the best way to keep the urine flow going throughout the day.  I began telling her that my previous experience with phenoazopyridine had left me unable to urinate at all for hours at a time.  If the goal was, as she said, to keep urine flowing to help protect my kidneys, and empty my bladder as much as possible, this drug, which had not worked for me pain-wise either, was not one to take.  She quickly dismissed my experience and encouraged me to take it three times a day, whatever it said on the box.

Updating this post just now I seem to have deleted my final paragraph. Had the doctor asked me my level of urgency to urinate and pain during urination, instead of making hasty assumptions about what I needed to do, I’d have given her a pain score of two on each of those, as opposed to a solid 7 to 8 several days ago, when my torn urethra was still inflamed. I didn’t need pain medication for the infection, only the antibiotic to cure it. I won’t be taking phenoazopyridine again, and I’ve regained much of my ability to urinate as before after last night’s dose, but … seriously, what do you expect from a doctor who works in the setting of corporate medicine? She doesn’t get paid to schmooze or ask patients about their feelings, there’s absolutely nothing in it for a doctor with a tough quota to meet every day.

Next time, remind me: corporate medicine’s denial of any mind/body, affective/corporeal, emotional pain/physical healing connection.

Speaking truth to powerful idiocy

Marks [former top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, who submitted his resignation today after being given the choice to resign or be fired] said that although he was willing to work with Kennedy on his plan to review vaccine safety, “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

Source

And truthfully, what psychopath could possibly desire less than that?

Move Fast and Break Everything

Project 2025, the Koch network’s radical reactionary plan to let the richest .01% off the leash of government regulation, confiscatory taxes, majoritarian tyranny and accountability for crimes, while subjugating everyone else, is being carried out on the smash and grab fast track in every one of its fine points. 

The authors of  the radical blueprint for autocracy that Trump lied about knowing the details of (at the same time claiming to disagree with some of the manifesto he said he knew nothing about), was written by many members of Trump 1.0, who are now back in powerful roles in the insane two-year old’s second administration.  It is a detailed action plan for rooting out disloyalty to the Unitary Executive and implementing a fully fascist, corporately-controlled US, fueled by revenge and intimidation of all dissent.   Full steam ahead!

The only problem for Project American Hitler and the Richest White Men of North America, and it may be a problem that saves this tottering experiment in democracy and respect for basic human dignity, is that much of what they are doing is plainly illegal and unconstitutional.   As well as cruel, thoughtless, rash, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, economically imbecilic, driven by a psychopath’s unquenchable need to prevail, destroy the opponent and have every bit of revenge he’s entitled to.    

For example, only Congress can create a government agency, so an outfit like “DOGE”, strictly speaking, and in spite of numerous sworn lies as to who is running Musk’s little “agency”, and the mass media all referring to it as a Department, as though legally created and not pulled directly out of Charles Koch’s crusty 90 year-old sphincter, is illegal under our laws, traditions and the Constitution which vests the power to create a monstrosity like the “Department of Government Efficiency” solely in Congress. Congress is also the only branch of government that can allocate and spend tax money, whether in the interest of “efficiency”, lack of accountability, covering up crimes or any other purpose.

An unelected, insane, unqualified, oligarch political donor unilaterally ending the sixty year foreign aid program to keep starving children alive, protect millions of children in danger of death from malaria, fund NGOs that care for war orphans abroad, defunding the Veteran’s Affairs suicide hotline (for fuck’s sake!), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, closing Social Security offices, illegally mass firing key staff throughout the federal government via email, the illegal round-up and televised deportation of persons subject to the jurisdiction of the US and its Constitution, the mafia don like shake downs of all perceived rivals, bullying, baseless lawsuits against cowed, spineless mass media corporations, compliant universities, a prominent non-MAGA law firm — all fucking illegal.

Who enforces the law?  On the federal level a loyal MAGA lie endorsing diehard who was too corrupt and radioactive for Trump to hire back in 2017.  After all, as Florida AG under the Viktor Orban-like Ron “Go-go boots” DeSanctimonious, she had recently taken a $25,000 campaign contribution from Trumpie to drop Florida’s investigation into his fraudulent, now shuttered, Trump University.  Now she’s 100% team Trump, the criminal president’s personal lawyer in a way even the pathetic, historically corrupt Bill Barr refused to be, including endorsing the fiction that the 2020 election was rigged and illegally stolen from the rightful winner, Mr. T.   Pam Bondi is eager and ready to do anything Aileen Cannon would do if she were the AG.  Cannon, of course, is poised to occupy Alito’s or Thomas’s incredibly foul smelling seat among the Immortal Nine, The Federalist Society Six.  Extremists, if they occupy even a one vote majority, can have the final say on virtually everything.  And that is their plan, to seize democracy by a one vote majority and shut the whole goddamned experiment down.

Fortunately the courts are holding so far. They have called bullshit over and over on weak, stupid and lying arguments made by MAGA officials defending illegal actions in court. We may be headed for an Andrew Jackson moment, I sure hope not, but it’s not unlikely when you depend on angry, vengeance seeking psychopaths to do what’s right for others. Jackson was a pugnacious psychopath with a famously foul temper who told the chief justice “you’ve made your ruling, now where’s your army to enforce it, bitch?” I asked a friend who knows American history in uncanny detail what happened after Jackson made that challenge.

“The Trail of Tears,” he said, referring to a mass killing death march under the Indian Removal Act, a death march the Supreme Court had tried to stop as unconstitutional. Fuck me, I thought, no wonder Old Hickory is Old Orange’s favorite president. Made millions capturing and selling slaves, told the Supreme Court to suck his hickory stick, regretted not personally hanging his disloyal Vice President and fellow psychopath John C. Calhoun. No wonder Trump put the guy’s portrait in the Oval Office. Jackson is a president after the Orange Polyp’s own heart, an American Putin, (minus the kompromat on the current American “president” — notice how Trump always claims to know nothing about the actions of his own executive branch).

The mass pain that this president of subnormal intelligence and supernatural stubbornness is inflicting directly on millions of his supporters, as well as on America’s allies (on behalf of a war criminal dictator involved in the, LOL! “Rusher Hoax” that helped place him in office two out of three tries) will not help him in the court of public opinion when the idiotic ideas he’s implementing really start hitting the fan, like the proverbial poop these dumb ideas are. 

Trump’s best hope to become the American Hitler is mass public violence (and he has the proven violent goon squad standing back and standing by, awaiting his next command) and the strong, powerful right arm of devout Christian Pete “I didn’t rape that lying bitch, I was drunk, my lawyers fucking paid her, shut up, for Christ’s sake, I have a hangover!” Hegseth and his generals ordering US troops to open fire on dissenting Americans under an invocation of Mike “Q-Anon” Flynn’s favorite American law, The Insurrection Act. 

I’m betting on democracy, no matter what the oddsmakers and bookies in Las Vegas are saying.  Call me Anne Frank, but I’m betting that Americans are better, and much smarter,  than Trump and his movement think we are.

Message from Big Balls

There is literally no limit to how stupid, vicious and incompetent psychopaths like father of 13 (all by IVF) Musk, his front man DJT and their young, unprincipled anti-government hackers (on the payroll of the government) are. I went on to the Social Security website to download my 1099. In order to log in I needed an email sent to me with a security code. Here’s the email that came from ssa.gov:

Google says: you can’t trust a message from Social Security, proceed with caution, red flag, red flag!

Apparently you can pick up one of these MAGA hats in Greenland or Canada. God bless these United Shayyssssh.

Traitorgate

Mary Trump posted this picture at the top of her piece called The Ongoing National Security Debacle.  I have only one word to add to the caption of this picture worth thousands of words.  Mary’s caption is fine, excellent, really.

Morons.

I have read several excellent pieces about this foul bit of ongoing fascist foreplay, the illegal, asshole use of a chat group, on personal phones, to plan and gloat about a secret military strike. Timothy Snyder’s analysis of the larger point of this group chat bullshit is brilliant. Heather Cox Richardson’s keeps to her very high standard of excellent, insightful reporting — if you only read one, her’s is the one to read. Robert Reich is on fire on the obvious, burning question of Where Are the fucking Democrats at this moment?

This kind of coverage (the three mentioned above, I haven’t read Mary’s yet) is a huge part of the fight we all need to participate in, now and not when we are done trembling about the lack of amenities at the eventual death camp many of us will be shoehorned into.

When you are up against Nazis you are fighting psychopaths, whatever spineless mainstream Democrats may say about the virtues of playing possum while the Nazis magically self-destruct because of their own hubris, irrationality, stupidity and incompetence.  The very things that drive Nazis.   The exact things we have to remain educated about, highlight and fight at every turn.  At every fucking turn, my friends.