Author Archives: oinsketta

Don’t forget John Roberts

From Heather Cox Richardson yesterday, on the long judicial coup run by the cunning, privileged owners of the activist extremist party that is now calling itself MAGA (see, also John Birch Society):

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” 

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate. . .

She then details McConnell’s right-wing judiciary appointment mission, and how he removed the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, when the time was right, to get a couple of 50% supported nominees on to the court, after denying Obama his constitutional right to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia eight months before the 2016 election.

. . . Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion. 

source

Don’t forget America’s most partisan balls and strikes umpire John “Corporations get to say ‘go fuck yourself'” Roberts. How does this smiling corporate shill, who schemes behind the scenes, votes in every key case with the right-wing fraternal order of the Federalist Society block, and has authored some of its most infamous decisions, get a pass from even someone as brilliant as Heather? How is he, the man who, although he didn’t vote with the other four to kill Roe v. Wade, gleefully signed on to nullify the power of federal regulators, keep an insurrectionist on the ballot in Colorado and immunize criminal acts committed by a criminal president, among other MAGA endorsed rulings, still seen as somehow “moderate” or an “institutionalist”?

Look no further than his infamous decision in Shelby County v. Holder when he ruled that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which he acknowledged righted a historical injustice, was no longer necessary. His argument is bland and pristine: Congress relied on forty year old data when they reauthorized it, so me and four Federalist Society diehards are undoing their uninformed, undemocratic activism. True, except that he was lying about the forty year old data, as it turns out. As I wrote when I read the decision:

Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nah, says John Roberts, we’re going back to that golden time when the wealthy land owners, the ancestors of our greatest billionaire donors and close friends, made all the decisions for the USA.  Dignity and respect, after all, are just words, and ridiculous ones when applied to those who deserve neither. Strike three, bitches.

I began writing this yesterday, and today the Gray Lady herself chimes in on Roberts. Here’s how he teed up the question posed by the Roberts court in Trump v. US:

The justices instructed lawyers from both sides to address a broad question: “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure.”. . .

. . . On April 25, the justices and the lawyers in the case gathered for oral arguments in the courtroom, across the street from where the Jan. 6 rioting had taken place three years earlier. The clamor from the Capitol attack had been audible from inside the court building, former employees recalled in interviews, and afterward, security sharply increased and fences shielded the building.

During the arguments, however, several conservative justices said that they wanted to focus not on what had happened that day, but on broader legal questions.

“I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,” Justice Alito told the courtroom.

“I’m not focused on the here and now of this case,” Justice Kavanaugh said. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Gorsuch said.

For the Thousand Year Reich, no doubt.

Here’s a bit about Roberts’s fundamental dishonesty:

One footnote left scholars wondering whether former presidents could ever be prosecuted for taking bribes. An N.Y.U. professor was startled to discover that the opinion, which leaned heavily on Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case on presidential immunity, truncated a quote from that decision, changing its meaning.

Verdict: Federalist Society stalwart and Nazi fuck.

MAGA influencer of the week

She traveled with Donald “People don’t leave my rallies” (think roach motel) Trump to his most excellent September 10th debate in Philadephia, a debate he won, he said, like 98 to 2, and then on his September 11th rounds. Her overt racism, proud “white nationalist” self-identification and penchant for lying and promoting wild, unfounded conspiracy theories provoked Trump sychophant Lindsey Graham to urge Donald to distance himself from her. She fired back, questioning coy bachelor Graham’s sexual preference. Klan Mom Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized her racism as too extreme and appalling even for Greene (wow!), and Trump’s companion’s response was to remind the world of Greene’s extramarital affair and compare her to a “hooker” (arguably not unfair, but still).

Meet 31 year-old Laura Loomer.

The NY Times described her this way:

A far-right activist known for her endless stream of sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Muslim and occasionally antisemitic social media posts and public stunts, Ms. Loomer has made a name for herself over the past decade by unabashedly claiming 9/11 was “an inside job,” calling Islam “a cancer,” accusing Ron DeSantis’s wife of exaggerating breast cancer and claiming that President Biden was behind the attempt to assassinate Mr. Trump in July. source

Wikipedia:

Loomer continued to advocate for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump in 2024, telling The Washington Post, “I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”[54] Loomer was brought as a guest by Trump to Philadelphia where he engaged in the September 10 presidential debate with opponent Kamala Harris.[55] The following day, Loomer attended events alongside Trump commemorating the September 11 attacks. Loomer had previously endorsed claims that 9/11 “was an inside job.”[56] According to anonymous sources on the Trump campaign, Loomer reportedly influenced Trump to publicly endorse various false conspiracy theories, including the claim that Kamala Harris hid her black heritage and the claim that Haitian immigrants were eating other people’s household pets in Ohio. Loomer also posted a tweet referencing stereotypes of Indians, saying that if Harris, who is half-Indian, were elected President “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right member of the United States House of Representatives, condemned this remark as “appalling and extremely racist.”[57]

As part of a promotional deal for the pet food brand Pawsitive on her Rumble channel, Loomer filmed herself eating dog food.[58]

. . . Early life and education

Loomer and her two brothers were raised in Arizona.[21] She attended Mount Holyoke College, leaving after one semester; she said she felt targeted for being conservative.[22] She transferred to Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism.[22][23] Loomer is Jewish.[24][25]

Oy! No, not Jewish, please, for the love of Jesus…

In an otherwise fair account of takeaways from the recent presidential debate about pet eating

Among a panel of fourteen writers assembled by the Times to opine about who won the debate thirteen of them call it clearly for Harris. The following throw away line was embedded in another headline article, their six takeaways from the debate:

In her response, Ms. Harris bored into Mr. Trump’s agenda rather than her own. It was typical of a debate in which she appeared most at ease talking about Mr. Trump rather than fleshing out her own plans for the presidency.

In other words, from the Grey Lady’s perspective, Harris, in her two minute answers, during which her main job was driving home the contrast between herself and the insane idiot behind the other podium, an idiot with a detailed plan, written for him, for unaccountable oligarchs to take over our government forever, kept focusing on the psychopathy and danger Mr. Trump displayed in his lying non-answers rather than giving wonkish details of her own policies. Fair enough. . .

Corporate media truly, truly can’t help themselves. Heaven help us all.

NY Times “sane washing” Trump

For the Times writing “what Trump seems to be saying….”, after giving an extended section of an incoherent statement by the Orange Polyp, is not a problem. The New York Times always exerts itself to interpret and explain the nonsensical non-answers that Trump always gets a pass for. Lawrence O’Donnell’s analysis of the media “sane washing” Trump’s raging incoherence is precise and brilliant.

O’Donnell applauds the New York Times for trying, for the first time, to stop sane washing Trump’s dangerous blathering. Then he points out that they just can’t help themselves, reading this section of the paper’s lead article focusing on concerns about Trump’s age and cognitive abilities (the article, which I saw online in the wee hours this morning, was gone from the homepage when I woke up, maybe somebody at the Times is watching O’Donnell’s show):

Mr. Trump’s response to the child care question in New York on Thursday underscored the concerns. Often his mangled statements are summarized in news accounts in ways that do not give the full picture of how baffling they can be. Quoting them at length, though, can provide additional context. Here is a more extended account of his reply on affordable child care:

“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that — because the child care is, child care, it’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.”

“What he seemed to be saying was that he would raise so much money by imposing tariffs on imported goods that the country could use the proceeds to pay for child care. In itself, that would be a disputable policy assumption.”

source

In spite of reflexively “sane washing” Trump’s incomprehensible word salads and most dangerous threats in headlines and news articles every day, the New York Times editors do actually know the truth, as they point out with great clarity in today’s editorial:

Some of Mr. Trump’s other promises are even more vague. Mr. Trump was asked after a speech last week if he would act to make child care more affordable. He said he would, but in the following two minutes, he didn’t manage to say anything coherent about how.

In other areas Mr. Trump has been more specific, but his plans would be disastrous.

He has proposed a tariff, or tax, of up to 20 percent on imports from foreign countries, along with an even higher tariff on imports from China. That bill would be paid by American consumers, in the form of higher prices, no matter how many times or how loudly Mr. Trump says otherwise.

He has proposed rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. Beyond the enormity of the impact on the lives of immigrants, their families and communities and the expense of the plan itself, mass deportations would blast a hole in the American economy, depriving employers of labor and retailers of consumers.

He has proposed extending tax cuts for the wealthy and for large corporations. Repeated experiments over the past half-century have made clear that the benefits of such tax cuts do not trickle down, do not generate economic growth and do not pay for themselves. They just make the rich richer.

I don’t have any insight into the Grey Lady’s reflex to reframe and normalize the Nazi point of view expressed by American fascists who are vying to take permanent control of the nation they claim is a smoking ruin of wokeness and colored criminals. Beyond that, all I can really say is fuck those putos.

Here’s Seth Meyers, making the same point, but with a great dollop of humor:

[1] The headline and article have been replaced at the top of the mobile app by this exercise in obfuscation and both-sides to every story syndrome, which buries the obvious fact, expressed plainly in today’s editorial, that tariffs are paid by the consumers of the nation that imposes them. Mexico didn’t, according to some experts, pay to build Trump’s fucking wall, Grey Lady:

For Trump, Tariffs Are the Solution to Almost Any Problem

The former president has proposed using tariffs to fund child care, boost manufacturing, quell immigration and encourage use of the dollar. Economists are skeptical.

So are high school graduates who paid attention in class…

Sly handmaiden of fascism

The Grey Lady, inscrutably, specializes in inventive headlines that frame issues to favor an increasingly deranged and desperate American Nazi’s candidacy. Look at the big challenge facing Kamala Harris at the upcoming debate with Donald, as framed by the NY Times. Oh, my!

As the Times idiotically frames it, Harris seemingly has to distance herself from the “unpopular” Biden while seeming to support the remarkable range of good policies she and the shockingly successful Joe Biden administration put into law during three short years.

You see, the headline suggests, if she criticizes the unpopular Biden — she takes a grave political risk. At the same time, if she supports him and their record of achievement 100% — apparently that’s an equally perilous position.

She’s on a greasy tightrope, suggests the NY Times, with a highly motivated Trump, jaws open, sharp teeth glistening, well-honed playbook in his back pocket, poised for a fatal pounce if she takes one misstep in this supremely delicate balancing act.

For a much smarter take on the upcoming “debate”, here’s my mother’s favorite, Frank Bruni. The sections below his fine opinion piece are like a cool drink on a hot day.

Rhetorical question: when did the NY Times become the fucking Völkischer Beobachter?

Quick question about polling

I think this is a nice illustration of the bullshit of current polling numbers, numbers heavily relied on by corporate media in its amoral, anything for more clicks, bettors’ guide to the horse race coverage of presidential sweepstakes.

I’m reading a piece by Robert Reich, a very smart guy with informed opinions and good arguments to back them up. He calls the piece Trump’s Woman Problem and it outlines how women should tip the election to Harris/Walz. Women vote in higher numbers than men, Reich points out:

There are 3 million more women in America than men. And they almost always vote in larger numbers than men. In 2020, 74 percent of adult U.S. women said they voted, vs. 71 percent of men.

That split has held true for more than 40 years — in every presidential election beginning in 1980, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.

There’s also a big split in voter registration: 89 million women told census surveyors they were registered in 2020, vs. 79 million men.

Fair enough. Then Quinnipiac tells us this:

A Quinnipiac Poll in mid-August found a similar gender chasm among likely voters in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania: Women backed Harris 54 percent to 41 percent, while men went for Trump, 49 percent to 42 percent. (Overall, Harris was up 48 percent to 45 percent.)

Women vote in higher numbers, they favor Harris by 13%. Men vote in lower numbers, they favor Trump by 7%. How does that average out to a 3% “overall” lead for Harris?

All an American can do is leave a comment, here’s mine:

Anyone else see a problem with these polling numbers?

Women are the majority of Americans, 89 million women were registered to vote in 2020, vs. 79 million men, and they consistently vote in higher numbers. Then this puzzler from Quinnipiac, after reporting that Harris is up 13% among women and Trump leads by 7% among men, and Robert Reich, who is brilliant, has no comment? How does the spread of 13% of a larger group for Harris and 7% for a smaller contingent for Trump come out to only a 3 point lead for Harris?

A Quinnipiac Poll in mid-August found a similar gender chasm among likely voters in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania: Women backed Harris 54 percent to 41 percent, while men went for Trump, 49 percent to 42 percent. (Overall, Harris was up 48 percent to 45 percent.)

This nonsensical math underscores the horrific fact that we are not presently living in a moment where ordinary rationality seems to apply. Discussing things based on agreed upon facts, seen in the light of Reason, seems to have gone the way of ethics, decency, fairness and self-respect. The virally infectious nature of intolerance, hatred and rage leaves anyone not ruled by those things puzzled as to how we arrived at this ominous place.

I feel a sense of futility as the comment I was urged to make immediately disappears under hundreds of more popular comments, and the discussion of those comments. This is the future we are now living in, boys and girls. Ask Quinnipiac, they’ll tell you the same thing.

When you lose, kill the winner

Narcissism has come into popular consciousness after almost a decade of a malignant narcissist dominating the news cycle every day, amplified by the destructive behavior of the ambitious psychopaths who justify his rage to dominate, all normalized by profit-hungry corporate media. One key feature of narcissists, because their ability to see things from anybody else’s perspective was destroyed early on, is a rigid insistence that they can never be wrong, no matter what they have done.

If they are wrong, it is somebody else’s fault for making them wrong, so they’re actually right. They justify every excess by blaming others for their temper tantrums, hurt, rage, shame, need for revenge and everything else that makes them unbearably uncomfortable. You get a great encapsulation of narcissistic rage, and its reflex to justify retribution, from our former president as he made his lying case during the privately organized, privately funded pep rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, the tasteful prelude to the peaceful, patriotic Trump riot at the Capitol.

Very different rules. You can “illegally” take millions of dollars from foreign powers for your campaign, in exchange for promised political favors, because the other side is cheating. You can claim your predecessor illegally wiretapped you, because he wasn’t even a legitimate president, he’s a liar. You can order your attorney general to violently remove peaceful protesters from the streets so you can show strength in a photo op, because the protesters hate America and are violent terrorists. You can have the wife of a Supreme Court justice walk into the West Wing at will, and when she leaves, decide which disloyal members of your staff need to be fired, because, separation of powers (or States Rights, or whatever). You can make political martyrs of those who violently attacked police, because, when there’s fraud, you know… You can lie to your supporters over and over, and steal money from them based on those lies, because the other side is a powerful cabal of cannibal pedophiles who advocate the murder of newborn babies and are legally killing them by the truck loads in Blue States.

There is nothing you are not allowed to do, when fighting an evil so monstrous. The narcissistic mindset is reptilian in its reflex never to be wrong, no matter what.

I think of my one time closest friend, today on his 68th birthday. His primal wound is that his father, a strong and generally admirable man, never protected him from a crazy mother with a violent temper. He grew up triggered by his manipulative mother, now over ninety and as able to reduce him to anger as when he was a child, and mourning the loss of a father who emotionally abandoned him.

The punchline, I suppose, is that he inflicted the identical damage on his own children, by being helpless to intervene whenever they were raged at by a mother who became abusive whenever she felt challenged. Here’s the man’s perfect rationale for nonintervention, as he’d explain to his children when they insisted on being hurt: what you think was abuse was really not abuse, you have to understand, because mom loves you so much, it’s just that she’s used to being in charge, has been since she was a girl, and so when you defy her she gets her back up, understandably.

Imagine falling asleep at night after your mother unfairly raged at you and your sympathetic father fed you that big, comforting spoonful of shit. Why would you not find yourself prone to panic attacks?

Note to a graduate student 150 years in the future

Heather Cox Richardson, transcribing the brutal history of this Nazi adjacent moment:

By rights, tonight’s post should be a picture, but Trump’s behavior today merits a marker because it feels like a dramatic escalation of the themes we’ve seen for years. Please feel free to ignore—as I often say, I am trying to leave notes for a graduate student in 150 years, and you can consider this one for her if you want a break from the recent onslaught of news.

Yesterday, Trump ranted at the press, furious that the American legal system had resulted in two jury decisions that he had defamed and sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll. He was so angry that, with his lawyers standing awkwardly behind him, he told reporters: “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”

Today, Trump held a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, a small city in the center of the state, where he addressed about 7,000 people. A number of us who have been watching him closely have been saying for a while that when voters actually saw him in this campaign, they would be shocked at how he has deteriorated, and that seems to be true: his meandering and self-indulgent speeches have had attendees leaving early, some of them bewildered. In today’s speech, Trump slurred a number of words, referring to Elon Musk as “Leon,” for example, and forgetting the name of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who was on his short list for a vice presidential pick.

But today’s speech struck me as different from his past performances, distinguished for what sounded like desperation. Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.

Trump told the audience that when he took office in 2017, military officers told him the U.S. had given all the military’s ammunition away to allies. Then he went on a rant against our allies, saying that they’re only our allies when they need something and that they would never come to our aid if we needed them. This echoes the talking points put out by Russian operatives and flies in the face of the fact that the one time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked the mutual defense pact in that agreement was after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in support of the U.S. 

He embraced Project 2025’s promise to eliminate the Department of Education and send education back to the states so that right-wing figures like Wisconsin’s Senator Ron Johnson can run it. He reiterated the MAGA claim that mothers are executing their babies after birth—this is completely bonkers—and again echoed Russian talking points when he said these executions are happening—they are not—but “nobody talks about it.” He went on: “We did a great thing when we got Roe v. Wade out of the federal government.” 

He reiterated the complete fantasy that schools are performing gender-affirming surgery on children. “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump’s suggestion that schools are performing surgery on students is bananas. This is simply not a thing that happens. 

And then he went full-blown apocalyptic, attacking immigrants and claiming that crime, which in reality has dropped dramatically since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office after a spike during his own term, has made the U.S. uninhabitable. He said that “If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by migrants and the governor will be sent fleeing.” “Migrants and crime are here in our country at levels never thought possible before…. You’re not safe even sitting here, to be honest with you. I’m the only one that’s going to get it done. Everybody is saying that.” He urged people to protest “because you’re being overrun by criminals.” 

He assured attendees that “If you think you have a nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids.” He reiterated his plan to get rid of migrants. “And you know,” he said, “getting them out will be a bloody story.” 

He went on to try to rev up supporters in words very similar to those he used on January 6th, 2021, but focused on this election. “Every citizen who’s sick and tired of the parasitic political class in Washington that sucks our country of its blood and treasure, November fifth will be your liberation day. November fifth, this year, will be the most important day in the history of our country because we’re not going to have a country anymore if we don’t win.” 

He promised: “I will prevent World War III, and I am the only one that can do it. I will prevent World War III. And if I don’t win this election,… Israel is doomed…. Israel will be gone…. I’d better win.” 

“I better win or you’re gonna have problems like we’ve never had. We may have no country left. This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This may be our last election…. It’ll all be over, and you gotta remember…. Trump is always right. I hate to be right. I’m always right.” 

Trump’s hellscape is only in his mind: crime is sharply down in the U.S. since he left office, migrant crossings have plunged, and the economy is the strongest in the world.

Then, tonight, Trump posted on his social media site a rant asserting that he will win the 2024 election but that he expects Democrats to cheat, and “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.” 

Is it the Justice Department indictments that showed Russia is working to get him reelected? Is it the rising popularity of Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? Is it fury at the new grand jury’s indicting him for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in power? Is it fear of Tuesday’s debate with Harris? Is it a declining ability to grapple with reality?

Whatever has caused it, Trump seems utterly off his pins, embracing wild conspiracy theories and, as his hopes of winning the election appear to be crumbling, threatening vengeance with a dogged fury that he used to be able to hide.