Category Archives: current events

Crowd size and a stirring video call to action

If this many of his base had attended his inauguration, Trumpie wouldn’t have had to make Sean Spicer lie to reporters/everyone about the enormous size of his manly crowd:

Here’s the stirring two minute American carnage porn video the crowd was shown, narrated by Trump, scored with heroic rap music, since gangbangers like Kanye love the gold-plated Boss, right before the great man himself took the stage to exhort the crowd, resulting in thousands of energized patriots surging down to the Capitol to fight like hell to Stop the Steal, kick police ass and take names, give courage to, or kill, hesitant Republican elected officials like the cowardly Vice President.

Bearing in mind that provable facts no longer matter to the Trump 39%, here’s fascism historian Jason Stanley on the echoes of Nazi propaganda on January 6th, right before the “violent terrorist attack” that Lyin’ Ted apologized for calling the peaceful protest to save democracy. Stanley’s powerful, informative essay putting the two minute call to arms in chilling historical context is called “Movie at the Ellipse a Study in Fascist Propaganda”. It sure enough was.

How Not to Be Depressed

Fuck if I know.

The only insight I have, and this took me years to really take in, is not to make depression more bitter by blaming yourself for feeling hopeless. This is the trap of depression — you feel depressed because you believe you don’t have what it takes, you lack the qualities that everyone else has, you are a loser, too weak to do what everyone else manages to do. That is the fucking depression talking, trust me. If you feel depressed, it is burden enough without adding unforgiveness toward yourself. It is also useful to remember that depression almost always passes, nuance, taste and color return.

As for good reasons for depression, there are currently many. At the top of the list is the accelerating pandemic, a wildly proliferating virus much cannier and more adaptable than the puny earthlings fighting over how to fight it, as the planet plummets toward ecosystem apocalypse. From the demented, “transactional” former president’s point of view, and millions in his cult, the more Americans who die of Covid-19 under Biden the better. It will prove that Biden is a loser, working with the Chinese Communist Party and Burisma Energy to kill as many white Christian Americans as possible and let George Soros replace them with brown fake Americans dumb enough to vote for elite pedophile cannibals. Luckily for Trump, he’s got a 6-3 Supreme Court majority poised to make it much harder for the Biden administration to fight this relentlessly morphing, deadly worldwide disease. US Covid death numbers are climbing every day, as a burned out health care force, on the front lines now for more than two years, in a war with no seeming end, starts to call in sick and quit. Talk about fucking depressing.

Any chance of justice after a president who lost reelection by a large margin repeatedly lies about a stolen “landslide victory” then unsuccessfully twists the arms of election officials to change results, then tries to get the DOJ to announce fake fraud investigations while his henchmen in Congress do the rest, then executes the elaborate, extra-constitutional “Green Bay Sweep” to sweep aside certified, recounted election results, based on what Ted Cruz yelled were “unprecedented allegations of massive electoral fraud,” before he unleashes a whipped up crowd, and everything else the defeated never-say-die motherfucker does daily? The Attorney General announced finally that the DOJ is very seriously considering doing something to restore faith in American justice, as long as the DOJ can convince people that it has no political agenda, in a society where even basic safety precautions during an unprecedented modern pandemic are weaponized for partisan advantage (by only one party, boys and girls).

Even Mike Pence, a Trump loyalist who embarrassed actual obsequious miniature poodles with his stone-faced ass-licking of his master, realized the game was over prior to the “Green Bay Sweep” on January 6. He consulted far-right former federal judge/Republican operative J. Michael Luttig about John Eastman’s absurd interpretation of the Twelfth Amendment which supposedly gives the sitting Vice President the right to overturn the results of any election that does not keep him in office. Even Luttig, a man who defended as proper Bill Barr’s meddling to get insane Trump fanatic Michael Flynn’s guilty pleas for perjury thrown out, told Pence not to do it. So did former VP Dan Quayle, in no uncertain terms.

Here’s the kicker: after Pence broke the bad news to Trump, that he could not hold up the certification of Biden electors, based on a lie — no matter how big — and a crackpot legal theory, Trump was furious. To Pence’s reported horror and anger, on the evening of January 5th Trump released a press statement announcing that Pence was fully on board with the plan to force another fraud investigation before Biden could be certified as the duly elected president.

Think about just the Pence angle of this hundred ring shit show MAGA seditious conspiracy circus. A crass yet obsequious far-right Christian crusader who had taxpayers fund Gay Conversion Therapy in Indiana (fuck the teen suicides, Jesus said to cure ’em!), an unlikable, charisma-free smudge of Santorum put in office by the connivance and funding of Charles Koch and company (like equally disgusting, suddenly invisible Mike Pompeo, who started as the Kochs’ personal Congressman from Topeka), Pence deserves whatever fate karma might have in store for his type. Still, when he decided to do the right thing, to follow the law, Trump set him up as a traitor by publishing a lie that made him seem like a suddenly vacillating liar too weak to do what he’d promised. That’s why the mob wanted to hang him as a cowardly traitor, because he’d chickened out at the last second, because he didn’t save America from the illegitimate brown and yellow hoards. When Trump sent a motorcade to evacuate Pence from the besieged Capitol, Pence declined to get in, fearing, not unreasonably, that his boss had taken out a hit on him. What the fuck?

We learn that the Fulton County DA spoke to Trump’s lawyers last month, and Trump reacted in fury that was then hard to understand, since nobody knew about the meeting with Trump lawyers, outside of the DA, the lawyers and Trump. The only sticking point in prosecuting Trump for that well-known attempt to cajole, persuade, threaten and otherwise get Georgia officials to “find 11,780 Trump votes”, we are cautioned, is the question of Trump’s intent.

What if Trump actually believed he’d really been cheated? What if he sincerely didn’t believe Barr, Chris Krebs and everybody else he appointed, and who were soon out of his government shortly after telling Trump there’d been virtually no voter fraud in 2020? I went to law school and practiced law, and I still don’t understand this lack of intent business, unless it goes to an insanity defense for the former president.

So, yeah, there are countless reasons to feel as depressed as I did opening my eyes this morning. Unless your depression is so severe that you feel life is not worth living (in which case, exert yourself to seek help) my best suggestion is get out of bed, use the bathroom, brush your teeth, take a shower, get yourself walking. Much of soldiering through depressing times is just getting yourself walking, and connecting with others, however you can, no matter how how horrific the prospect of being in contact with others may seem. It is very easy to feel alone in this, and very important to stay connected, as best you can. My two copeks on how to endure any perfectly reasonable depression you are feeling right now in these exceptionally depressing times.

Strong Medicine

Hard-hitting 44 second video From the Republican Accountability Project, a group of Republicans for democracy. Several will no doubt work for for the Liz Cheney for President campaign in 2024. Their message couldn’t be clearer for 2022. Or more welcome.

Strong Medicine for a deadly, highly contagious disease, American fascism.

This ad is apparently eleven months old, (it has less than 70,000 views on youTube). They are currently running it as an ad on FOX, during Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Fox and Friends. Good luck convincing the Trump death cult that these are not all fake clips manipulated by vicious commies, but, more power to the Republican Accountability Project. More timely now than when they created it right after the riot at the Capitol.

“You fucking did this!” is what Liz Cheney snarled at Jim Jordan, pushing him away as he tried to take her arm as they fled from MAGA rioters sacking the Capitol.

How the unpopular (toxic) Cruz was elbowed out of the way by the People’s candidate, Donald Trump, who done it and why it matters to democracy

Ted Cruz came to the Senate in 2012 in a wave of Tea Party candidates, an organized, well-funded “grassroots” expression of popular rage that exploded onto the national scene as a protest against Obama’s dictatorial plan to expand health care insurance coverage for struggling Americans. The Tea Party was fueled by the lie, funded by the same super-wealthy folks, that Birtherism was a true fact, that Obama was not only Black, and a secret Muslim, but not even eligible to have run for president, having been born in Africa. He was illegitimate and a liar.

Into this Tea Party Congress stepped the highly intelligent, ultra-right, former Ivy League debating champion Ted Cruz, the right wing billionaires’ obvious choice for president in 2016. He was the last man standing, before his billionaire backers the Mercers saw that Cruz couldn’t win the nomination, threw their money behind Trump, and put their network at his disposal, including ultra-right wing strategist Steve Bannon and supremely brazen attorney Kelleyanne Conway. Bannon and Conway, it should be noted, were both revealed to be members of the Council on National Policy. Bob Garfield and Anne Nelson, researcher and writer who exposed the powerful, secretive, nonprofit CNP, discuss:

GARFIELD: All right. Let’s now turn to the more-or-less present: the rise of Trump and the now violent assault on democracy. How was CNP involved in Trump’s ascent?

NELSON: The CNP was involved with Trump, initially, very reluctantly. He wasn’t one of them, he had no particular religious background, he was multiply divorced, and he really didn’t reflect their values in many ways. Their favored candidate was Ted Cruz, but they had a problem – which was that Cruz had a tremendous charisma deficit, and as he lost the primaries, they realized that either they supported Trump, the primary victor, or they lived with Hillary Clinton’s presidency, which was unacceptable to them.

GARFIELD: Oh, I – I’m sorry, I just – I just have to interrupt to remind you what then Senator Al Franken (laughs) said about Cruz.

AL FRANKEN: I probably like him more than most of my other colleagues like Ted, and I hate him (laughs).

NELSON: That is the case. Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something, like, a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don’t have a war chest, you don’t have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don’t have a strategy. And all indications are you’re going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return –

GARFIELD: We have a shopping list. 

NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it’s basically got three items. The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon’s wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal. The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis. The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that’s how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.

GARFIELD: So that was the origin story of Trump’s deal with the devil, a man with not only no religion, but no ideology to speak of creating himself in the image of his political and financial sponsors. Over the ensuing – well, so then he was elected, more or less – and then over the ensuing four years, many of Trump’s 30,000 lies, big and small, find their provenance, what do you know, in the CNP. So, can we just tick a few of these off beginning with the COVID hoax, and the savior drug hydroxychloroquine?

NELSON: So if you get to the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign is in trouble and the Council for National Policy recognizes it. They had hoped that the 2020 elections would be won with a popular vote, that was cast into doubt. COVID set in a couple of months later, and the whole strategy of the Trump campaign had been built around mass rallies and data harvesting from attendees of the rallies and building on that to secure a victory.

Well, mass rallies became impossible because of COVID restrictions, so there was a critical phone call that involved the president of the Council for National Policy and members of the Trump campaign staff, where they said, “We need to open up society, get the economy roaring again, and people are afraid of COVID, but they trust doctors. We have a group of doctors who will say that COVID is a hoax, will argue for the reopening of society and the mass rallies.”

So that summer, these doctors were convened by Jenny Beth Martin in Washington. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a leading figure in the Council for National Policy. At that point, the point person – when Dr. Simone Gold announced that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID – she was put on partner media platforms of the CNP, including the Charlie Kirk Show and the Christian Broadcasting Network, spreading this disinformation 

SIMONE GOLD: With the tyranny of medical apartheid nipping at our heels, rise up. Rise up. Rise up.

NELSON: And that has now expanded into a small army of unethical physicians who are continuing the hydroxychloroquine hoax. They’ve added ivermectin as a cure and, in fact, they have online prescription services charging money to people who are ordering ivermectin as a COVID cure.

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As for the man Trump rebranded as Lyin’ Ted, who kicked off the January 6th MAGA “Green Bay Sweep” to keep Trump in office, after days of yelling about “unprecedented allegations of massive electoral fraud,” he’d narrowly held off a challenge for his Senate seat by Beato O’Rourke in 2018, as the New York Times noted:

Republican strategists and insiders said Mr. Cruz’s narrow victory did not mean that Democrats stood to make substantial gains in Texas. Rather, they believed it had more to do with Mr. Cruz himself, one of the most divisive political figures in the state, and the anti-Trump energy of Democrats.

source

here’s a highlight reel on brilliant, unlikable Ted’s nuanced, evolving views of Donald, compiled by the staff of Meet the Press (I was somehow thwarted from posting the clip I filmed in its original form, but here is my free ad for the NBC show starring Chuck Todd, in an audio workaround)

Why so few police at January 6th March to the Capitol?

The enormous crowd that surged toward the siege and overran of the Capitol police, while planned as a Hail Mary option for the “Green Bay Sweep”, hurried to the Capitol to riot without police interference. The whipped up crowd had been promised “will be wild!” and it sure enough had been, so far. The best was yet to come.

They stormed straight down to the Capitol without encountering lines of police, as marches everywhere always do, because the Stop the Steal organizers had not applied for or obtained a permit to march from the mass rally at the Ellipse down to the riot at the Capitol.

No planned march, hence minimal police presence along the unannounced parade route.

Any emotional mass march is always closely supervised by police, if authorities know about it, if the proper papers have been filed, if the law has been followed.

So the path of the quick march of incensed patriots, down to fight like hell and take the under-policed Capitol and give courage to fainthearted Republicans in Congress to “Stop the Steal”, was very different than anything you’d ever see on any parade route in DC, or in any other city or town, or in any rural or suburban area, for that matter.

The Trump riot was not an overwheming law enforcement failure. It was lawless by design. Had the law been followed and a permit sought for the march, enabling authorities to protect the public and prevent traffic nightmares, the riot would have been prevented. Defeating the whole purpose of inciting the violence and making the leader and MAGA nation look weak!

Yeah, so we didn’t apply for a stinkin’ permit, boo fucking hoo. Yeah, we planned to teach those f-ing traitors a lesson, so we kept our secret, illegal plan quiet…

Duh!

“What don’t you motherfuckers get about ‘by any means necessary’ or the ‘ballot or the bullet’? Next time the boys will go down there armed with their sacred Second Amendment… and we’ll see what those weak, corrupt, elite, lying, cowardly blood drinking pedophiles have to say then…”

USA! USA!!! etc.

Short bio of Lyin’ Ted Cruz, and legal update on Cruz’s role in MAGA’s Jan. 6 Alamo stand

First a well-done light-hearted highlight tour of the career of Tea Bagger Ted Cruz, the most universally hated person in the Senate (with apologies to also-ran Josh Hawley) from Trevor Noah’s Daily Show.

And a more serious discussion of Cruz’s Trump-related craveness, and his direct involvement in Peter Navarro and the war room’s “Green Bay Sweep” strategy to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory due to “unprecedented allegations of fraud” believed by FOX nation.

Cruz executed the opening play in the “sweep” on January 6 as the start of a coordinated Hail Mary, with the clock about to run out, to once more try to flip votes in swing states. The idea was to get Republican state legislatures all on the same page, attempt to decertify Biden electors, creating no winner in the Electoral College and throwing the presidency to the House to extra-constitutionally keep cuddly Trumpie as president.

A final word on this snarling, squirming far-right billionaire-backed fuck nut next time I sit down to open his disgusting can of worms .

(with apologies to the late, great Al Lewis)

Stop the Steal ads run through last January 5th

Nothing at all unusual here, but it seems that the ads promoting false claims of a stolen election that enriched Facebook in the months after Facebook removed the safeguards they’d installed through election day, (safeguards that damaged Facebook profits) stopped on January 5th. The day before the peaceful protest at the Capitol during which 140 police officers were injured, the ads, $50,000,000 worth, paid for by donations to Trump’s “legal defense fund,” suddenly stopped running. Get over it, nitpicking libtards, this is how real men dominate.

Representative Eric Swallwell explains in a minute

Tucker whips apologetic Ted Cruz on FOX

Shortly before the first anniversary of the Trump riot to stop the certification of Biden’s win, Ted Cruz, on the floor of the Senate, with cameras rolling, referred to the organized, planned, violent siege and sacking of the Capitol as a terrorist attack.

A strong argument could be made that participating in a long physical battle with cops and leading a phalanx of criminal tresspassers into the closed to the public Capitol to stop the People’s business is, even without being part of a larger seditious conspiracy, an act of terrorism. Using violence to frighten and intimidate political opponents is the definition of terrorism.

Understandably, this term, applied to their own faithful, coming from one of their own, put MAGA nation into full rage mode. Tucker Carlson pulled no punches bullying Cruz to back down. Lyin’ Ted, as he does, immediately began reassuring FOX nation that only Blacks, Muslims, Antifa and other commie traitors can ever be rightfully called terrorists, an angry MAGA mob can only ever be patriots, since they are always righteous in their rage and fight on the side of the angels.

Fortunately for him, the supple Cruz was able to whine and grovel his way out of the fatal accusation of having spoken truthfully, as all great statesmen and moral leaders are sometimes called upon to do.

Big Surprise in the Supreme Court…

This Washington Post headline says it all:

Of course they seem skeptical, these right-wing ideologues chosen for their fidelity to a hard right-wing worldview. Science during a deadly plague can be alchemized into tyranny by six judges well-trained in how to focus on a single hair on the head of an angel dancing back and forth through the eye of a needle. They do this humbly, with God’s help, by the grace of Jesus Christ.

The doctrinaire Trump super-majority continues to provide unappealable right-wing firepower to the giant bloc of angry Christian nationalists who are their ground troops in the long culture war that has brought this majority to the pinnacle of constitutional power.

For them not to express “skepticsm” over reasonable health precautions during a deadly tsunami of Omicron infections would be like a Nazi jurist listening thoughtfully to a Jewish argument against mass murder.

Speaking of mass manslaughter (man’s laughter, LOL) the US still leads the world in Covid infections and deaths because US authoritarians find it advantageous to weaponize vaccines, masks and testing. Their position is, if it keeps us in power, BRING BACK POLIO!

MAKE POLIO GREAT AGAIN, LOSER CUCKS!

Only one Republican out of 262 in Congress attends January 6 commeration, accompanied by the aptly named Dick Cheney

NY Times, headline, January 6, 2022:

‘A Reflection of Where Our Party Is’: Republicans Avoid Jan. 6 Observances

Subheadline:

Elected Republicans stayed away from the Capitol during a day of solemn remembrance on the anniversary of the attack carried out by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump

The party of Lincoln, yo, and of our first female president, Liz Cheney, the only elected Republican who showed up for a moment of silence on the first anniversary of Trump’s patriotic riot to overturn an election he lost, at the polls, in the Electoral College and in countless courts.

The GOP line, of course, is that power-crazed commie puppet pedophile Dems are cynically politicizing something that Dick Cheney used to call a kerfuffle.

Heaven help us all.

One of very few Republican members of Congress who made a statement that did not blame the Democrats for the deadly MAGA riot, a representative not running for reelection, issued a statement the Times called “blistering”. You be the judge.

“Any reasonable person could have seen the potential for violence that day,” he said. “Yet, our president did nothing to protect our country and stop the violence. The actions of the president on Jan. 6 were nothing short of reprehensible.”

Here’s a link to the Times story. Read it and weep: