Category Archives: current events

Countdown to Trump Liberty Day

And is it wrong to have a crush on the most right-wing representative in the Congress?

As we come up to the first anniversary of Trump’s gentle, peaceful, patriotic riot at the Capitol, after weeks of frustrated, manic arm-twisting of Republican election officials in several states, desperate Oval Office meetings with Q-Anon Trump dead-ender loyalists like Mike “Lock Her Up!” Flynn (who urged martial law) Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell, personal attorney Rudy, and the MyPillow CEO, after replacing leadership at the Department of Defense right after the election and instituting a new rule for deploying the National Guard, and finally, right before certification of Biden’s win, assembling a large angry mob, whipping it up and sending it to the Capitol, a ragtag team of co-conspirators, including “alt-right” Council for National Policy member Steve Bannon and several demented authoritarian-leaning legal scholars/conspiracy theorists, sitting in a nearby war room to engineer the blocking of Joe Biden’s presidency by a coordinated plan of objections to certified electors, enabled by an insane “legal” stand by Mike Pence, by a riot, by any means necessary, it’s hard to avoid thinking about it as I drink my coffee today.

You’ll recall that immediately after the riot, when order was finally restored, the rioters allowed to go in peace, and the constitutionally mandated session continued, 147 Trump loyalists in the House, and something like a dozen in the Senate, tried to carry out the mad plan they’d hatched with Trump, insisting that since, as Lyin’ Ted Cruz put it, polls showed that millions of Americans believed the boldfaced lie that the election had been stolen, so there had to be a ten day freeze so yet another investigation could take place to prove a counter-factual case they had lost in court more than 60 times since Biden’s clear victory in the election.

The Trump appointee in charge of cyber security for the election announced, as Barr had informed Trump before parachuting out of the administration just in time, that there was no evidence of fraud that would have changed any election result anywhere. Trump promptly fired his disloyal appointee, expressed great disappointment in Barr and kept doubling down on his lie that he’d been robbed.

Right after the riot a bunch of Trump’s cabinet, including the moronic Betsey DeVos and McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, immediately resigned in protest, with days left in their terms (none will comment now, per their actual loyalties and common interests).

After the riot marquee Republicans, top Trumpers, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, people who’d resisted acknowledging that Biden was the president-elect, for crucial weeks and months leading up to the final day to overturn the election results and the riot, all denounced their enraged leader for launching his reckless and desperate attack on a joint session of Congress doing their constitutional duty.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey, all I can say is count me out, enough is enough,” said Lindsey Graham, from the floor of the Senate immediately after the January 6 Stop the Steal riot. “If you’re a conservative this is the most offensive concept in the world — that a single person could disenfranchise 150,000,000 people.”

You can parse this for obvious bullshit, clearly the most offensive concept in the world to a modern, American conservative is the idea of millions of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, big city dwellers, college students, unionists, liberals, progressives, socialists, anti-racists, minimum wage earners and poor “whites” voting for politicians who will not reflexively favor the super-wealthy and corporations, thereby ousting the “conservatives” from power. Hence John Roberts casting the deciding fifth vote to overrule president George W. Bush and a united Congress (98-0 in the 2006 senate) to make partisan/”racist” voter suppression laws the new constitutional norm (unless you can successfully prove in federal court that they are ONLY racist, and intentionally so, of course, as the Founders intended).

But back to Lindsey, who like his buddy in the House Kevin “not as upset as some people” McCarthy, and even Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell, condemned Trump’s mad, violent plan to maintain power. Trump still hates McConnell, the man who made his biggest achievement, the Trump Court, possible, for belatedly congratulating Biden on his win, for not having Trumpie’s back about the Big Lie being TRUE. McCarthy headed to Mara-Largo where he was reminded of the irresistibly delicious taste of his master’s nether sphincter, he came back fighting the Steal, his story changed to 100% incoherent. Here’s the highly principled, persecuted single white male from South Carolina’s current stance on the man who tried to do the thing most hateful to conservatives:

“It’s his nomination if he wants it, the Republican base appreciated him, we don’t appreciate all the things he does sometimes, but from a policy point of view of he was the most successful president, from a conservative’s point of view, since Ronald Reagan. It is his nomination if he wants it and he will be in the White House in 2024 if he wins a disciplined campaign,” Lindsey Graham told the FOX audience last week.

Ominous though it is that Trump would be back in the White House in 2024, before his imagined inauguration on January 20, 2025, it’s Lindsey, it’s live TV, it’s FOX. So, shit yeah, the night of the 2024 election, when partisan officials installed in Republican-controlled swing states, pursuant to Trump’s Big Lie and his then illegal plan to undo the last “STEAL” by appealing to partisans to bend the then-law just a little, declare Trump the president, he will immediately take power, the day after the election, and woe unto his many enemies.

I have to say, abhorrent as I find her hard right political views, as creepy as I find her facial resemblance to one of the most evil men in American history, I find myself loving Liz Cheney every time I hear her speak. She is clear and cuts to the chase: an American president who incites a riot to try to cling to power, after months of increasingly inflammatory lies and manipulation, making extra-legal efforts in several instances clearly criminal (come on, fellas, give me a break … you just have to say I got 11,780 fucking votes…), and allows that riot to continue for over three hours as he calls at least one Senator/co-conspirator to make sure he’s still going to do his part to block Biden, must never have power again.

For his part, the former president, who, while increasingly beleaguered, is the current leader of the Republican party with their full backing (including paying all his legal fees) is planning an alternate program for January 6. He will tell his delusional version of the story: there WAS massive voter fraud, the INSURRECTION was on ELECTION DAY, his conspiracy was only launched to right a TERRIBLE wrong, that Blacks and others who hate him, Muslims, disloyal Jews, Mexican rapists, Communists, the Chinese, the Italians, Ukrainians and Venezuelans, somehow corrupted weak Republicans like the two traitors in Georgia and too many others to name, to PERPETRATE THE BIGGEST CRIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!! ARE YOU FUCKING LISTENING TO ME, YOU GODDAMNED WEAK LOSER MORONS!!! WE WERE ROBBED, I WAS ROBBED AND WHEN YOU ARE ROBBED YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO FORM LYNCH MOBS TO GET BACK WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM YOU AND AVENGE THE THEFT. KILL MY ENEMIES! SECOND AMENDMENT, ARTICLE TWO, I’M STILL THE PRESIDENT — KILL THEM!!!

Meantime, in response to numerous lawsuits and civil and criminal investigations the Orange One does what he’s always done, spend a vast fortune of other people’s money to use the courts to delay and avoid justice. His son and daughter have filed frivolous motions to quash subpoenas for their testimony, which will delay things for at minimum a few months. Others in his orbit site phantom privilege to defy subpoenas and wait for a 6-3 Trump Supreme Court to hopefully back them up, eventually.

For now, in the wake of a year when a billionaire psychopath was Time’s Person of the Year, instead of say, Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who, judging by the video of his smart move to protect the Senate from being overrun by enraged “tourists” who’d innocently broken in, possibly saved Mitt Romney’s life, we need to focus on justice being done.

As for the crowd Goodman’s quick thinking turned aside — why not kill a RINO who voted his conscience at one of the fake, evil, witch hunt impeachments of the defrauded, persecuted Leader? Death for the one public act of integrity performed in a long political career, in my opinion, is a little harsh, even if the man is an entitled vulture capitalist by trade, one who continues to vote in a Trumpist/McConnell bloc to thwart all proposed legislation, to prevent it even being debated in the senate. Preventing debate is key for Republicans — if they get to the merits of the argument WE LOSE! filibuster now, filibuster tomorrow, filibuster forever! [1].

There are good reasons for optimism, in spite of our recent history and the wild success of Charles Koch’s reborn John Birch Society Republican Party. We now know for a fact, verified by the sworn testimony of eye witnesses, what all of us were pretty sure of right after the long riot. Trump loved the mayhem, felt the love of that angry crowd during what he described as a love fest, watched it all on live TV with a little stirring in his pants. He ignored numerous urgings, from FOX news, from at least two of his children, from elected Republicans hiding from an exuberant mob of rioters, to call off his peeps. He did so reluctantly, lovingly, after more than three hours had gone by, the National Guard standing down and standing by. During the deadly assault, Liz Cheney informs us, he called at least one Senator, to make sure the plan was in place, that the Senator would do what they’d agreed on to Stop the Steal. No conspiracy, no quid pro quo, no collusion, total exoneration, I’m not a liar YOU ARE A LIAR, the real BIG LIE is your LIE, I don’t stink, YOU STINK, I know you are but what am I?

Is it sad to love Liz Cheney? I don’t feel bad. She is behaving heroically, putting democracy, in this instance, ahead of the willful destruction of our form of government, flawed though it most certainly is. In spite of the infamous spinal flexibility of corporate Democrats, I am feeling hopeful.

The story seems to be changing now, finally. That a third of Republicans surveyed support a violent mob’s right to object to what they’ve been convinced was a crime is troubling. That the courts can still be weaponized for agonizing delay, intolerable. But that two Republicans can stand for values higher than sheer power, and that the evidence pointing toward justice, in a court of law, appears to be so overwhelming, are very encouraging signs for 2022 and beyond. Peace be upon us all.

[1]

“I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” – George Wallace

Nice assist to the antivax movement, Grey Lady, addendum

Of course, a discerning reader of the NY Times article on the apparent uselessness of vaccinations (4,600% increase on the heavily vaccinated island of Puerto Rico!) will note the references to the great poverty of the island, and how health professionals have left in droves for better pay, and how the severely strained system really doesn’t have the resources to afford decent health care for most of its citizens, especially during a pandemic surge. Plus, the place is nearly bankrupt! Creditors are circling, getting ready to pounce. Anyone with ambition and the ability gets the hell off of Puerto Rico, apparently.

The headline and subhead strongly suggest that vaccines don’t really work against this new strain anyway. But the reader also learns about the culture on Puerto Rico where parties are held everywhere between Thanksgiving and January 6. January 6, I know, it has a special significance for the people of Puerto Rico that I don’t recall. The date rings a bell for another reason I can’t quite put my finger on.

So, a new strain of coronavirus that is five times more infectious than the original, if much less often deadly — and almost never deadly for the vaccinated — is sweeping Puerto Rico, as it is sweeping the world, and the NY Times headline is: vaccinated people getting covid in droves.

Might a better headline have been:

Impoverished US Island feels disproportionate impact of Omnicron, in spite of high vaccination rates, due to poor health services and a culture of partying continuously for over a month

The NY Times serves an important purpose and sometimes publishes great things. Sometimes you have to look past the headline, and the first few paragraphs, and take the time to read between the lines, right down to the last paragraph, focusing on what they often leave out. At such times you just have to say: what the fuck is your fucking agenda, fucking Grey Lady?

Nice assist to the antivax movement, Grey Lady

My doctor friend, who encounters Covid daily in her practice, told me a fully vaccinated person who gets symptomatic Omicron suffers a bad cold for two or three days. The unvaccinated who get infected often go to the hospital, some die.

Why is there any “vaccine hesitancy” if a vaccine is the difference between contracting a bad cold and days on a respirator and possible death? Why isn’t this the media and government’s constant message to overcome hesitancy?

Grey Lady to the rescue today:

The subheading drives it home:

The island had a 4,600 percent increase in cases in recent weeks after mounting one of the nation’s most successful vaccination campaigns.

The article describes how a huge, seemingly maskless audience, 60,000 strong, triggered a massive surge, during weeks of partying on the island with low Covid rates where 75% were fully vaccinated, proving, as the headline suggests, that the vaccine don’t mean shit.

All the news that’s fit to print.

FOX Domination

The Fair and Balanced right-wing network that presents engagingly inflammatory opinions and let’s the viewer decide, has taken a bow today on YouTube. They headline their proud announcement 2021 Domination. They certainly have dominated on cable and in the streets (of retirement villages, anyway). Kudos to Rupert Murdoch and his stars, not only did they help put Mr. Trump into office, they helped him steer the US ship of state during his four years as the most powerful man in the world.

They may have been alarmed by Trump’s riot at the Capitol that started the year, and several of their stars, close, unofficial advisors to Trump and the government, texted him to make it stop. But then again, they were at the same time on the air blaming antifa, BLM, Communists, America haters, FBI agents provocateur and others cunningly dressed in MAGA gear and treacherously giving Trump and his peaceful supporters a bad name by attacking police in trial by combat, pretending he’d sent them, when everyone knows it was George Soros who tried to once again smear the president, right before he willingly and gracefully left office.

They have a strict vaccine policy at FOX, but spread the infectious entertainment/opinion that masks are for sissies and that real men and women say “fuck you” to tyranny and don’t take what Lauren Boebert adorably scorned as the Fauci Ouchy. Only sheep take the vaccine. And so those who take as truth the angry opinion that FOX is constantly venting, fancying themselves patriotic freedom lovers, disproportionately die unnecessary, preventable deaths, but, as we all know, the tree of liberty must periodically be watered with the blood of patriots.

Anyway, that’s all the time I have at the moment, but I wanted to share this great one two punch from the cable station that dominates the air waves like their candidate, Trump, dominated the streets against terrorists when he had an army of federal law enforcement forcibly clear the streets so he could pose in front of a famous church, with the Bible, and as proof of God’s plan, the Good Book miraculously did not burst into flames as the glaring former president held it aloft.

Their second post today was a bow for their generous donation of a million advertising dollars (tax deductible) to help out the thousands of Americans who were in the path of the recent devastating tornado in Trump country.

Brave New World

Comedy Monster Jim Gaffigan made an interesting distinction that illuminates a lot about our current social crisis. He differentiated between being old and being like “no cellphone in high school” old. I am both, as anyone born before about 1990 is. To prior generations, the idea of having a super computer in your pocket, capable of Flash Gordon-style video conferences, was something out of 1950s science fiction, yet there it is, in my shirt pocket as I type.

Has the smart phone changed the world? You betcha. More than the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio and television changed the world? You betcha, since it makes irreversible changes instantly, simultaneously, in real time, constantly tweaked and updated for billions of us puny earthlings.

The technology of smart phones has released limitless wealth for many smart business people, many of them now powerful, influential billionaires, their fortunes derived from selling targeted ad demographics based on what they learn about the preferences and personal habits of actual individuals.

Printers made a lot of money selling new printed books, and some newspaper owners got very rich, the latter from ad dollars as much as from people buying newspapers. Telegraph and telephone magnates surely got rich. Radio, a populist game changer, was another gold mine. TV made many people very rich, also based on massive ad dollars spent on this powerfully influential new entertainment technology that instantly reached millions. But none of these was on the scale of these current day billionaires who get rich by monetizing the private needs, wants and weaknesses of billions of people using the internet and the smart phone.

How the technology, carried around in a pocket by billions of us, changes the way we interact is what I am thinking of. There is little chance for real nuance in a text, LOL! The loss of this nuance, to me, is a big deal. I spent years making myself a better writer, learning to choose and rearrange my words carefully. I’ve spent a lot of time making my writing a clear and accurate expression of my thoughts, feelings and observations. It is a certain kind of satisfying work, though unappealing work to many, sitting over something you’re writing and methodically revising it to make it clearer and clearer.

An average writer sending an informational or opinionated text dashes off some words, and an acronym or two, with every expectation of being understood. ROTFLMAO is one you used to see, instead of hearing the sound of your friend laughing, watching her rolling on the floor, you know, her ass literally falling off she’s laughing so hard.

Facial expressions, eye contact, body language, tone of voice, irony — all impossible to discern in any but the most skilled text message. The world of interpersonal communication, the world itself, has radically changed, in less than twenty years.

I know, I’m an old fart and there is probably not even a point to registering the things I am trying to express now. It is surely the kind of nuance that we’ve lost that makes no difference at all to anyone raised without it.

Why quibble about a thumbs up being the same as saying “I like the way you phrased that, very sly” with a wink, a pat or an eye roll? Thumbs up! Like. Nothing ambiguous about it, I thought it was cool.

I text and email my friends all the time, sometimes it’s the only contact we have outside of seeing each other at long intervals (now that we have this endless Democrat [sic] plague upon us, a new Trump-resistant variant of the original “Kung Flu”) but to me, even without the eye contact, body language, facial expressions, talking to them on the phone is almost always preferable to the linear process of sending notes back and forth.

In third grade we passed notes, written on slips of paper, to people we wanted to talk to. During lunch break we got to talk. Back in class we passed notes that were not allowed to be passed. We’d be busted for passing notes sometimes, and would have to pretend to be sorry.

Today it seems to be largely passing notes, purely linear back and forths instead of conversations that can turn into discussions where we actually learn something new about somebody or something else. The other regrettable feature is the linear nature of texts, they focus solely on the matter at hand. It strikes me like the difference between googling a source for a term paper, and including a link as a footnote, and reading a book that leads you to other books that give you information you didn’t know was important.

I am old school, I know, a dying breed. I like to listen, I like to talk, I like to bring in divergent topics related to something I hear someone say. I like the idea of learning, shedding light, having it shed for me, gaining what used to be called insights.

Insight is in short supply in a knee jerk world of instant thumbs up or thumbs down. That business is from the Coliseum when the mob indicated if they wanted a vanquished gladiator killed or spared. It is the same today, friend, “unfriend”, have a nice day.

I love a good talk. I understand that conversation is a dying art, in an age when it is so much easier to tap a few keys and wait for a usually instant reply. We are programed to respond to our phones right away. It saves time, yes, but saves it for what? Time with those we care about is really the only real wealth we have.

To me, a conversation can be magic. A text is only a parlor trick that more than a billion people do billions of times a day. We can see what happens to the world when conversation, and the ability to discuss nuance, and problems that are complex, is flattened into a yes/no computer process that ends in a thumbs up or a thumbs down. LOL!

Rolling on the floor laughing…hey, wait! Where the hell’s my ass??!!!

Happy New Year — and one last one for 2021

Note, the lede is buried in this draft, my apologies, but I’m writing this under a time constraint. The point I’m coming to is why the DOJ has not indicted Rudolph Giuliani for crimes he appears to have committed in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer, several years ago in Ukraine (prior to his unethical behavior as Trump’s lawyer in post-election purely propagandistic lawsuits).

I recently found myself listening to what I thought was the opening presentation from the popular Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial. I was looking forward to hearing the presentation, prepared by the excellent editors over at Lawfare who had a great podcast covering the Mueller Report and, not long after, the first impeachment, called The Report.

Lawfare did a great job boiling down complex issues, and condensing many hours of hearings into a clear and compelling hour or so, and I followed their great dissection of the Mueller Report and the first impeachment closely. I discovered they had a new season and I eagerly jumped in to hear everything said during the second impeachment, weeks after the January 6 riot when most of us were keen to make sure the instigator of a violent assault on democracy could no longer run for the most powerful position in the world.

It turns out Lawfare hadn’t covered the second impeachment at all, at least not on The Report. I found myself instead listening to their excellent presentation of the first group of impeachment managers laying out the case for conviction in the impeachment trail (well worth hearing) — over the former president’s plan to shake down the new Ukrainian president not only in the perfect phone call, but in the weeks leading up to it, when our ambassador to Ukraine was smeared, menaced and abruptly fired, and in the days and weeks following the perfect call, when the whistleblower report on the call was being buried by Barr, as a Russian army threatened Ukraine (who had already been granted military aid by Congress) and Trump refused release the aid or to meet with the president of our beleaguered ally until he announced a fake investigation into seemingly slimy bastard Hunter Biden, in order to politically hurt his father.

If their crystal clear laying out of the facts of Trump’s extra-legal meddling in Ukraine, to extract the promise of a propaganda coup, had been presented to a jury in a court of law, there is no question that a guilty verdict would have been returned. Even with Trump’s party’s refusal to allow witnesses or new evidence (and damning new evidence was coming to light daily), the facts they produced supported conviction for a conspiracy to threaten a false corruption investigation out of the vulnerable new president of one of our allies, seeking more foreign help in an American presidential election.

Now this is all urine down the old urinal and I’m not bringing it up to re-litigate any of that “purely political” stuff, here’s the buried lede.

What is laid out in the presentation is how Giuliani, acting as Trump’s PERSONAL lawyer, conducted official business for the United States, employed Trump donors Lev Parnas and Igor Furman (both on trial now) to work with corrupt Ukrainian power brokers (pro-Russian associates of Trump’s first campaign manger, pardoned felon Paul Manafort) to have President Zelensky announce a corruption investigation into the son of Trump’s perceived rival in the 2020 election — after ousting our longtime ambassador. The plot stinks a mile, as my grandmother used to say. A few month’s after Barr, Trump’s warrior gunsel, parachuted out of the looming insurrection, Rudy Giuliani’s home and office were raided by the FBI, records, phones and computers seized. Rudy’s two shady associates, Lev and Igor, Individuals 3 and 4, were both indicted (though for other crimes). Why is there no indictment against Rudy?

If you indict Rudy for doing the corrupt, illegal bidding of Individual One, for the benefit of Individual One, at the request of Individual One, how do you avoid indicting fucking Individual One, particularly now that he’s a private citizen? Hard to do, maybe impossible. I feel your pain, Merrick Garland, and I hope to heaven that you have a very good plan the Department of Justice is busy working on.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Arguing in the alternative

I was a little surprised to learn, in a first year law school class, about arguing in the alternative. It may not be intuitively obvious that you can defend yourself on multiple, sometimes contradictory theories, but it makes a certain amount of sense in our adversarial legal system.

Charged with murder you answer that you didn’t do it, you weren’t even in the state, you have an alibi witness. You also argue that even if you did kill the guy it was legally justified self-defense, and if not self-defense, it was done without malice aforethought and therfore was not murder, and if it was murder under the law then the murder law is facially overbroad and therefore unconstitutional.

You can throw up as many contradictory defenses as you can think up, placing the burden on the prosecutor to overcome each one, beyond a reasonable doubt. Being creative, within the universe of legal possibilities, is a lawyer’s legal responsibility to a wealthy client (lawyers for the poor usually don’t have the same luxury to create).

A lawyer for Trump just sent a motion to the Supreme Court asking the Federalist Society Six to carefully consider a recent Washington Post interview with January 6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, who showed his nefarious political bias by admitting (note damning action verb!) that if the evidence points there the committee would make a criminal referral for the former president.

I didn’t do anything wrong, and if I did, these evil fucks are still persecuting me! I don’t know if Binnall is a legal genius, but he’s throwing everything he’s got against the wall to see what sticks. He’s throwing it to six judges who’d probably be happy for a legal figleaf with which to fully clothe their beleaguered, eternally brawling, party leader.

And why not? The lawyer is just earning the fees Ronna McDaniel [1] will use political donations to pay.

[1] For RNC executive compensation schemes, see this very Trump Org type setup

https://www.propublica.org/article/republican-national-committee-obscured-how-much-it-pays-its-chief-of-staff

Invitation-only secret public policy membership society is a tax exempt charity

So right-wing power center CNP, the powerful, off the radar Council for National Policy, a by-invitation-only private, secret membership society of leaders, funded by undisclosed donors, is a charitable non-profit under the laws of these United States of America. Of course it is.

Makes sense, I guess, considering the power and reach of its secret membership (identities sometimes leaked) who, in addition to sometimes having the final say on who the Republican presidential candidate is (2016), rotate seats on the boards of the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, The Progressive Policy Institute (“radically pragmatic”), Judicial Watch, ALEC, the Cato Institute, Donors Trust and Charles Koch’s personal favorite, The Institute for Humane Studies.

Eh, what are you gonna do? The law’s the law. No law against powerful partisan zealots secretly meeting as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) or (c)(4) corporation. This is America!

Exceptional!