Category Archives: current events

Hair on Fire

If you are devoted to American democracy and the ongoing project to form a more perfect nation, and your hair is not on fire, watching the feeble parliamentarian efforts to fight an opposition party united behind a ruthless, determined, deep-pocketed group of reactionaries, fronted by a deranged narcissist, then what can I say? Barton Gellman published a long article in the Atlantic last week entitled “January 6 was practice” and retitled Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun (I can’t give you the link, I’m out of free articles at the Atlantic, here’s the Atlantic’s summary of the article with a link) detailing exactly why Biden’s hair, Merrick Garland’s hair, everyone’s hair should be on fire. It is well worth reading and I have pulled three sections for you (below) to whet your appetite for your hair bursting into flames.

The phrase “hair on fire” became popular as an image of someone with an urgent warning of a catastrophe (that soon happened) that was being ignored. Twenty years ago, in the months before Saudi religious fanatics brought down the World Trade Center and put a hole in the Pentagon in a spectacular act of terrifying mass murder, there were high national security officials like Richard Clarke running around with their “hair on fire”. Clarke was trying to get the attention of the vacationing leader of a then highly unpopular administration and brought bulletins with titles like “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” and Al Queda plans to fly Planes into US buildings to the president in the weeks before the attack. Bush and Cheney paid no attention to these warnings, though their party was ready with the voluminous Patriot Act within days of the attack and Bush’s popularity soared starting on September 12th. The Project for a New American Century began in earnest, something its reactionary architects predicted would take decades, absent a galvanizing Pearl Harbor type attack. Then, bingo, September 11, and the rest is history. A history we still don’t have important details of, like who were the wealthy investors who made a killing on the stock market with strategic buys and sells the day before September 11.

Almost a year ago a president who lost the election by a wide margin tried everything in his power (and much beyond his legal power) to change the outcome of the election he lost. His last, desperate move was to incite a riot to Stop the Steal, the fraudulent claim he’d been pushing for months, starting well before the election. In the aftermath of the riot he incited (and note, there was no permit for the march that swarmed into the Capitol — a permit would have meant massive police presence along the route), Trump was immediately condemned, by leaders of both parties. His top enablers, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham all spoke forcefully in the days after the MAGA riot stopped a joint session of Congress in its constitutional duties related to the peaceful transfer of power. Trump would quickly bring virtually all of them in line. McConnell, who gave Trump his greatest, indelible success during his term by ramming home hundreds of Federalist Society lifetime judicial appointments, is now hated by Trump for not falling 100% back in line like the rest of his cult members. They are planning on an improved version of what narrowly failed the last time.

Here are three sections from Gellman’s important article. At the risk of burying the lede (which you can skip to) his hair on fire conclusion is saved for last. The headings are my own, not Gellman’s.

A bullshit legal theory of Scalia-like brilliance

Elections are complicated, and election administrators have to make hundreds of choices about election machinery and procedures—the time,place, and manner of voting or counting or canvassing—that the not specifically authorized. A judge or county administrator may hold polls open for an extra hour to make up for a power outage that temporarily halts voting. Precinct workers may exercise their discretion to help voters“cure” technical errors on their ballots. A judge may rule that the state
constitution limits or overrides a provision of state election law.

Four justices—Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas—have already signaled support for a doctrine that disallows any such deviation from the election rules passed by a state legislature. It is an absolutist reading of legislative control over the “manner” of appointing electors under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last appointee, has never opined on the issue.

The question could arise, and Barrett’s vote could become decisive, if Trump again asks a Republican-controlled legislature to set aside a Democratic victory at the polls. Any such legislature would be able to point to multiple actions during the election that it had not specifically authorized. To repeat,
that is the norm for how elections are carried out today. Discretionary procedures are baked into the cake. A Supreme Court friendly to the doctrine of independent state legislatures would have a range of remedies available to it; the justices might, for instance, simply disqualify the portion of the votes
that were cast through “unauthorized” procedures. But one of those remedies would be the nuclear option: throwing out the vote altogether and allowing the state legislature to appoint electors of its choosing.

Trump is not relying on the clown-car legal team that lost nearly every court case last time. The independent-state-legislature doctrine has a Federalist Society imprimatur and attorneys from top-tier firms like BakerHostetler. A dark-money voter-suppression group that calls itself the Honest Elections
Project has already featured the argument in an amicus brief.

How close the mob came to hanging Mike Pence

Less than an hour earlier, at 1:10 p.m., Trump had finished speaking and
directed the crowd toward the Capitol. The first rioters breached the building
at 2:11 p.m. through a window they shattered with a length of lumber and a
stolen police shield. About one minute later, Fairlamb burst through the
Senate Wing Door brandishing the baton, a teeming mob behind him.
(Fairlamb pleaded guilty to assaulting an officer and other charges.)

Another minute passed, and then without warning, at 2:13, a Secret Service
detail pulled Pence away from the Senate podium, hustling him out through a
side door and down a short stretch of hallway.

Pause for a moment to consider the choreography. Hundreds of angry men
and women are swarming through the halls of the Capitol. They are fresh
from victory in hand-to-hand combat with an outnumbered force of
Metropolitan and Capitol Police. Many have knives or bear spray or baseball
bats or improvised cudgels. A few have thought to carry zip-tie wrist
restraints. Some are shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” Others call out hated
Democrats by name.

At 2:26, the Secret Service agents told Pence again that he had to move. “The third time they came in,”
the vice president’s chief of staff told me, “it wasn’t really a choice.”

These hundreds of rioters are fanning out, intent on finding another group of
roughly comparable size: 100 senators and 435 members of the House, in
addition to the vice president. How long can the one group roam freely
without meeting the other? Nothing short of stunning good luck, with an
allowance for determined police and sound evacuation plans, prevented a
direct encounter.

The vice president reached Room S-214, his ceremonial Senate office, at
about 2:14 p.m. No sooner had his entourage closed the door, which is made
of opaque white glass, than the leading edge of the mob reached a marble
landing 100 feet away. Had the rioters arrived half a minute earlier, they could
not have failed to spot the vice president and his escorts speed-walking out of
the Senate chamber.

Ten minutes later, at 2:24, Trump egged on the hunt. “Mike Pence didn’t
have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country
and our Constitution,” he tweeted.

Two minutes after that, at 2:26, the Secret Service agents told Pence again
what they had already said twice before: He had to move.

“The third time they came in, it wasn’t really a choice,” Marc Short, the vice
president’s chief of staff, told me. “It was ‘We cannot protect you here,
because all that we have between us is a glass door.’ ” When Pence refused to
leave the Capitol, the agents guided him down a staircase to a shelter under
the visitors’ center.

President Biden’s plan to protect democracy in 2022 and 2024

THERE IS A clear and present danger that American democracy will not
withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-
party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The
other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot
live without.


Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people
who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to
stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves.

Joe Biden looked as though he might do that on the afternoon of July 13. He
traveled to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which features
on its facade an immense reproduction of the Preamble in 18th-century
script, to deliver what was billed as a major address on democracy.

What followed was incongruous. Biden began well enough, laying out how
the core problem of voting rights had changed. It was “no longer just about
who gets to vote” but “who gets to count the vote.” There were “partisan
actors” seizing power from independent election authorities. “To me, this is
simple: This is election subversion,” he said. “They want the ability to reject
the final count and ignore the will of the people if their preferred candidate
loses.”

He described the means by which the next election might be stolen, though
vaguely: “You vote for certain electors to vote for somebody for president”
and then a “state legislator comes along … and they say, ‘No, we don’t like
those electors. We’re going to appoint other electors who are going to vote
for the other guy or other woman.’ ”

And he laid down a strong marker as he reached his rhetorical peak.

“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.
That’s not hyperbole,” he said. “I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying
this because you should be alarmed.”

But then, having looked directly toward the threat on the horizon, Biden
seemed to turn away, as if he doubted the evidence before his eyes. There
was no appreciable call to action, save for the bare words themselves: “We’ve
got to act.” Biden’s list of remedies was short and grossly incommensurate
with the challenge. He expressed support for two bills—the For the People
Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—that were dead on
arrival in the Senate because Democrats had no answer to the Republican
filibuster. He said the attorney general would double the Department of
Justice staff devoted to voting-rights enforcement. Civil-rights groups would
“stay vigilant.” Vice President Kamala Harris would lead “an all-out effort to
educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote, and then get
the vote out.”

And then he mentioned one last plan that proved he did not accept the
nature of the threat: “We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress,
in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent
this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to
vote.”

So: enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws,
vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans stand
athwart their own electoral schemes.

Conspicuously missing from Biden’s speech was any mention even of
filibuster reform, without which voting-rights legislation is doomed. Nor was
there any mention of holding Trump and his minions accountable, legally, for
plotting a coup. Patterson, the retired firefighter, was right to say that nobody
has been charged with insurrection; the question is, why not? The Justice
Department and the FBI are chasing down the foot soldiers of January 6, but
there is no public sign that they are building cases against the men and women who sent them. Absent consequences, they will certainly try again. An unpunished plot is practice for the next.

DONALD TRUMP came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a
free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his
position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak
points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They
have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of
aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace
violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters, Robert Pape’s
“committed insurrectionists,” are armed and single-minded and will know
what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.


Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced
with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows
better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power
and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.

The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the
GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be
ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of
presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as
oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of
counting the electoral votes.

Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be
capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that
chance.


This article appears in the January/February 2022 print edition with the headline “January 6 Was Practice.”
Barton Gellman is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Dark Mirror: Edward
Snowden and the American Surveillance State and Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

Imagining a better world

It’s not hard to imagine a better world than this one. For all its miraculous beauty, all of its amazingly cool life forms, interacting for mutual benefit, all of its potential to be a kind of paradise. I suspect, and every history I read seems to confirm this, that our beautiful planet has always been run for the benefit of the most ruthless and unprincipled among us. It is important to imagine a better world, because commitment to that vision comes before any effective action.

If we had binding ethics rules in the Senate, or House, for example, one member of a committee who stands to profit from defeating legislation that most citizens of the world are in favor of, slowing the devastating warming of our planet, could not block that law because his personal fortune would take a hit. Case in point, filibuster supporter Joe Manchin III, coal profiteer, largest recipient of fossil fuel money in the Senate and chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

The ethical standard for a judge recusing herself from a case is the appearance of a conflict of interest, the appearance of impropriety. Not a provable criminal conflict or some gross impropriety, the appearance of impropriety, anything that would make her appear to favor one side over the other. Why is this not the ethical standard for the Senate or the Supreme Court? Because– eh, FUCK YOU, HOW DARE YOU?!

Ethical behavior has never been a particular strength of the kind of human who craves power over others. Many such people consider themselves selfless public servants, taking one for the team, foregoing the fortune their talent, education and connections would afford them in the free market, and as such, they argue, they must not be subjected to arbitrary ethical rules and certain discipline for violating those rules.

In a more perfect union the judicial system would not allow frivolous cases to drag on for months or years, baselessly running out the clock on various investigations. We learned in law school that you instantly lose your law license if you bring a case without evidence, a frivolous case you have no hope of winning. Frivolous lawsuits are unjust, and hated by ethical judges, because they are calculated only to cause vexation, delay and confusion. They are discouraged because they clog up the justice system with crap lawsuits designed only to vex, delay, intimidate, bankrupt, create public relations campaigns and confuse the public. Yet, of the dozens of frivolous cases brought by an army of die-hard Trumpist lawyers trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, based on a host of wild conspiracies involving allegations of massive fraud that never occurred, very few of these shysters have been slapped a little bit, forced to pay some legal fees and so on.

Don McGahn, Federalist Society superstar, the man who managed the successful installation of 2/3 of Trump’s majority on the Trump Supreme Court, exploited the crowded federal D.C. docket to drag out a very iffy case for two years– weaponizing the delay to legally dodge a valid subpoena until the damaging testimony he gave against his client, Donald Trump, was a dead letter. You can almost hear the right-wing fuck laughing as he admitted everything years too late to make a difference of any kind, behind closed doors, and not under oath. Powerful insiders play let’s make a deal, while the rest of us must deal with a system that never bends.

I like to think these motherfuckers, the same ilk who were militant in their highly principled, righteous Christian defense of chattel slavery, may be finally overreaching. Charles Koch is an old zombie who has lived to see much of his radical dream play out for America — a nation where those born with incredible wealth are free to amass as much additional wealth as their talents and drive allow, a nation that coerces nobody to give a shit about anybody else, a nation where the government can only force you to do things if you’re a powerless piece of garbage. A transactional nation designed for the well-born to rule as benefits them most.

I like to imagine they have finally over-reached, are miscalculating in their lockstep march behind an increasingly deranged, widely hated front man whose only real talent is stirring rage. By allowing an unconstitutional abortion law to stand in Texas, denying countless poor women of Texas a right guaranteed to them by the Supreme Court because the scheme Texas came up with is a diabolically clever evasion of judicial review — there’s literally nobody to sue to stop it! — these zealot dickheads have finally shown their hideous hand, openly, proudly, the way Charles Koch himself does these days after decades of doing his damage from under a rock.

Recall, the powerful master of the Koch network announced that he would support neither Hillary nor Trump in 2016, until Trump announced that he would put as many of Koch’s Federalist Society vetted picks on to the Supreme Court (and various federal appellate courts) as he was able to.

It is good to imagine that the walls may finally be closing in on these unprincipled, reactionary motherfuckers. Too slowly for my taste, but increasingly, the mountain of evidence already collected and made public has become too high even for modest, mild “institutionalists” like Biden and Merrick Garland to remain silent about. It is not hard to imagine a reckoning, between a legal system rebuilt in 1870, when the Department of Justice was founded to combat the evils of slavery and post-slavery racist terrorism and an incorrigible gang of largely bumbling loyalists ready to use violence on behalf of a megalomaniacal madman to overturn an election he lost, and strongly lied about losing. Trump’s denials of losing the election are as strong as Muhammed bin Salman’s “strong” denials about having Jamal Khasoggi strangled and dismembered, after luring him into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

In the battle between a mountain of evidence of crimes and the demand to deem it all fake, I’m still taking the mountain of evidence, even in this weak, teetering democracy we have left. Especially in this weak, teetering democracy we have left.

The right-wing dark web

In this installment of The Scheme (below) Sheldon Whitehouse compares the operation of the right-wing front groups and fake trade associations that promote climate change denial and shows that these are the same groups, funded by the same donors, involved in court capture and other right-wing projects. The larger aim of this network is to end the administrative state by destroying government agencies’ power to regulate business.

Whitehouse continues to lay out the orchestrated cascade of dark money that funds an energetic, litigious web of right-wing activists; groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Foundation, Donors’ Capital and Donors’ Trust, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the US Chamber of Commerce. He runs through a few of their wish list items, like the lawsuit, brought on behalf of a paid plaintiff, to attack the constitutionality of Elizabeth Warren’s Federal Consumer Protection Agency.

It is not only a flotilla of coordinated amicus briefs Federalist Society lawyers are submitting to the Federalist Society 6-3 majority on Trump’s Supreme Court, on behalf of various united front groups, it is the lawsuits themselves, selected, as Shelby County v. Holder was, to achieve specific long sought reactionary goals.

To give bolster the illusion that their cases speak for all Americans, there is a women’s front group, the Independent Women’s Forum, funded by dark money, that pops up to present a right-wing free market woman’s point of view in various cases, a recent Second Amendment case, a contraceptive case, a case to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, in the Americans for Prosperity Foundation case that granted a constitutional right to unlimited dark money (signed off on, as Whitehouse says, by the dark-money justices).

Whitehouse ties together cases originating from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (sudden champion of Climate Science denial) which was, grotesquely enough, the same conservative political outfit that paid for the fucking Powell memorandum, the blueprint for a corporate takeover of the nation, written decades ago. In that memo Powell identified an activist federal judiciary as the key instrument for social, economic and political change, indispensable for kneecapping agency power across the board. Louis Powell, the tobacco lobbying lawyer, became Justice Powell shortly after writing his influential memo for the US Chamber of Congress. Justice Powell, appointed by Nixon, a pox on both of their houses.

This series should be required viewing for every high school and college course in civics and American government.

Ascendant Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

There are conspiracy theories, often based purely on paranoia about unexplainable vexations and there are actual conspiracies that can be mapped using real data. How did this nation arrive at a place where almost 70% of one of our two major political parties believes that a widely disproved lie (massive Democratic voter fraud, abetted by disloyal Republicans) justifies political violence and the nullification of millions of legally cast ballots?

You can read books like Jane Mayer’s great “Dark Money” and Nancy MacLean’s detailed follow-up, “Democracy in Chains” and emerge with a clear view of how super-wealthy American reactionaries have methodically used their fortunes to shift the cultural debate and the government and its laws toward their goal — unfettered enjoyment of perpetual privilege free from the “coercion” of “majoritarian tyranny.”

They have done this by tireless engineering work, work that resulted in the Supreme Court declaring that spending infinite amounts of “dark money” to influence elections and law enforcement is simply free speech, protected under the First Amendment. After Charles Koch became convinced that their reactionary ideas could never win via the ballot (his brother, as VP candidate on a Libertarian ticket got less than 1% of the vote in the 1980 presidential election) they began engineering alternative influence mechanisms. They created many “think tanks,” endowed university chairs, gave scholarships to promising young right-wing thinkers, deployed armies of lobbyists, used smart, audacious media strategies, funded “grassroots” movements like the Tea Party when the time was right to show that ordinary Americans coast to coast were united in opposition to a tyrant of mixed-race who was possibly not even legitimately entitled to be the president. They used these devices to create “climate change skepticism,” a fever over gun rights, to gin up a host of violent debates to divide a populace that would otherwise be united in opposition to this powerful elite’s larger plan — eternal luxury for unaccountable, unregulated corporate masters of the universe.

One of their most important innovations is an almost forty year-old fraternity that selects true believers for the highest lifetime judicial positions in the nation. These frat brothers (and some sisters) are then in position to have the final unappealable word on what is constitutional and what is illegal in the USA. Unlimited expenditures of secretly donated money becomes protected free speech. Five of their frat brothers have the power to overturn a 98-0 Senate vote, and the enthusiastic support of a conservative Republican president, with a few pages of bloodless legalistic right-wing fantasy, as John Roberts did in his infamous Shelby County v. Holder decision that ended federal enforcement of minority voting rights. Since we now have a half-black president, he reasoned, we live in a post-racial society and there is no longer need to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 5-4, case closed. If you read the decision, the dissent had the better of every argument, but, no matter, there is no appeal available once the majority has signed on. We can all see the predictable results of gutting enforcement of a law that successfully evened the electoral playing field after a century of winked-at legal racism at the polls in many states.

The Federalist Society is a quasi-religious right-wing fraternity that trains young law students and lawyers in its conservative doctrine and grooms them to become solid, right-wing judges. It provides members with fellowship, support, a network of powerful mentors and a career path to power for the most loyal and ambitious among them. Six of its most illustrious members and supporters now compose the 6-3 Trump Court majority.

It is not entirely unfair to call a faith based organization like this a cult, since it demands adherence to a strict set of values — “originalism” (faith to the Constitution without those pesky post Civil War Amendments) the rights of corporate “persons”, the right for everyone to have guns, the right of the religious to discriminate, based on their faith, the rights of the fetus — and rewards that adherence to these values with advancement to lifetime judicial appointments. All three of Trump’s picks were handed to him off a list Leonard Leo and his friends at the Federalist Society drew up, as Trump had promised. Doing that was one of the few promises Trump ever kept in a life of compulsive “transactionalism”.

Here is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on The Federalist Society:

The importance of focus during a crisis

We live in a culture of distraction based on marketing to each of us personally every possible moment. The power to sell us things (and ideas) every waking moment has never been greater than now, when we carry our virtual community with us everywhere, in our pocket.

The constant distraction of monetized social media during these desperate times makes mass influence much easier, “social media” also creates the illusion of community and democracy by making mass “personal” conduct, like the so-called Arab Spring or the January 6 MAGA riot at the Capitol, events in which many choose the same personal action at the same moment, more likely.

So much noise and bad air is flying at us, constantly, in a torrent directed at each of us personally, that it is almost impossible to keep the larger view of what is happening in front of our senses for more than a moment. The heightened anxiety of living in a competitive, highly individualistic culture where the stakes for losing include homelessness and death for lack of medical insurance, is good for only one thing, the corporate bottom line — consumerism. Fear and anxiety sell! When the going gets tough the tough go shopping.

As consumers about to spend our money, our power of personal choice is at its greatest. What specific variety you consume and when you consume it (on demand, it doesn’t get better than that!) are really the only inviolable US freedoms at the moment, so who would not feel better when making consumer choices, even ones thrust at us?

Our challenge in this environment is how to escape from these ever more complete personal/social/political bubbles once in a while to see the bigger picture, the historical one. How to take in, focus on and retain important small details that later become so important in the big picture.

It’s often hard to see a direct line in a mass of information until someone else lays it out for us. Heather Cox Richardson, historian and writer, has emerged as one of our best in this moment in history. Here’s a bit that caught my eye from the other night’s Letters from an American:

Ukraine, which became independent from the old U.S.S.R. in 1991—December 2 is the anniversary of Poland and Canada becoming the first to recognize its independence, actually—is not part of NATO. It had begun the process of applying for membership in 2008, but in 2010, Russia-allied oligarch Viktor Yanukovych, whose campaign was being handled by Paul Manafort, won the presidency and turned the nation away from NATO and toward Russia. 

In 2014, Ukrainians rose up and overthrew Yanukovych, who fled to Russia (thus putting Manafort out of a job and freeing him to run Trump’s 2016 campaign). Later that year, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea, prompting the U.S. economic sanctions that Putin desperately wants lifted. Ukraine’s interest in joining NATO jumped.

source

Heather’s point in that post was to detail the autocratic Putin’s high-stakes brinksmanship in his current threat of Ukraine, as Russia threatens all-out war with Ukraine, not to expose the Trump connections that may underlie the ongoing crisis. But read these lines and see how much of the current GOP’s ongoing anti-democratic corruption is encapsulated in them.

in 2010, Russia-allied oligarch Viktor Yanukovych, whose campaign was being handled by Paul Manafort, won the presidency and turned the nation away from NATO and toward Russia.

Trump’s unpaid, volunteer campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had spent years in Ukraine, making many millions of dollars, grooming a Russia-allied oligarch to become president of Ukraine. Manafort, the man of ostrich jackets and the lavish lifestyle, was not one to do anything without a big pay day. Manafort’s candidate Viktor Yanukovych was in office until 2014, openly exercising corrupt power when

 
Ukrainians rose up and overthrew Yanukovych, who fled to Russia (thus putting Manafort out of a job and freeing him to run Trump’s 2016 campaign).

This is a huge background detail in Trump’s shakedown call to the new Ukrainian president asking him to do him a political favor, though, by announcing a corruption investigation into Hunter Biden. That call led a whistleblower to report the improper use of presidential power, which in turn led to Trump’s AG burying the whistleblower complaint, as one does when one’s power is unrestrained by any principle. Nancy Pelosi foolishly bet the farm on Americans being outraged that an American president would try to extort a political favor from our allies Ukraine. To which most Americans responded “Ukraine? What is a fucking Ukraine?”

Manafort, the Republican Senate intelligence committee report found, regularly met with and gave sensitive polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik an agent of Mr.. Putin’s. Mr. Putin did everything possible to help swing a close election to his useful idiot Mr. Trump. These findings were confirmed by Little Marco (Rubio) and his Republican committee. Manafort lied under oath, was convicted, sentenced, pardoned by Trump like his colleague Roger Stone, like the insane Mike Flynn. Nothing to see here

To many average Americans, the only question regarding Ukraine is whether it, not Putin, actually helped Trump squeak his way into the White House.

Besides, what the hell even is a Ukraine?

Dark Money, the source of right-wing power

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has been laying out, in a now nine part series of presentations in the Senate that he calls the Scheme, the billions spent (tax-deductibly) over the decades by increasingly demanding right-wing billionaires to take over state governments (with organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Counsel — ALEC, authors of Stand Your Ground, anti-mask mandate, voter “integrity” and anti-abortion laws) and capture the federal courts.

Their larger goal is to end all government regulation of business, lower their own taxes, shrink government and enjoy the liberty of a luxurious life without the threat of coercion by a meddling, overeaching government that panders to the “takers”, that undeserving, ever expanding majoritarian tyranny. Their biggest advantage in this fight is an inexhaustible fund of unregulated, untraceable, “dark money”, permitted under the laws that make their political organizations qualify as non-profits. I visited ALEC’s website the other day, and, bingo:

As long as the Supreme Court they have orchestrated into being continues to rule in their favor (and the 6 reactionary majority are all members of the same far-right ideological fraternity, literally, a career-networking frat founded on the 1980s by those same dark money billionaires), they will remain safe from things like “Kamala Harris’s unconstitutional disclosure requirements.”

Imagine the irreparable harm that would be done to America’s greatest political donors if the identity of those secret donors who funded Trump’s $50,000,000 ad buy to promote the lie that Trump was robbed was forcibly unmasked. Those ads worked fabulously, by the way, about 2/3 of Republicans believe there was massive fraud in a bipartisan conspiracy so diabolical that no evidence was ever found!

It’s impossible to hear the “arguments” and read the summary, unsigned 5-4 and 6-3 narrowly ruled partisan decisions from the Trump Supreme Court without suspecting that some kind of fix is in. Here’s Whitehouse on the part of the dark money machine that selects cases the Supreme Court uses to change the laws for decades (like the Shelby County case that overruled a 98-0 Senate vote and set voting rights back fifty years). Their various dark-money funded legal arms submit countless “friend of the court” legal briefs that provide the Gorsuchs, Kavanaughs and Coney-Barretts everything they need to craft facially plausible eye-of-the-needle legal arguments:

What could go wrong? After all, once they throw a coveted chunk of red meat to their religious base by overturning Roe v. Wade, it will only be poor women, and girls without family connections (the bulk of the US plague of maternal and infant mortality deaths anyway), who will suffer the abolition of of this long time woman’s constitutional right. Everyone else can just fly to Switzerland. What’s the problem?

Loneliness, anyone?

A recent pre-pandemic survey found that 61% of Americans reported feeling lonely. The epidemic of loneliness is painful in its own right, plus, it leads to destructive attempts to escape the pain of feeling isolated and eternally alone in the universe.

Lonely people look for community on-line and find “social media” groups where their worst suspicions are confirmed in sickening detail: fucking Tom Hanks drinks the blood of children he has kidnapped, after doing sexually perverse things to them!

Words on a page, even those written by our most skilled users of language, almost never contain the nuance conveyed by a wry twinkle in the eye, a shrug, a sarcastic body movement in concert with the words spoken — a pregnant pause.

Lonely people staring at screens take the words they read, words they hope will somehow bind them to others, at face value. Of course George Soros, Barbara Streisand and fucking George Clooney had something to do with those vile accusations against innocent, humble, nonpartisan, never a black out drunk, Brett Kavanaugh!

Aside from an epidemic of suicide caused by loneliness and despair, aside from the political chaos, the literal madness, it has unleashed among desperate people looking for simple answers to complicated, vexing issues, aside from the outward rippling misery loneliness causes, loneliness is, at its heart, a very painful condition.

A writer named Steven Petrow published a thoughtful essay called I’m not alone in feeling lonely. There are ways to fight loneliness. It appeared in today’s Washington Post and has been generously “gifted” to you by a supremely generous man of the people, the illegally anti-unionist Jeff Bezos.

A thoughtful essay by Mr. Petrow, I thought. When a painful condition is stigmatized, and those who talk about it are treated as pathetic losers, the pain of that condition is greatly compounded. The first step to dealing with anything painful is to acknowledge that it hurts and talk to others about it, tough guy.

It helps nobody you care about, and yourself least of all, to pretend you’re fine when you have the cold arrow of loneliness stuck in your chest.

If you feel lonely, or know lonely people, this article is worth a read, especially during this time of year, the “holiday season” when the days grower shorter, expectations for merriness soar and suicides spike.

Powerful piece by Michelle Goldberg

In an op-ed entitled What ‘My Body, My Choice’ Means to the Right, Michelle Goldberg puts the issue (based in the Christian jihad against abortion, no matter how unbearable the circumstances of the pregnancy, or how terrible the consequences for the mother are) into stark perspective.

I read Michelle Goldberg’s piece before yesterday’s theatrical down at the Supreme Court. There is much to say about that, and time to write about it soon. For now, her piece beautifully sets up the grotesqueness of the “my body, my choice” troll picked up recently by the nation now called Trumpists.

It also sets up a discussion of this cynically installed, unappealable, lifetime right-wing fraternity chosen for their cult-like willingness, in the case of abortion, to absurdly pretend that conservative Christian religious belief is the only real constitutional consideration at play — the question of the immortal Christian soul of that poor fetus, even when it is little more than a collection of cells, potential life, and no matter what the mother will have to suffer to protect this potential life.

Remember, this religious-based argument about preventing the mass-murder of innocent embryos and fetuses (condemned to eternity in purgatory after their killing, the faithful believe) was the galvanizing issue chosen, among many field tested and focus-grouped issues, as the single cause to unite the millions of religious Evangelical Christians with religious Catholics and the rest of the “moral majority”, that solid 39% percent of largely rural Americans who seem to faithfully believe whatever their leaders tell them to believe. It used to be abhorrence of homosexuals that drove this demographic to the polls, that was the difference maker in the 2004 reelection of Liz Cheney’s dad, and it’s still an issue to a lot of them, but this abortion one is the winner, by a mile, has been a standby and rallying cry for decades.

Here’s Michele Goldberg:

Here’s a bit of evidence that we live in a simulation controlled by someone with a perverse sense of humor: At the very moment that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, the American right has become obsessed with bodily autonomy and has adopted the slogan “My body, my choice” about Covid vaccines and mask mandates.

Feminists have always known that if men — or at any rate cis men — could get pregnant, abortion would be a nonissue. The furious conservative reaction to Covid mitigation measures demonstrates this more than any hypothetical ever could. Many on the right, we can now see, believe it’s tyranny to be told to put something they don’t want on or in their bodies in order to save lives.

There is, to be fair, at least one prominent illiberal conservative, Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule, who has defended vaccine mandates, writing, “Even our physical liberties are rightly ordered to the common good of the community when necessary.” More typical on the right, however, is a paranoid sense that the vaccines are tied up with occult forces of social control.

In “Why I Didn’t Get the Covid Vaccine,” an essay in the Catholic anti-abortion journal First Things, the theologian Peter Leithart quotes a book called “The Great Covid Panic”: “A very effective way to dominate people is to convince them they are sinful unless they obey.” He invokes totalitarian “biopolitical regimes” that seek to exercise power over the body: “Once upon a time, the ruler bore a sword; now, a syringe,” he writes.

Of course, many American women will soon be faced with an infinitely more invasive form of biopolitical control, courtesy of First Things’ allies. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case dealing with Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks. It’s possible that the justices could gut Roe without overturning it outright, but after they let Texas’ abortion bounty law stand, at least for the time being, I’m expecting the worst. If Roe is tossed out, most abortions will instantly become illegal in at least 12 states, and they will be severely restricted in others.

We are seeing a preview of what this world will look like in Texas, whose six-week abortion ban remains in effect. There are no exceptions for rape and incest. Women with wanted pregnancies that go tragically wrong have to either cross state lines for treatment or wait until their lives are in immediate danger. “Many doctors say they are unable to discuss the procedure as an option until the patient’s condition deteriorates and her life is at risk,” The New York Times reports.

It’s striking, the gap between the bodily impositions people on the right will accept in their own lives and those they would impose on others. When it comes to themselves, many conservatives find any encroachment on their physical sovereignty intolerable, and arguments about the common good irrelevant. Yet their movement is dragging us into a future where many women will be stripped of self-determination the moment they get pregnant. Choices, it seems, aren’t for everybody.

As the feminist Ellen Willis once put it, the central question in the abortion debate is not whether a fetus is a person, but whether a woman is. People, in our society, generally do not have their bodies appropriated by the state. It’s unimaginable that they would be forced to, say, donate blood. As we’ve seen, even mask and vaccine requirements elicit mass umbrage. Americans tend to believe that their bodies are inviolate.

“You can’t make a case against abortion by applying a general principle about everybody’s human rights; you have to show exactly the opposite — that the relationship between fetus and pregnant woman is an exception, one that justifies depriving women of their right to bodily integrity,” Willis wrote in 1985. To ban abortion is to say that pregnant women are not entitled to the authority over their physical selves that other adults expect and demand.

Mississippi’s attorney general, Lynn Fitch, who will defend her state’s ban before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, has also filed three lawsuits against President Biden’s vaccine mandates. On Nov. 12, a federal appeals court stayed one of them, the mandate dealing with companies that have over 100 employees. Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt, a Trump appointee, wrote that the public interest is “served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions — even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.”

Engelhardt, a former member of Louisiana Layers for Life, obviously doesn’t believe that all individuals should have the liberty to make “intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions.” But that doesn’t mean he’s a hypocrite. He simply appears to believe, as much of the modern right does, that there are some people who should be subject to total physical coercion, and some who should be subject to none at all.

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What kind of monster can possibly be against innocent life?

Snapshot of how a top criminal uses noncriminals

“Oh, the honor system, of course, of course, we’re on the honor system, on my honor. I’m on my honor, absolutely. You have my word, 100%. I swear to you on the grave of my sainted mother, on my sacred honor.”

On September 29, Trump went to his scheduled debate with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, arriving too late for testing. Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel, who was the moderator at the debate, later said the event was relying on the “honor system.” Trump railed and snarled at Biden, who was close enough to him to have been in danger. Trump’s contingent refused to wear masks despite rules at the venue to do so. At least 11 people tested positive after the debate.

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This honorable gentleman’s assurance was given after a man famous for his punctuality contrived to arrive at a live debate hosted by a FOX moderator too late for mandatory testing, three days after the first (undisclosed) positive test for the strongman who thought wearing a mask made him look vulnerable, weak, who’d made a strong branding decision to be the tough guy, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, as opposed to the wimpy and unmanly mask-wearing Pence, who he’d soon blame for betraying him and send a mob down to threaten, chase, perhaps rough up, or maybe actually hang. The strong contrast to weak, old Biden with his comically gigantic mask.

The tough guy assuring the others “on his honor” that this time he was actually not lying, that he’d never tested positive for Covid in recent weeks (let alone three days earlier) must have been thinking what easy marks, what pathetic losers noncriminals are… as he concealed his recent positive test for a disease that was ravaging the world, one he’d dismissed as a hoax as America led the world in Covid deaths, one he swore on his honor that he’d tested negative for (still his story).

That massive Covid disruption was not his fault in any way, whatever those exaggerated, fake death tolls supposedly were, he’d totally delegated that, to his dimwit alter-ego, his son-in-law the Covid Czar (rewarding his glorious work making historic peace in the Middle East, fixing the federal bureaucracy and ending the Oxycodone overdose crisis). Pence was also assigned Covid Czar, with equal responsibility for the outcome, but with less power than Kushner and a much better guy to send an angry mob after than the husband of his cherished daughter.

Of course, by refusing to wear a mask while bellowing at Biden he was probably hoping to spew enough active Covid to infect and kill the old man he hated and had vowed he could only lose to in a rigged election. He gave the people who prepped him for the “honor system” debate Covid. Loyal Chris Christie got a serious enough case of the deadly disease to need heroic, very expensive emergency treatment at a hospital, and hospitalization, extraordinary measures necessary to save his life. Measures unavailable to virtually any of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died of the pandemic and continue to die of it.

But really, when you’re at the top of the food chain, the apex predator, the only question is, how many more times with this stupid “honor system” bullshit? Isn’t it enough, already, with the make believe about honor systems, not lying, even if it helps you, being nice just so somebody else can fuck you? Nobody has honor, let’s face it, why insult people’s intelligence? You’re a mark that’s going to get strongly played if you believe in that honor bullshit, take my word for that, loser.

Now, did you take care of that little thing we talked about?