Category Archives: current events

Perfectly good reasons for inchoate rage and despair

Last year in the US we set a new record (since the CDC began compiling these numbers) for drug overdose deaths of despair, 92,000. Depression that leads to suicide is sometimes described as rage turned against the self. There is certainly a loss of hope before someone slips the needle into their arm, takes just one or two more highly addictive pain pills, trying to make the psychic pain stop.

There are certainly reasons for great concern, despair and anger, even if we can’t always be sure of the direct cause of either of these destructive emotions. The news is more and more nightmarish, more and more a reflection of Trump’s vision of American Carnage, of our current dystopia. Our planet is heating up, polar ice caps are melting faster than predicted, sea levels are rising, devastating climate catastrophes are increasingly regular occurrences — and, not long from now, there will be tens of millions of climate refugees with no food and no place to go. Poverty rages in even the most prosperous countries; the disparity in wealth here in the USA is as great as it was right before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Health outcomes for Americans, who pay the highest rates for medical insurance/care anywhere in the world, are mediocre, tens of thousands of us die preventable deaths every year. In spite of our country’s great wealth, our infant mortality and maternal mortality numbers are up there with much poorer nations. While tens of millions suffered during the worst months of a pandemic, American billionaires, sometimes capitalizing on this widespread misery, increased their wealth by more than a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars, a thousand billion, looks like this $1,000,000,000,000.00. It was generated for a few hundred of America’s richest in about a year.

We watch all this horror and injustice more or less helplessly as politicians, well-paid by various industries, and serving at their pleasure, wrangle. If you are on the left you are angry that, in our current political culture, with corporate moderates (and some rigid extremists) firmly in charge of the political process, no progress can be made to fix any of these longterm, worsening problems — no matter how pressing the emergency is (think daily American gun massacres). If you are on the right you know exactly who to be angry at — the fucking liberals of the overbearing nanny state who keep failing to fix anything, despise Liberty and Freedom, hate the Free Market, are making things a hundred times worse for everybody and who should just keep their mouths shut and go back to the shithole countries they came from if they hate our freedom so much.

We are not alone with a front row seat to this maddening power-driven shit show. Worldwide nations are roiled by angry demagogues, many gain control of populous nations, speaking directly to the boiling rage of their most agitated citizens. Hindus are roused to stop taking shit from Muslims, Muslims from certain countries are banned from flying into other countries, rage against Mexicans is stoked, rage against immigrants, rage against homosexuals, urban elites, rage against an imaginary cabal of powerful Satanist cannibal “Democrat” pedophiles, rage against so-called cooler heads urging us to talk to each other honestly, based on the best facts we can get, if we hope to solve mutual problems.

The rage is real, we can all feel it sometimes, as well as the deepening despair the inability (or unwillingness) of our elected representatives to act together to address any of this causes daily. We are, as they say, outraged regularly. The outrage is weaponized. What makes you feel a little better? Guy in a MAGA hat likes it when a libtard gets called out, enraged, humiliated, it makes his day. Anyone not wearing a MAGA hat gets a bit of schadenfreude when some MAGA person makes a fool of herself, gets called out, makes it worse trying not to apologize in a way that will hurt her fundraising. Does this meaningless sideshow help us solve any of the vexing problems that we all face? Rhetorical tic, that dumb question, obviously the sideshow is a fucking sideshow to make us forget what is really going on.

I’m going to Physical Therapy to try to get my arthritic knees to work better, have less pain, get back into better shape. The guy who runs the place has FOX blaring on a TV in the exercise room. The other day I was on the stationary bike and he sat next to me and asked if I’m a fan of Larry Kudlow. I told him I don’t know much about Kudlow, asked if he was a Queens boy (we were sitting in Queens, a block from where I grew up, near where he grew up, less than a mile from Frederick Christ Trump’s former mansion on Midland Parkway). He didn’t know, though, now that I mentioned it, he detected a little New York accent in Kudlow. “He worked for George W. Bush, and for President Trump,” he informed me. Within a few seconds we established that I am not a fan of Trump, and that the owner of the thriving PT practice is a conservative. He doesn’t like everything about Trump, and he didn’t agree with some of the things he did, but believes that Trump definitely did some good things as president, he said.

I determined to remain pleasant and decided not to ask how big a tax break he got from The Donald. I asked him instead if he thought Trump was the best leader of the conservative movement. He was coy in his answer. I said “leave aside everything else, just the fact that his university was shut down for fraud, and he paid a $25,000,000 settlement right before the election, and that when he was president his charity was shut down for fraud. Doesn’t that tell you maybe you should want someone more trustworthy to lead the party?”

He wasn’t sure, he smiled as though maybe I had a point, didn’t say much. I decided to try one more question. “Can we agree that there is a criminal justice problem in the country, in addition to disparities of wealth determining the outcomes of cases, that black and brown people are many times more likely to wind up in prison than whites?”

He could not totally agree, or actually, well, what he said was “isn’t it nice that we can have a pleasant conversation about politics, even though we are on different sides politically?”

I agreed that it was, not bothering to point out that he had no answers to either of the questions I’d asked him. That is one of my perennial problems with talking to people on the right, those who avidly watch FOX and similar outlets and get their worldview set out for them every day. No answer to direct questions, only parrying counter narratives, often boldly false ones.

During the Cheney/Dubya years I tried to resolve a long email debate with a onetime friend of my father’s, radically leftist when I knew her decades ago, who’d had a “political awakening” (and a religious conversion, the blonde midwesterner was now Jewish) and now was a politically “independent” extreme right-winger. She had initiated the conversation about politics because none of her former liberal friends would talk to her any more and she wanted my honest feedback, as an old friend, to see what common ground we could find. She also hoped, by the sheer strength of her irrefutably moral position, to convert me to her way of thinking (this she did not announce at the start).

The discussion had been infuriating and exhausting, because she had an instant right wing talking head non-answer to everything. The racial disparity in arrests and sometimes deadly police violence against people of color? She shot back an angrily written piece, by a then “hot” right wing provocateur, about how blacks murder each other in atrocious numbers. How did this answer my question? She’d sent it, she said, to open my eyes about the propaganda I’d been exposed to that made me think police regularly use force on blacks for no reason. Clearly, she’d changed her view of America’s most persecuted race since her days singing protest songs and marching for Civil Rights, and living with a fellow Mensa member from Haiti.

Toward the end of this agonizing exercise I asked her one question, about torture. I may have gotten this idea from David Bromberg, a singer and multi-instrumentalist Sekhnet and I both like.

In every show he does a song inspired by the Rip Van Winkle story, a guy wakes up after being asleep for twenty years and doesn’t recognize the world. Bromberg, during a musing instrumental interlude, makes a few political remarks, he’s a progressive-seeming fellow with a good sense of humor. This night in Town Hall, as he fingerpicked a background to his remarks, he began musing about some of the worst things Cheney/Bush were doing [1] a guy in a military jacket rose behind us and called for him to stop with the politics and get back to playing music. Bromberg looked at him thoughtfully, said “we torture people now? We torture people?” and went back to singing.

I wrote her something similar, it may have been a two part question. Why are we at war in Iraq, a country with no connection to al-qaeda and no WMD? How do you justify torturing people, many of whom had nothing to do with terrorism, people who had been turned in by personal enemies for large cash rewards?

Iraq she’d have to get back to me on, she wrote (she needed to research the issue). As for torture, what we were doing to these terrorists was not torture, it was fully justifiable and certainly not deadly, we were just standing up for ourselves, speaking to them in their own language, to protect us all from having our throats cut in our beds — as one right wing friend of her’s predicted would happen to me one day, to shut my big, liberal, New York Jew lawyer mouth, a Muslim jihadist would break into my house and cut my goddamned throat, in my bed, because people like me are friends of the terrorists but terrorists don’t care about any of that, they’d slit my throat in a second.

If the crazy old bastard had said that to my face, of course, I might have been tempted to shiatsu massage his sweaty mug with my knuckles. I don’t do that kind of thing, and it has been a long project of mine to learn to avoid reacting with anger, but, seriously? That is an answer to my question about how the greatest democracy in history justifies endlessly detaining and torturing captured Muslims?

If you can’t get a serious answer all you can do is remain pleasant until you can walk away. Not very satisfying, for someone who hopes to solve problems and come to an understanding, rather than agree that we can never agree because we are loyal to radically different views of the world. Infuriating, in fact. The fury is the heart of the entire right wing exercise (as the enraged right-wing always says of the left, and Blacks– whew! so fucking angry!). The beauty of emotion-driven righteousness is — no thought or a working through of actual facts is ever required of you.

“You call me childish? I know you are, but what am I? Make me! Make me!”

So the rage is out there, and it’s very real, and potentially very destructive, as is despair. There are good reasons for anger and feelings of hopelessness, when, as a friend sang the other night “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” and added that Biden was just cleaning out the ashtrays and burying the bodies, that business would proceed largely as usual. I agreed that in terms of the Department of Justice’s actions so far, it certainly seems to be the case. You want real change? You have to stop shopping at the same store that keeps selling you the poison that’s killing your family. But it’s the only store in town, an aggravating, maddening problem.

Oh will you please shut the fuck up?

[1]

That Trump’s predictable cruelty and petty vindictiveness makes Dubya Bush (America’s second worst president — and arguably a war criminal) look like a decent guy always reminds me of the no-brainer hypothetical about who would you rather live under, Hitler or Mussolini? No contest, give me the bragging, strutting, blustering Italian fascist any day, if those are the only choices. The only people who pick Mr. Hitler over Mr. Mussolini are, literally, very fine Nazis — on both sides, on both sides!

Barr, we didn’t forget

As corrupt, partisan, untruthful culture warrior William Pelham Barr embarks on his rehabilitation tour, I heard a great capsule summary of Barr’s career as Trump’s penultimate Attorney General. It was delivered by this guy:

“This is the Attorney General who interfered with the deployment of the Mueller Report, he interfered with the whistleblower in the Ukraine case, he interfered in the Mike Flynn prosecutorial decisions, in the decisions around Roger Stone, he interfered with the events of Lafayette Square, he interfered with the firing of the SDNY top prosecutor. All of those things Bill Barr was happy to do. Bill Barr was also happy to go tell Wolf Blitzer that there were reasons to question the integrity of the mail ballot. He was happy to cross all those lines, so the suggestion that he wasn’t willing to cross one final line to kneecap and topple our democracy by undermining the election, look, give the guy credit for that, but I mean… it’s not much credit in terms of his career at the Department of Justice”

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The quote is from the video below, which is worth checking out. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner points out that from the moment Barr, head of the DOJ, told Trump that his department had fully investigated and Trump’s claim of voter fraud was “bullshit”, Trump had clear knowledge that he was lying about the election. This would establish the criminal intent, mens rea, behind his actions when he continued to falsely insist (as he does to this day) that there was massive bipartisan election fraud (Republicans like the disloyal, runt governor of Georgia and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger were in on it!!!) that stole his landslide victory from him and when he organized and provoked a crowd to storm the Capitol to stop a joint session of Congress from certifying his loss.

How does Trump reward over-the-top loyalty? By calling for his devoted poodle, Mike Pence, who finally refused to break the law in an ill-planned attempt to usher in a Trump dictatorship, to be hanged by the traitorous neck until dead. Trump had done no less to the loyal Jeff Sessions, he mocked him and gloated after supporting Tommy Tuberville’s successful ouster of Sessions in the Republican primary. What kind of schmuck listens to frigging “ethics” advice in business or government?

Sheesh.

American history that “should not” be taught

There is a great outcry now, among Republicans and right wing screaming heads on cable, over curricula that does not emphasize only the glorious, totally non-racist, non-sexist, never the least bit genocidal, history of our exceptional land. A hastily written term paper to this effect, making the case that America’s White Christian values are the essence of our remarkable nation’s values and the source of all justice and freedom, was posted by Trump’s 1776 Commission right before the former president left office, an office he never conceded losing. I laughed when I read that the day after he was sworn in, Biden immediately took that shit off the internet and disbanded the “Commission”.

Now we have fascistic governors like that scary clown in Florida basically mandating the teaching of similar ahistorical bullshit and giving teachers, students and universities loyalty tests as the basis for funding and pay. The rallying cry among these history “purists” is against Critical Race Theory.

Their angry critique is based on three things:

it is clearly critical, right there in the name, which, obviously, makes it bad.

It has Race in the name, which makes it racist, on its ugly face, right there in the name.

It is a theory, meaning that it makes an argument based on history, facts, law and logic and requires a strong, well-informed counter-argument to refute — or it needs to be cancelled in its entirety as racist and critical.

No matter that it is taught in graduate schools, and began as a legal theory in law schools (to explore elusive but prevalent areas of systemic injustice) and has nothing to do with what is taught in public elementary, middle and high schools is immaterial (as Barr later characterized the lies fellow Trump loyalist Mike “Q” Flynn pleaded guilty to telling the FBI), it is still CRITICAL, it is RACIST and, worst of all, it is a THEORY.

Readers of history will recognize a rhyme or two with moments of great division in our shared past. A generation after their beloved pappies, brothers and beaus heroically fought the tyranny of a government intent on destroying their way of life, by outlawing chattel slavery, the Daughters of the Confederacy embarked on a project to glorify what they rebranded as the Lost Cause.

We never fought for slavery, their story went (whatever our articles of succession may have said otherwise), we fought for honor and glory and the right of each state to decide for itself how it wanted to live. History books were written to reflect this story and curricula were introduced in schools to teach this quaint revision of history (during decades of racism at law all over the country which included countless lynchings and filibusters of anti-lynching laws). The monuments to the insurrectionists, slave masters, West Point trained murderers of surrendering Black troops began to be erected during this period, as these determined, history-conscious old women, many of whom had inherited slavery-based fortunes, were starting to die off.

By the time these influential women were all dead the story stuck firmly in the classrooms of the former Confederacy and beyond: the South had fought the glorious Lost Cause for States’ Rights and Freedom, no matter what lying n-words and their mindless radical supporters might say to the contrary. It was never remotely about race, you irrationally angry n-word loving whiners!

Yet in the LIBERAL press you can read a paragraph like this, from an op-ed last week:

The former Confederates had failed to build a slave empire, but they would not accept the demise of white man’s government. As the former Confederate general and subsequent six-term senator from Alabama John T. Morgan wrote in 1890, democratic sovereignty in America was conferred upon “qualified voters,” and Black men, whom he accused of “hatred and ill will toward their former owners,” did not qualify and were destroying democracy by their mere participation. Disenfranchising them, therefore, was not merely justified but an act of self-defense protecting democracy against “Negro domination.”

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Imagine the outrage of that to decent “white” people, that former slaves bore

“hatred and ill will toward their former owners”!

Can you imagine the temerity of those formerly owned democracy destroyers, those savage tyrants?

The writer of that op-ed called his piece The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump. Cruelty is often the point of the politics of division (and, yes, Tucker, back in 1890 the racist party was the Southern Democratic party, replaced by the post-Civil Rights Act GOP that turned the former Confederacy solid red on the electoral map). The current Republican party is cruel, in its logic and operation, and in how it deals with anyone it regards as an enemy.

Cruelty works, to inspire terror, rage and cringing loyalty. A reputation for cruelty is a powerful thing. When you are known for being deliberately cruel, you inspire fear as you make people angry (or dead, for that matter). Cruelty infuriates your opponents and critics, who then begin whining and attacking, proving that they are the problem not you. It is the childhood sadist’s tic, I keep poking you in the ribs, harder and harder, until you slap me, then I scream “MOM!!!” and you get a whuppin’.

Here’s historian Heather Cox Richardson, from last night’s installment of her long letter from an American, a curriculum Florida governor Roaring Ron DeSantis (or DeathSantis, as many Floridians call him for his stellar pandemic response) would have her fired for teaching in a publicly funded Florida school:

Trump’s Big Lie has a number of elements that echo the argument behind the organization of the Confederacy in 1861. Like the Confederates, the Big Lie inspired followers by calling for them not to destroy America, but to defend it. The insurrectionists of January 6, and those who continue to insist the election was stolen, do not think of themselves as domestic terrorists, but as patriots in the mold of Samuel Adams. 

“Today is 1776,” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) tweeted on January 6.

The Confederates, too, believed they were defending America. In February 1861, even before Republican President Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, lawmakers for the Confederate States of America wrote their own constitution. It was remarkably similar to the United States Constitution—copied from it verbatim, in fact—except for three key changes that they believed made the original constitution better: they defended state’s rights, denied that the government could promote internal improvements, and prohibited any law that denied or impaired “the right of property in negro slaves.” 

Confederate leaders convinced ordinary white men in the southern states that defending the expansion of human enslavement would be defending the nation against the “radicals” who valued the principles of equality outlined in the Declaration of independence. 

On the basis of that powerful patriotism, they took their states out of the Union shortly after Lincoln was elected president, hurrying to secede while tempers were hot.

But, once they declared an insurrection, they found it hard to keep up enthusiasm for it. Confederate leaders approved the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 in part because interest in creating a new nation was fading. The new nation that had seemed exciting and inspiring in the holiday gatherings after the election seemed a little silly in the spring, when attention turned to planting. Sparking a crisis made sure that southern whites did not abandon the Confederacy. And, once the war had begun, white southerners were committed. Wars are far easier to start than to stop.

Trump’s insurrection seems to be facing the same waning enthusiasm that Confederate leaders faced. Saturday night, at his first large rally since January 6, Trump spoke at Wellington, Ohio, about 35 miles west of Cleveland. While attendees responded to his complaints about the election, many left early. Today Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “there’s a growing recognition that this is a bit like [professional wrestling]. That it’s entertaining, but it’s not real. And I know people want to say, yeah, they believe in the ‘Big Lie’ in some cases, but I think people recognize that it’s a lot of show and bombast. But it’s going nowhere. The election is over. It was fair….let’s move on.”

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Today Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told CNN’s Jake Tapper:

“there’s a growing recognition that this is a bit like [professional wrestling]. That it’s entertaining, but it’s not real. And I know people want to say, yeah, they believe in the ‘Big Lie’ in some cases, but I think people recognize that it’s a lot of show and bombast. But it’s going nowhere. The election is over. It was fair….let’s move on.”

There was also the recent Atlantic article with new remarks from Trump’s former loyal gunsel, devout and unprincipled culture warrior Bill Barr. Barr is a gigantic piece of shit I will have to return to soon, unfortunately, because … he’s a gigantic piece of shit who enabled Trump to stay in office by lying about Mueller’s findings, helped his Unitary Executive continue to skirt laws and obstruct justice by employing every legal and public relations trick to spin things Trump’s way throughout his tenure as America’s most openly partisan and truth-challenged AG.

Even Barr bailed when it became clear Trump was determined to overturn the fair election by any means necessary. Even after Barr spent months stoking fears of a massively fraudulent mail-in election and announcing a series of criminal investigations into traitors like Robert Mueller and his zealots, and investigations of alleged voting corruption right up through and immediately after the election. Barr didn’t leave out of principle, he left because he knew his boss was in the process of willfully committing crimes, including incitement to insurrection, that Barr didn’t want to go to jail for.

The Bagpiper is piping a different tune about “obvious” massive mail-in voting fraud these days:

But, rather than looking like heroic patriots [the January 6 MAGA rioters currently on trial], they increasingly look like dupes. Barr’s effort to rewrite his actions is a good indication of which way he thinks the wind is blowing. When he left office shortly before the election, he wrote a glowing letter to his former boss promising to update him “on the Department’s review of voter fraud allegations in the 2020 election and how these allegations will continue to be pursued,” and promoting the rhetoric of those pushing the Big Lie: “At a time when the country is so deeply divided, it is incumbent on all levels of government, and all agencies acting within their purview, to do all we can to assure the integrity of elections and promote public confidence in their outcome.”   

Today’s article told a different story: “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

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Reason to feel slightly heartened

This is the man the organized right-wing and the entire Republican party is putting all of its money on going forward.

Selfish, incapable of loyalty, petty, cruel, vindictive, delusional, bigoted, America’s greatest sore loser?

Perhaps, but all of the smart, dark, right-wing money, at this second, is on the Orange Polyp and his loyalists, by a nose, in a midterm already being fueled by hate and threats of further violence, amid litigation challenging new voter suppression laws in the fourteen states (and counting) now actively making it harder for people in cities to vote [1].

If it was me donating the big bucks to keep the GOP firmly in the driver’s seat, I’d be looking to base the operation on a genius just a little bit more stable. Maybe someone who hadn’t had his “university” and his “charity” both shut down for fraud? Just spitballing here.

This photos doctored, I LOOK GREAT! Biden’s a walking cadaver.

[1]

Between January 1 and May 14, 2021, at least 14 states enacted 22 new laws that restrict access to the vote.  The United States is on track to far exceed its most recent period of significant voter suppression — 2011. By October of that year, 19 restrictive laws were enacted in 14 states. This year, the country has already reached that level, and it’s only May.

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The Educated Voter

We recently had a primary in New York City for mayor, several district attorneys (including the one that will almost certainly be prosecuting Trump, Inc.), public advocate, comptroller and a few other positions. In a moment when democracy is under ruthless attack, on the ropes, face swollen, one puffy eye closed, a mix of snot and blood dripping out of the nose, we New York voters had very little information on the individual candidates we were asked to choose between.

The few debates were not super enlightening, articles of substance about the candidates were hard to find. There was a flood of large format, glossy, paid advertising from the candidates, choking the old mailbox. Some of the material contained things that ruled out a given candidate, like the endorsement of a certain well-known Nazi-type, but the rest of the Democratic candidates all sounded like true champions of equality, justice and decency.

As always in the primaries, you take your best shot at voting for a candidate that seems to represent your views, knowing that almost certainly you will get some corporately selected piece of shit to hold your nose and vote for in the actual election, even in an anarchist jurisdiction like New York City. Politics, as we know, is a nasty business, driven by expensive advertising, largely attack ads stirring up fear and loathing and let the best brand marketing win!

The lack of information continues. The last update on the close, important Manhattan DA race was four days ago when 83.9% of the precincts reported the day after of the primary and the top two candidates were separated by less than four percent, the margin of error. One of the two has already said she will not recuse herself from any investigation involving her big campaign donors and wealthy close friends. What could go wrong?

A digression, one of the candidates in these primaries was my best friend from kindergarten, a guy I have only seen once since then, some time in first grade when our mothers arranged a surprise play date. My mother and I walked up the hill from the turnpike and there was a woman and a boy in the distance, near our house. When we recognized each other (he must have known what he was there for, he was standing in front of my house) we began to run toward each other, like in romantic, slow motion commercial from back in the day, hugged and started laughing. The guy was attending a yeshiva, I was still in our old school. His mother, who turns out to still be alive (at 95, I think) and a Cuban Jew, made the first meat sauce I’d ever tasted. Man, it was delicious over spaghetti. My mother began making it after that and to this day, when Sekhnet’s tomatoes are ripe, I make it with vegetarian “meat” [1]. Thanks to rank-choice voting I was able to vote for my old buddy, though he wasn’t my first choice, based on what I could make out of his positions.

I keep thinking, and writing, as though the facts of the case are really the central deal, that most voters actually care, spend the time to learn about the candidates and use the best information they can get to make an informed choice, select the best people for elected office.

If it was not clear before now, it is now perfectly clear — in the war of whipped up emotions vs. dry, fact-based intellect, passion wins over any form of logic. In politics, in advertising, in the world as we know it. As Mr. Hitler clearly, and approvingly, set out in his otherwise rabidly raving Mein Kampf, a lie works best when it is bold, infuriating and repeated over and over. When a Big Lie is exposed as a total fabrication designed to enrage people, call the fucking liars who exposed it the ACTUAL BIG LIARS, their lie about the lie is the BIG Lie — call for their execution!

We recently had a president who, weeks before the election, secretly paid off two women to dummy up about sex the NY Times characteristically notes they “allegedly” had with the guy. You always pay $130,000 for a non-disclosure agreement for someone who alleges to have had extra-marital sex with you, why wouldn’t you? It’s just standard caution, especially for a politician. Then, also right before the election, his fraudulent “university” was shut down, a tiny, pennies on the dollar, $25,000,000 settlement paid out to defrauded students in NY, with no admission of wrongdoing. (Also, once he was president, his fraudulent charity was shut down, for illegal expenditures of charitable contributions, but, you know, seriously, who among us hasn’t had a fraudulent charity shut down?).

We’ll give him a pass on whether there was anything fishy (or illegal) about 140 known contacts (collusion, sure, chargeable criminal conspiracy? insufficient evidence found) between his campaign and a hostile foreign government. This hostile foreign power openly favored him and released information intended to damage his already hated opponent at key strategic moments (“Grab ’em by the pussy” meet “Hillary’s fucking emails!!!”). We’ll pretend he was exonerated by Mueller for obstruction of justice as well, that his attempts to change the results of an election he lost were just what any real winner does when people say he lost, that it’s normal for a competitive white man to send a violent mob to disrupt the final certification of an election that infuriated him, an election he actually won “in a landslide”.

Ordinarily payments by an adulterer to silence paid sex partners, a finding that your “university” was a fraud, as well as your charity, would be enough to do a certain amount of damage to your candidacy. Yes, it was the perfect storm in 2016, the most hated (though exciting) man in American politics running an aggressive, sometimes ugly, campaign against the most hated (though competent) woman in American politics. A plague on both of their houses, and we are stuck with the bill.

And still I sit here, virtually every day, after reading, listening to a few podcasts, watching a few people I respect in the media, trying to coherently set out the details of what is going on around us, as if coherence is even still a thing in America.

Many people I know feel this practice of mine is a form of masochism, since there is so little you can do about any of it, why keep feeding on the toxic details? We know what the GOP has finally become, the radical, anti-democratic party of obstruction of government. We know the despicable, unprincipled players well, Mitch, McCarthy, Lyin’ Ted, Lindsey, et al, a pack of craven, cynical shitbirds stinking to the heavens. Does it surprise us on Wednesday when they confidently say the opposite of what they said Monday? When they make a solemn vow in 2016 that they break, without consequence or remorse, when the time comes to do the opposite? Are we sad, and sickened? Sure, about 60% of us are.

I like to think we are not doomed, not hostages to those whose enflamed passions will not allow them to look at the larger picture, ratchet down the rage and help us all attend to the massive problems we all face. I prefer to believe that most of us are inherently decent people, no matter how many millions might be easily misled. Most people don’t like liars, crooks, smug, provocative pussy grabbers. We need to keep our focus, and not look away, there is a lot of work ahead if we’re to save ourselves from the worst of us.

The earth is on fire, under water, rocked and ravaged at every turn. There is massive poverty, even in the richest nations on earth, particularly in ours. People still die because they can’t afford the medical treatments that routinely save and extend the lives of wealthy people. Citizens in some areas can’t drink their lead-infused drinking water without taking dire health risks. Our military veterans, “thank you for your service”, kill themselves at a rate of 600 a month. People die every day because police claim they are rightfully in fear of their lives, even when the person they are afraid of is handcuffed and lying face down on the pavement. Women, will you ever get the Equal Rights Amendment added to the fucking constitution?

Like I said, I like to think we are not doomed, pretend that my own doom is likely not a done deal. It is our privilege to be optimistic, to look at the worst and see the possibility of a better outcome, until all of our privileges, and our breath itself, are revoked. And if they are revoked tomorrow, let us live today with a full appreciation of this miraculous beauty and our great potential for goodness, in the face of the ugly as the worst sin you can imagine.

what?

[1]

To make it with meat, add chopped fake meat (or the real stuff, if you insist) to the skillet when you are caramelizing the onions, garlic and peppers/carrots. You want to sear it a bit (brown it, as my mother would say), before you add the tomatoes and start cooking it into sauce. This gives the sauce maximum deliciousness. The simple recipe is here.

Worth Remembering

“Given Mr. Trump’s reckless actions after losing the 2020 vote [1], and the violence they spurred, the newly released emails are unsurprising. But consider that fact for a moment:

It is unsurprising that the president of the United States leaned on the Justice Department to help him try to steal an election.

The country cannot forget that Mr. Trump betrayed his oath, that most Republican officeholders remain loyal to him nonetheless — and that it could be worse next time.”

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you people are all fucking losers, you deserve “president” Biden

[1]

Among these reckless actions:

repeating the baseless, infuriating lie that the election was rigged against him and riddled with bipartisan fraud, spending $50,000,000 in advertising to promote this lie, denouncing the numerous courts that found he’d produced no evidence of voter fraud or irregularity, firing the federal appointee who certified the election as fair and clean, attacking Republicans in various states he lost for not overturning election results, leaning on state voting commissions to overturn the election, making calls (18) to at least one Republican state Secretary of State asking him to give him a break and just “find” a total of one more vote than he lost by, calling for and promoting a Stop the Steal rally in front of the White House, with a march to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” on the day a joint session of Congress would ceremonially award the Electoral College votes to Biden, and officially make him winner of the presidential election, encouraging anger at the “cowardly” “traitor” Mike Pence who was refusing to be bold, break the “law” and declare Trump the winner, as his crowd stormed the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” with a gallows erected outside, Trump, watching the mob advance inside the Capitol on live TV, tweeted:

etcetera

When he was impeached for these dangerous, unconstitutional actions, he denounced the “partisan” impeachment as a desperate ploy by partisan, witch hunting fraudulent [cannibal pedophile] losers. etc.

Now there are a bunch of new voter suppression laws, in states Trump lost, to make sure what he demanded be done by Trump-loyal state legislators to reverse the election results last time can now all be legally done next time.

Where is the moderate, judicious Attorney General Merrick Garland on all of this? On the obstruction of justice case laid out by Robert Mueller? He hasn’t really taken a public position on the seriousness of this threat to democracy.

A word on the NY County DA race

Alvin Bragg and Tali Farhadian Weinstein are in the lead as the votes are being counted several hours after the polls closed. We learn, with a key new fact unreported by the New York Times:

Farhadian Weinstein recently made waves by donating $8.2 million to her own campaign, more than all the other candidates have raised, combined.

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more than all the other candidates have raised, combined.

Going back to the old bit about freedom of speech, you get as much of it as you can afford to pay for… campaign finance reform, anyone?

Paid for by Friends of Tali

We got a ton of large format campaign cards from Tali Farhadian Weinstein, one of the Democratic Primary candidates for Manhattan District Attorney. That is the office that will be hopefully prosecuting the former president and present danger, Mr. Trump in the coming months. It’s also the office that let Ivanka and Don Jr. skate a few years ago for some arguable fraud in connection with the Trump SoHo.

Tali has the bones of a compelling story, her family having fled tyranny and oppression in Iran. The Voter Guide gives us this capsule biography:

Tali Farhadian Weinstein (D)

Farhadian Weinstein, who came to New York from Iran as a child, is a professor of law and most recently served as general counsel for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Previously, she worked as a federal prosecutor.

Then I learned the reason she was able to send us so many glossy campaign ads (and show up daily in ads in the New York Times) is that she is married to a hedge fund guy and he and his friends have a shit ton of money. The NY Times:

Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has raised more money than any of her competitors, including $8.2 million she gave to her own campaign.

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Asked if she would recuse herself from any case involving one of her donors, she said she would not. Presumably there is no reason to, since she is scrupulously fair, having escaped oppression as a girl.

The standard for recusal, of course, is “the appearance of impropriety”, though it is often interpreted as a subjective standard with plenty of wiggle room — it is difficult to force anyone to recuse themselves. A big warning flag went up for me when she told the interviewer there was no reason for her not to oversee the prosecution of one of her big donors, if it came to that.

Then we learned the 45 year-old first registered as a Democrat in 2017.

Then we got this mysterious attack ad, aimed at knocking out the two men running for Manhattan DA, one of whom happens to be apparent co-front runner Alvin Bragg.

In politics, increasingly, people do whatever they need to do to win, to gain and retain power. Attack ads seem to work, particularly when they arrive close to election day. They scare people, make them angry, make them go to the polls to vote against the sick, sneaky bastard who was attacked.

The strategy is tried and true, but it was not clear that Tali Farhadian Weinstein had sent the card savaging the two men in the DA race. Sekhnet and I read the card several times before the eagle-eyed Sekhnet found what we suspected was likely the case (it is in fairly small print under the address, extreme right above): Paid for By New Yorkers for Tali.

The People rest. Get the fuck out of here, Tali.

Poetry is also this

This is from the end of an interview with a writer named Clint Smith about Juneteenth that Amy Goodman conducted on Democracy Now! on Friday. Juneteenth recently became a federal holiday, over the nay votes of fourteen GOP sticklers . Though, in fairness to them, it was fewer than the number (21) who opposed gold medals for the outnumbered officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 and FAR less than the number (all but six of them in the Senate) who opposed the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the MAGA riot. The new national holiday commemorates the day in June 1865, two months after the Confederacy surrendered — and two months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — that enslaved Blacks in Galveston, Texas learned that they’d been freed more than two years earlier.

AMY GOODMAN: Clint, before we end, you are an author, you’re a writer, you’re a teacher, and you are a poet. Can you share a poem with us?

CLINT SMITH: I’d be happy to. And so, when you’re a poet writing nonfiction, that very much animates the way that I approach the text. And so, this is part of the — this is an adaptation or an except from the end of one of my chapters, that originally began as a poem that I wrote when I was trying to think about some of these issues that I brought up.

[reading] Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform flung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who P.G.T. Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate battle flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city, these copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced by the soil.

After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. We called it the Lost Cause. And it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding; that told us that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved; that the Southern flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But, see, the thing about the Lost Cause is that it’s only lost if you’re not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it’s a word that also means “I’m ignoring what we did to you.”

I was taught the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860 the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights, but I was never taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way.

It’s easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don’t see the Black bodies buried behind it. It’s easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.

I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that’s still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains.

Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on Claiborne. Translation: Go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.

What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?

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Uncanny echoes of Nazism

It is an unsettling thing to watch a right-wing movement move to an extreme position and appropriate so many of the tactical tics of, say, the Nazis.

When the Nazis controlled the mass media in Germany it was easy enough for the party to get their unchallengeable message across to every citizen. They had a network of spies who informed on disloyal citizens, anyone privately critical of the one-party narrative. These traitors met with harsh, often gruesome fates. In many cases, they were turned in by their own true believer Nazi children, loyal members of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend).

An example of a debatable Nazi talking point, Jews had to be destroyed because they were responsible for the war. Hitler had invaded Poland, unprovoked, because of the Jews. The Jews, you see, were said to be a highly infectious disease that had to be eradicated. Every vice in the great German nation you could think of was a result of poisonous Jewish devilry. The only way to purify the blood of the Aryan Reich and make Germany great again was to exterminate this Judaic bacillus. The news was dispensed day after day in a way that made this controversial “theory” seem not only entirely reasonable but in urgent need of immediate action (or “aktion” in Nazi-speak).

If you get your news from FOX (Rupert Murdoch), or from even more extreme right-wing sources, One America News Network (OANN) or Newsmax, you get a version of reality very much at odds with the facts that can actually be established by things like court verdicts, bipartisan election certifications, real-time videos, written statements, spoken statements, sworn statements made under the penalty of perjury.

In the MAGA telling, the January 6 MAGA riot, for example, was not the result of a long, well-funded, long-planned campaign based on the lie that Trump won in a landslide and that communists, anarchists, anti-fascists (imagine how sick that is!) insane lying, violently rioting Blacks, angry radical Democrats and disloyal, lying Republicans had rigged the election against him, it was a spontaneous show of completely understandable patriotic fervor.

The 140 Capitol Police officers supposedly injured by this crowd of peaceful protesters? Never happened, radical left propaganda. OK, injured cops are speaking up, showing up in Congress to testify. Well, it may have happened, but it was not Trump fans but terrorists from antifa and BLM who did all the damage, viciously attacked the police, who all supported Trump 100% and kissed and hugged the actual peaceful Trump supporters, who behaved like normal tourists (who’d smoked crack or crystal meth a moment earlier). Actually, wait, it was an FBI false flag operation to make Trump, who actually won in a landslide, look like the inglorious loser he will never be!

A logical question I heard some pundit ask the other day: if the FBI staged this evil thing to make Trump look like a treasonous, seditious loser, wouldn’t you want a complete and thorough bipartisan investigation into the fucking FBI? Not the case with the lockstep GOP — they have learned from recent Trump/McConnell/Barr history. They want any finding about the January 6 “riot” to be dismissible as a complete and total “partisan witch hunt” and they know their solid 39% will believe that theory no matter what the radical partisan Democrat liars try to produce as “evidence”.

It is, of course, a mistake to look for logic in any of this. Just like the average disgruntled German who listened to Nazi media broadcasting every evening and came to believe as indisputable fact whatever was confidently repeated several times, the average American who gets only one political opinion, the same talking points echoed endlessly, will never even consider the likely notion that, if Trump indeed was lying about all the traitors who rigged the election against him, the dozens of lost lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of the rigged election, the expenditure of $50,000,000 to advertise the lie that he’d actually won, organizing a mass gathering to physically Stop the Steal and prevent the peaceful transition of power, and gave a fiery speech immediately before the riot that incited an already angry crowd to break through police barricades, fight the police and storm the Capitol, forcing legislators and their staffs to run for their lives, as the law abiding mob did $1,400,000 worth of damage to the building, maybe . . . Trump didn’t actually win in a landslide.

No matter. As we see from history, authoritarians rely on certain things, primarily blind obedience from their followers, who are inclined to believe whatever supports their view of a world run by vicious enemies who are mercilessly screwing them and need to be fought without mercy. Another common feature of authoritarian mobs is ready, justifiable, righteous violence against these rightfully hated enemies. This violence encourages obedience, or fearful silence, which also helps.

The one thing that every right-wing movement has in common is an unshakable belief in a strongman, an infallible leader with the will to destroy all of their despicable, dangerous enemies. In the case of Trumpism, that leader is Trump. As Trump’s German born grandfather [1] might have said:

The leader is always right.

The Führerprinzip (German: [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp] (listen); German for ‘leader principle’) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the Government of Nazi Germany. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer‘s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[1] In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political fascism.

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Amen to that, morons

[1]

Trump’s entrepreneurial grandfather, Friedrich Trump, trained as a barber, was deported from Germany for fleeing to avoid military service (and tax evasion when bringing in his American-made fortune). Interesting bit from Wikipedia:

During the Klondike Gold Rush, Trump travelled to the Yukon Territory and made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in the boomtown of Whitehorse.[1][2] Trump then returned to Bavaria and married Elisabeth Christ, the daughter of a former neighbor.

As he had emigrated to America in order to evade conscription, the Bavarian Government stripped Trump of his citizenship and permanently banished him following an investigation. As a result, Trump and his family returned to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1892.

Trump worked as a hotel manager and was beginning to acquire real estate in Queens when he died in the 1918 flu pandemic. He was the father of Frederick Christ Trump and John G. Trump, and the paternal grandfather of former 45th U.S. president Donald Trump.

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The poor man died during a pandemic from a lack of hydroxychloroquine . . . an eerie echo of history.

The sometimes shady details of how he made his fortune are fascinating to read (see the article above), and another eerie echo of history.