Category Archives: current events

Robin Givhan deserves another Pulitzer Prize for this one

from yesterday’s Washington Post

The witness would not be described as angry

By Robin Givhan

Senior critic-at-large March 30, 2021 at 7:14 p.m.

The witness Donald Williams was trained in mixed martial arts. He had experience working in security — and alongside police officers — and handling potentially unruly crowds. He also described himself as an entrepreneur and a father. But during his hours of testimony over two days in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who is charged in the death of George Floyd, there is one thing that Williams made clear he was not: an angry Black man.

That he could not afford to be. He was not allowed to be. He could cry for Floyd. He could despair for him. But he was not supposed to be angry, even if that was what Floyd’s death demanded.

Defense attorney Eric Nelson has made anger central to his argument for Chauvin’s acquittal. In his version of events, the anger of the growing crowd on the street that May afternoon distracted Chauvin from the man he had pinned under his knee. Floyd, who had been accused of circulating a counterfeit $20 bill, was in Chauvin’s custody, which meant that he was also in his care. But the crowd — that dangerous, unruly mob, according to Nelson — had distracted Chauvin so that he could not attend to Floyd’s well-being. He could only concern himself with his detainment.

To that end, according to several witnesses, including Williams, the White police officer adjusted his knee to apply more pressure, to ensure that Floyd’s Black body remained immobile — until his immobility turned into unconsciousness.

The defense’s narrative makes use of one of the culture’s most damaging and enduring stereotypes about Black men — and women, too. These people ooze anger, and Black anger is inherently menacing. It isn’t justified or understandable or controlled, even when it is all of those things. It most certainly is not righteous. And when it rises, it must be tamped down, defused and crushed.

Nelson, bespectacled and bearded, and with an affinity for florid neckwear, worked hard to have the jury see Williams as enraged — as a man who was yelling at Chauvin and threatening fellow officers. Nelson detailed the many expletives and insults that Williams directed at Chauvin. He portrayed Williams as a man who was advancing toward the police with his chest thrust forward and spoiling for a fight

“It’s fair to say you grew angrier and angrier?” Nelson asked.

“I grew professional and professional. I stayed in my body,” Williams replied. “You can’t paint me out to be angry.”

Williams said he was speaking loudly so that he could be heard, so that he wouldn’t be ignored. He was imploring Chauvin to relent. He was calling Chauvin a bum and lacing his speech with expletives because the situation was too dire for polite conversation. Derek Chauvin’s defense team said on March 30 that Donald Williams, a witness, grew so angry at police that he wanted to fight them.

What Williams saw was, on its face, enraging. He had happened upon the sight of Floyd facedown on the ground with Chauvin on top of him for more than nine minutes. He heard Floyd cry for help and cry out for air. A young bystander saw him turn “purple” and described him as looking “really limp.” Kids saw this horror. Children. The gathered crowd all watched as their pleas to render aid to Floyd went ignored.

Anger is surely the natural human reaction, along with alarm and concern, but Nelson has characterized that as a wholly unnatural response to Floyd’s dire circumstances, as if he was not worthy of any of those emotions. Should the crowd simply have stood silent?

History would probably have excused their anger. So many other people of color — unarmed and stopped for minor offenses or for nothing at all — have died during encounters with police officers. They have been deprived of air, riddled with bullets; they’ve been killed without consequences because their death was deemed reasonable. When does fury become moral and decent if not in the face of all that?

Williams seemed to understand the perilousness of leading with anger. He refused to let it be his abiding message on Tuesday afternoon in a Minneapolis courtroom as Nelson tested him. No, his words weren’t getting angrier that awful day in May, he said, “they grew more and more pleading — for life.”

Williams was so alarmed by what was unfolding before him that he even called 911. He called the police on the police because he had not given up on law enforcement. He still had faith that they had the capacity to protect and to serve. He trusted in their outrage even if society demands that he deny his own.

The phrase resonated. “I stayed in my body.” Williams remained in control. He maintained focus. He was attuned to his movements and gestures. He didn’t let emotions take hold. He didn’t relinquish his soul.

As he spoke from the witness stand, Williams’s deep voice rumbled from a body that was both solid and still. On his second day of testimony, he wore an open-collared dress shirt in a sea-foam green. His hair was cut close. He didn’t fidget or appear nervous. He didn’t look imposing, but he often looked perplexed.

When Nelson questioned his emotions, pressed him about the expletives he’d used and took a sharp tone, Williams cocked his head sideways and furrowed his brow. Then a slight smile flashed across his face.

Williams did not display a hint of fury. Outrage can be a burden, but it can also be a source of power. If Williams had any anger, he was keeping it in reserve.

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Headshot of Robin Givhan

Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press.Follow

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Does an unintentional lie hurt?

There’s a rhetorical question for you. If a guy lies to you, truly believing he is not lying, is that really a lie? Here’s another way of thinking of it: does an unintentional hard knee to the privates hurt?

The law, a problematic beast at best, has an intent requirement for many crimes. If you don’t have the required malicious intent to cause harm, you are not, under these laws, held responsible for committing a crime or even a tort. Malice has a strict legal definition, which comes in several varieties, express malice, malice aforethought, implied malice, etc. most of which boil down to the deliberate, intentional infliction of illegal or tortious harm. An act done knowingly (or in some cases just recklessly) to harm another, without just cause or excuse, constitutes legal malice.

When I complained of malice in the hard-heartedness of a lawyer friend’s increasingly aggravating responses to my aggravation, he told me that it plainly was not the case — he neither felt nor expressed malice, merely his opinion of the facts on the table as he understood them. Therefore, by the legal definition of malice, the definition he assumed I was referring to, with its requirement of no just cause or excuse, it was impossible that he had acted with malice, since he had, alternatively, no intent to cause me harm, nor (he added, sub silentio), lack of just cause or excuse if he had, unintentionally, caused such harm.

This is what comes of arguing with a lawyer, trained to parry and thrust whenever presented with even a straightforward assertion — to be “malice” it all hinges on the strict definition of intent or lack of just cause or excuse, doesn’t it?

I had to resort to other words to describe his unsympathetic stance: ill will, spite, hostility, for as the law notes:

malice in law
:implied malice in this entry
2: feelings of ill will, spite, or revenge 

NOTE: Such feelings are usually not an important component of malice in legal consideration unless punitive damages or actual malice is an issue.

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In the ordinary use of the word malice, among non-lawyers, it is interchangeable with “ill will”, its synonyms are spite, malevolence, animosity, hostility, bitterness, rancor, enmity.

“Yes,” says the lawyer calmly, “but don’t all of these things require an intention to cause harm? If I am accidentally bitter, or arguably hostile, or seemingly spiteful, in your subjective estimation, how can you fault me for that? Accident negates will– there can be no ‘ill will’ without an intentional act of will, as you will have to admit, if you’re being honest. Since any harm I may have caused was purely unintentional and inadvertent, what are you complaining about?”

Might as well argue with a tumor.

This “intent” business is where the law gets sticky. An ordinary person assumes that a powerful man who lies over and over about a stolen election, spends $50,000,000 for media advertising of that deliberate lie, organizes a Stop the Steal rally (at a cost of $4,500,000) on the day the election results are being certified, shows an inflammatory two minute video about widespread voter fraud committed by riotous haters of American freedom, before speaking at length about the many detailed lies he’s already told, (the 205,000 corpses voting in Fulton County, to take just one), who repeatedly tells his crowd that they are the victims of a stolen election and that they have one last chance to fight like hell to stop it — I mean, once you’ve done all that, and a violent riot erupts, the most passionate of your crowd storming and ransacking the Capitol to Stop the Steal — it would seem to the ordinary person that you have set out everything needed to prove this fellow is responsible for the insurrection.

The law, however, often imposes a higher bar than common sense about what seems to be clear cause and effect. It often requires proving the subjective intent of the alleged perpetrator, a deliberate course of conduct, knowing that he was lying, and lying to deliberately bring about the foreseeable result his actions caused. Without this kind of legal rigor … well, you just have mob rule (says the law).

Similarly, when the same guy called the Secretary of State of Georgia and tried to convince him and his lawyer to throw out almost 12,000 ballots with arguments like “fellas, I’m talking about 11,780 votes here, give me a break…” to establish that he violated Georgia law about soliciting interference in an election we must prove that he intended to solicit that illegal interference. What if he did it by accident, truly believing that the 11,780 votes he wanted thrown out had really been cast fraudulently?

I went to law school, passed the bar exams of two states, practiced law for years, and I still have a hard time getting my brain around this shit. In the case of the Georgia law, it’s as if Trump ran his finger down the text of the law while he was trying to convince the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out results that had been recounted and certified three times, and made sure to violate every provision of the law. He went down the list: solicit, cajole, threaten, promise, influence, check! making sure to explicitly violate each provision and every iteration of the crime.

It may be, after the grand jury is done hearing the evidence, that he will be indicted, tried and convicted under this law, which has a mandatory two year prison sentence. I would not be unhappy to see this result, though millions might be, literally, up in arms about their leader being unfairly witch hunted this way.

The same goes for repeated lies about the totally non-threatening love fest at the Capitol on January 6. Cops beaten by the mob? That cop who lost an eye? The one killed? The many videos of anti-police violence? All irrelevant and very misleading, the protesters were peacefully expressing their first amendment rights (unfortunately deprived of their second amendment ones) and the far less than 200 seriously injured that day were injured by over-enthusiastic hugging and kissing. Hugging and kissing, you merciless motherfuckers! Now, prove I KNEW I was lying, asshole! [1].

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, as every school child learns. Just because you don’t know it’s illegal to do X doesn’t mean you won’t be held responsible for violating the law. Unless, of course, you retain diligent, skillful counsel who can create a reasonable doubt about whether you had the required mental state to have committed the crime. Slander, libel, defamation? No worries, if we can show you honestly believed the lies you were telling were true (no malice!).

Does this make sense to you, kid?

As I tap at the keyboard they’ve wrapped up the second day of the trial of Derrick Chauvin, the former police officer who, for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, kneeled on the neck and back of the handcuffed George Floyd, who pleaded for his life until he lost consciousness, while Chauvin continued to keep his knee on Floyd’s neck, long after he was motionless and silent.

The defense is making arguments, as defense attorneys are paid to do, which hinge on this violent constriction of Floyd’s blood and air flow not being what actually killed Floyd. The defense claims he died of a heart attack, caused by adrenaline and the illegal drugs he had in his system at the time of his death. Nothing to do with being pressed to the ground by a large man with his knees on his neck and back until he stopped breathing. Nothing whatsoever. Chauvin was afraid, because a large, hostile crowd was intimidating him. And so on.

It could work. It doesn’t take much to convince one or two in the jury of a plausible sounding excuse, based on actual selected facts. Hmmm. Coroner found fentanyl in his system, he’d been resisting arrest for a misdemeanor (allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty) so there’s the adrenaline, had a bad heart, big as he was, he couldn’t take somebody kneeling on him for eight or nine minutes — he freaked out and died of heart failure. Nobody’s fault, the tragedy, except perhaps the dead guy, who put everybody through all this pain…

Notice, no lying whatsoever required, just reframing. It wasn’t the continued knee on his neck that killed him, with the weight of a grown man behind it — it was a bunch of other things. Not murder, just a fucking tragedy. Not manslaughter, just a cop doing his difficult job under terrible circumstances, with a bunch of unfriendly natives angrily hassling him and mercilessly making videos of him in the course of his official duties. Chauvin didn’t kill George Floyd, George Floyd’s bad choices killed George Floyd.

Sometimes a lie is neither intentional nor unintentional, sometimes shit just happens when people are doing their jobs and we have to make sense of it the best we can. Or maybe we are lying to ourselves that we are not lying. Who’s to say?

Who’s to say?

[1]

What’s the harm of a lie?

It depends on the lie, of course. Some lies cover up terrible crimes, cause massacres, justify endless wars — others just make us uncomfortable. At the same time, every lie attacks our sense of fairness and undermines our faith in ever being able to get to the truth of anything. A lie is almost always a motivating factor for outraged violence, like lynchings. That some lies are relatively harmless does nothing to diminish the harm that lying does.

I had a friend who used to lie — almost always about small things. His particular tic of untruthfulness never bothered me very much. It was hard to tell, much of the time, why he’d told a particular lie. I always chalked it up to the very nervous fellow’s neurosis. I knew his mother, she was the same way. Could look you in the eye, and with the greatest apparent sincerity, assure you of something that was manifestly not true. These little lies can take their toll in a relationship, certainly, but, truly, I never held it against either of them.

Then there are bigger lies, about fundamental things. These are the clearly dangerous ones. By changing the truth, and distorting what actually happened, they serve to deny the validity of your rightful reaction, block the way to solving the actual problem and allow the liar to prevail. Big Lies justify all sorts of things. With a big enough lie, you can have a mob go into a neighborhood and feel totally righteous raining holy hell down on random passersby.

Lying is often motivated by an attempt to protect oneself from shame or accountability. I know a man who has lied since I met him, about almost everything. His father told my father “don’t believe a word he says, Irv, he’s a liar.” He lost his job, took his dead father’s credit cards, maxed them out, had the bills sent to a PO box he rented. Came home every week with a fat cash advance and pretended it was his pay from work. What could go wrong? Everything was fine for months, until his wife found a large unpaid credit card bill, sent to his secret PO box, in his pants pocket while she was doing the laundry. Eventually the credit card companies came looking for their money. If you ask the guy about this, he will have a story, if he doesn’t immediately go on the attack.

What is the harm of a lie? You know the answer to that from your own life, from the times a lie really mattered. The real harm comes when the lie is indignantly insisted on, over and over. Liars have a tendency never to back down and the rest of us tend to believe most things we hear over and over, or at least to develop doubts about what actually happened, based on an insistent lie. Undeviating repetition is crucial for convincing people of the lie, undermining our certainty about truth and falsity, or at least wearing us out and making us drop the whole subject in disgust.

An obvious recent example of what many are calling The Big Lie is about the 2020 election. It is the first time in American history that a president who lost an election, an election certified as fair by election officials of both parties, refused to accept the results — even after his successor was sworn in. He lied, over and over, continues to lie every time he speaks publicly, about massive fraud his lawyers could produce no evidence of in court.

He told his followers that they had been robbed, that he had massive, incontrovertible proof of widespread fraud, that the election was stolen, that the courts are corrupt enemies of the people who were in on the Steal. He called state election officials and tried to get them to change vote tallies, he told the Georgia Secretary of State exactly how many votes against him, 11, 780, he needed thrown out. He whipped up the anger of his most violence-prone followers, so much so that they rioted and Twitter eventually stopped its weak attempts to use disclaimers to hold him accountable for lying, banning him outright from the platform he’d used to such great effect.

When his incensed followers rampaged at the Capitol, injuring more than 100 police officers, killing at least one, trampling one of their own to death, and stormed the building to stop the lawful final certification of the votes, pausing to spread feces on busts of Democrats, it… uh, nobody was threatened that day, nobody chanted for the lynching of Mike Pence, or taunted next in line Nancy Pelosi, nobody released tear gas in the building, nobody tried to crush police in doors, or beat them with their own shields. It was a totally non-threatening riot, completely peaceful, the protesters were literally hugging and kissing the police — and nobody was arrested that day, which kind of proves that nobody was threatened or harmed in any way.

None of the Republicans who were locked down during the riot felt threatened — as the few who will talk about that day continue to insist. The Democrats, according to the GOP and its backers, are trying to blow the whole thing out of proportion for political advantage — lying liars using the liberal media to spread hateful propaganda, which is what these freedom-hating communists always do.

The old maxim that all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing now comes into play. Even the handful of Republicans who voted to impeach and convict the former president for provoking the insurrectionist mayhem at the Capitol are quiet about it now, taking their political fortunes into account as they maintain a discreet silence. The corporations who loudly pulled campaign funding after Trump’s riot have now quietly resumed funding these candidates. The most ferocious advocates of the Stolen Election myth are raking in huge donations behind their fierce refusal to back down.

Last week Georgia became the first of 43 states (the hell are you waiting for, former Confederacy?) to pass laws that would allow the GOP to bypass the safeguards that protected the integrity of the last election and disqualify any votes they believed to have been cast by fraud. These “suspect” ballots are, of course, the ones cast in cities, in areas where many “non-whites” stand on line for many hours to cast votes that are cast with no wait in rural and suburban, heavily GOP areas. What is the basis for this new law? Repeated false allegations of massive voter fraud, elections that need their integrity protected, because millions of Trump supporters honestly believe fucking “n-words” illegally stole the will of the real people of Georgia by 11, 780 fake votes last time. This new law will allow a gerrymandered state legislature to have the final say on whose votes count and whose get tossed as “suspicious”.

Heather Cox Richardson, historian, is often described as apolitical. She gives the facts, lays out some of the echoes of history. She often sets the details of true events against modern day claims. Sometimes, simply juxtaposing two things is a political act. Of Trump’s Big Lie about massive fraud that never happened, the lie the Heritage Foundation has cited as valid grounds for the model legislation it produced, that 43 states are considering enacting into law, Cox Richardson compares it to the lies that were at the heart of the Ku Klux Klan, the “Redeemers” and the “segregationists”. A political act, by Heather, setting a true account of treachery against a lying story to justify similar chicanery, but there is nothing inaccurate about it. You can read the whole discussion here.

Is a lie not a lie because the liar honestly believes it’s true? We’ll take a look at that sticky business down the road.

(to be continued)

White Pride

Easy to vote and hard to cheat, secure, fair and accessible, you say. No significant cheating was found, by officials in both parties, in the secure, fair and historically accessible 2020 Georgia elections, but, what the hey. Georgia will fix it, next time millions of unqualified voters sneak their way to the ballot box to subvert the will of the leader– and they won’t leave it up to a “principled” Secretary of State, either.

Kemp, well-known midnight purger of Georgia voting rolls (when he was Secretary of State running for governor), was so proud that he signed this important voter suppression law in his office, behind closed doors, under a painting of a famous slave plantation. Georgia state representative Park Cannon, who knocked on the governor’s door during the secretive signing ceremony, was handcuffed and hustled out of the building by silent Georgia State Troopers. She was later charged with two felonies, court challenges to follow. Oh, yeah, naturally Rep. Park Cannon is a Black woman.

Before the fat compulsive liar was banned from Twitter, Mr. Trump tweeted things like this, daily:

The 65 days that led to chaos at the Capitol - BBC News

After forcefully inciting the Stop the Steal riot, and personally leading his army of passionate, credulous totally non-racist peaceful supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6, Trump tweeted this, one of his last:

Donald Trump's Twitter, Facebook video censored during Capitol Hill riots - Texas News Today

Here is what Mr. Trump said about Brian Kemp during his long rant to his supporters, while exhorting them to go to the Capitol to find the traitorous Mike Pence and Stop the Steal on January 6th. I’ve left the good natured rambling diatribe that follows, as a reminder of the essential incoherence of the compulsively lying malignant narcissist (got to love his winking defense of innocent, righteously outraged conspiracy victim Boof Kavanaugh):

And I had Brian Kemp who weighs 130 pounds. He said he played offensive line in football. I’m trying to figure that out. I’m still trying to figure that out. He said that the other night. “I was an offensive lineman.” I’m saying, “Really? That must have been a very small team.”

(LAUGHTER)

But I look at that and I look at what’s happened and he turned out to be a disaster. This stuff happens. You know, look, I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They love to rule against me. I picked three people. I fought like hell for them. One in particular I fought.

They all said, “Sir, cut him loose, he’s killing the senators.” You know, very loyal senators. They’re very loyal people.

“Sir, cut him loose. He is killing us, sir. Cut him loose, sir.” I will never — I must have gotten half of these senators. I said no, I can’t do that. It’s unfair to him, and it’s unfair to the family. He didn’t do anything wrong. They made up stories. They were all made-up stories. He didn’t do anything wrong. Cut him loose, sir. I said no, I won’t do that. We got him through, and you know what, they couldn’t give a damn. They couldn’t give a damn. Let him rule the right way, but it almost seems that they are all going out of their way to hurt all of us and to hurt our country, to hurt our country.

You know I read a story in one of the newspapers recently how I control the three Supreme Court justices. I control them. They are puppets. I read it about Bill Barr that he is my personal attorney, that he will do anything for me, and I said you know it really is genius because what they do is that and it makes it really impossible for them to ever give you a victory because all of the sudden Bill Barr changed, if you hadn’t noticed. I like Bill Barr, but he changed because he didn’t want to be considered my personal attorney.

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Kemp has now redeemed himself in the eyes of his former backer, one would think. Redeemed in the sense of the “Redeemers” who restored white rule to the former confederacy after a political compromise (ending the stalemate in the 1876 election) removed federal troops who were enforcing things like the Ku Klux Klan Act in the states that seceded to defend White Supremacy. If the law Kemp signed the other day had been in effect for the 2020 election, Trump wouldn’t have had to make phone calls to Georgia state officials asking for the election results to be thrown out, the GOP state legislature could have easily, and legally, fixed things for him.

As she so often does, historian Heather Cox Richardson captures the essential nature of this struggle, between a small group of powerful white men meeting in secret and the rest of us, whose voices are limited to the ballot:

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed his state’s new voter suppression law last night in a carefully staged photo op. As journalist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, Kemp sat at a polished table, with six white men around him, under a painting of the Callaway Plantation on which more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. As the men bore witness to the signing, Representative Park Cannon, a Black female lawmaker, was arrested and dragged away from the governor’s office.

It was a scene that conjured up a lot of history.

Voting was on the table in March 1858, too. Then, the U.S. Senate fought over how the new territory of Kansas would be admitted to the Union. The majority of voters in the territory wanted it to be free, but a minority of proslavery Democrats had taken control of the territory’s government and written a constitution that would make human enslavement the fundamental law in the state. The fight over whether this minority, or the majority that wanted the territory free, would control Kansas burned back east, to Congress.

In the Senate, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, who rejected “as ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born equal,” rose to speak on the subject. He defended the rule of the proslavery minority in Kansas, and told anti-slavery northerners how the world really worked. Hammond laid out a new vision for the United States of America.

He explained to his Senate colleagues just how wealthy the South’s system of human enslavement had made the region, then explained that the “harmonious… and prosperous” system worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a larger class with “a low order of intellect and but little skill.” Hammond explained that in the South, those workers were Black slaves, but the North had such a class, too: they were “your whole hireling class of manual laborers.”

These distinctions had crucial political importance, he explained, “Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Hammond believed the South’s system must spread to Kansas and the West regardless of what settlers there wanted because it was the only acceptable way to organize society. Two years later, Hammond would be one of those working to establish the Confederate States of America, “founded,” in the words of their vice president, Alexander Stephens, upon the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth… that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

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Meantime, several propagators of the Big Lie about a stolen election engineered by dead Socialists and Dominion voting machines, (the mother of an equally Big Lie about the harmless intentions of the unarmed peaceful patriots who attacked Capitol Police with Bear Spray, other chemical irritants, tasers, flagpoles, barricades, their own shields, etc. [1]) are being dragged into civil court for defamation. Their defense, the noted FOX defense (used to get entertainer Tucker Carlson off the hook for some of his more incendiary lies) is that it should be obvious to anyone that these were wildly exaggerated statements intended solely to whip up angry, low-information people and that only a moron could believe were actually true, no matter how specific or otherwise plausible they may have sounded.

Like the constantly trumpeted claims of widespread voter fraud that were not backed by any evidence whatsoever in any one of almost four hundred Trump/RNC lawsuits brought before and after the election. As no less an authority than Lyin’ Ted Cruz insisted, in the days before and after the January 6th Stop the Steal Riot, loud and angrily repeated widespread allegations of voter fraud are good enough to support anti-fraud measures [2].

Now, about that filibuster, Mr. Manchin…

[1]

Trump went on FOX the other night to insist again that his riot, in which one police officer was killed by peaceful protesters and 140 more injured by those same law and order patriots, was a love-fest featuring hugging and kissing between his people and the police. What is it with the homoerotic suggestions of this giant orange homophobe? He and the North Korean dictator “fell in love”. Sure did.

[2]

This very specific sounding, but false, fabricated claim of fraud, an outright lie unsupported by any evidence, made by Trump while urging his supporters to go to the Capitol and Stop the Steal, stands in for the rest:

There were over 205,000 more ballots counted in Pennsylvania. Now think of this, you had 205,000 more ballots than you had voters. That means you had to — where did they come from? Do you know where they came from? Somebody’s imagination, whatever they need it. So in Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters, and it’s — the number is actually much greater than that now. That was as of a week ago, and this is a mathematical impossibility unless you want to say it’s a total fraud. So if Pennsylvania was defrauded.

Over 8,000 ballots in Pennsylvania were cast by people whose names and dates of birth match individuals who died in 2020 and prior to the election. Think of that. Dead people, lots of dead people, thousands, and some dead people actually requested an application. That bothers me even more. Not only are they voting, they want an application to vote; one of them was 29 years ago died. It’s incredible.

Incredible, yes, that’s the exact word, sir — too extraordinary and improbable to be believed. In your defense, sir, only a raging imbecile would take you at your word.

How many times do we have to fight the same fight for basic equality here in the USA?

Have we not fought, and won, all these fucking battles for democracy before? Apparently not. What we politely call “segregationists” succeeded, for a solid century, in nullifying the results of the Civil War, effectively voiding all rights conferred by the Thirteenth (no involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime…) Fourteenth (full rights of federal citizenship for anyone born here) and Fifteenth amendments (right to vote may not be denied on account of race or previous condition of servitude) [1]. Almost 100 years later Congress had to pass new laws to enforce civil rights and voting rights, both laws vigorously opposed — and energetically filibustered — by segregationists (racists, let’s call a fucking spade a spade). They’ve been at it continually since the Supreme Court struck down segregation in public schools in 1954, seeking to end “judicial activism,” “get government off our backs” starve it of tax revenue (particularly from the super-wealthy) and “drown it in the bath tub”. They are at it full-throttle right now, in the wake of their champion Donald Trump’s electoral defeat in spite of getting 75,000,000 votes.

You’ve heard about the 43 states, including every state Trump narrowly lost, voting on 253 new voter suppression laws to address non-existent “voter fraud” committed exclusively by Democrats. Had these laws been in place for the 2020 election, we’d now be a white supremacist autocracy under the triumphant Donald Trump and family. The final arbiters of the legality of these new voter suppression laws will be Trump’s 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court, a group that has rarely met a voter suppression measure they’ve considered unconstitutional.

The first of these open voter suppression bills was signed into law yesterday by Georgia governor Brian Kemp, a man mocked as a runt and a coward in the incendiary harangue Trump delivered on January 6th, including a long-winded, maniacally detailed recitation of debunked lies supporting his false claim of massive voting fraud, before he bravely marched with his millions of freedom-loving supporters to peacefully, patriotically storm the Capitol to Stop the Steal.

There was an ugly arrest yesterday, of a Georgia state representative, sickeningly reminiscent of 1950 — several beefy white Georgia State Troopers silently hustling a handcuffed black woman away, ignoring questions about why she was being arrested. The only difference between the 2021 arrest and one in 1950 is the absence of a beat-down and the repeated use of the unexpurgated “n-word” during the subduing and arrest of this dangerous little elected official. Her criminal act was knocking on the door of the governor’s office while he was in a private signing ceremony with six other white guys, making the new voter suppression bill binding Georgia law.

The only way to defeat these kinds of clear race-based voter suppression laws (the Georgia law severely limits the use of drop box, bans most absentee voting, — it had originally intended to ban Sunday voting — and criminalizes bringing water to anyone on a long line to vote Democrat — ya’ll know where those long voting lines are…) is by a federal law that would preempt these measures. HR-1 became S-1, The For the People Act, the other day, and when the Senators get back from yet another two week break, the GOP filibuster of this voting rights act will begin.

A party who perceives its only path to power as through partisan gerrymandering, dark money funding and voter suppression, and has 50 votes in the senate (and a 6-3 Federalist Society minoritarian majority on the unappealable Supreme Court to review challenges to state voting laws), will have no problem raising 41 Senators, even if forced to, to stand and take turns reading Dr. Seuss books, mischievously sharing the most racist images in the books his executors are no long publishing (as I would if I were them, wouldn’t you?), to block debate on this crucial law.

Democrats are currently agonizing about how to placate the most reactionary of their one-vote majority caucus so they can push back against the filibuster, the obstructionist parliamentary maneuver Barack Obama not unfairly called a Jim Crow relic. With the filibuster in place, democracy, as the sainted Framers of the Constitution conceived it, is as dead as the Fourteenth Amendment was (except for corporate “persons”) for almost a century of racist terrorism with no remedy at law. (Thankfully the State no longer kills unarmed blacks with impunity…)

Seriously, how many times do we have to fight, and win, the same basic rights of citizenship in a democracy?

We know how before Mitch McConnell became the master radical obstructionist he is today, the filibuster was used to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The (Roberts Supreme Court gutted) Voting Rights Act of 1965. Before that the filibuster was a favorite tool of supporters of slavery like John C. Calhoun and by opponents of oppressive federal anti-lynching laws (what kind of country do we have if you can’t even lynch a goddamned troublemaker in your own county?). You can draw the through line yourself, and picture Lyin’ Ted Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham to block the funding of Obamacare a few years back [2] before even talking was abolished for the debate-blocking filibuster (the mere threat of filibuster, backed by 41 votes, is all it takes today to block any debate).

Because effective democracy is based on open, fact-based debate, and then a vote and majority rule, (and because these proposed GOP voter suppression laws are clearly aimed at one segment of the electorate) we hear things like this:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) argued Tuesday that the Senate filibuster “has no racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.”

[The Washington Post quickly debunked that made for FOX news talking point]

That’s false. Historians know the filibuster is closely intertwined with the nation’s racial past and present. To be sure, senators have filibustered issues other than civil rights over the Senate’s history. But it is impossible to write that history without recognizing the centrality of race.

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So says the author of a fine article on the filibuster, writing in the Washington Post.

No racial history at all. None. There’s no dispute among historians about that.

Oh, yeah, from that same article, we’re reminded that McConnell’s Senate colleague from Kentucky, another peach of a southern gentleman, filibustered the latest attempt to pass a federal anti-lynching law.

Attitudes on race continue to color contemporary Senate filibusters. Just last year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) temporarily halted passage of a measure that would make lynching a federal hate crime.

It is clear enough what we are up against. I’m sometimes chided for comparing this group of any-means-necessary extremists, who march in lockstep, support any useful lie and vote in a disciplined block, to the devoted followers of Hitler in the German Reichstag. Trump is no Hitler, though arguably as racist and stupid as the author of one of few books Trump has ever read. It wasn’t for lack of trying to be a dictator, though, Trump just didn’t have enough time to do much as far as the really historically memorable stuff. Remember, it took Hitler almost a decade to start the actual mass killing program he is so rightfully famous for. All Trump got to do was ban Muslims, appoint three ideologically pure rightwing extremists to the Supreme Court, gut fedral agencies, pull children from their mothers’ arms and put them in cages, repeatedly and openly lie, advance cruelty as national policy, defend white killers of blacks while ordering the extrajudicial execution of a Seattle man accused of killing a white supremacist (both were white), use military force against peaceful protesters, attempt to overturn an election by force and a few other things like that.

To be fair and historically accurate, though both Trump and Hitler can be fairly characterized as angry, irrational, lying sociopaths, it is beyond dispute that Trump is no Hitler. He didn’t have enough time to dismantle every norm and safeguard, and American democracy held, if just barely. With these new voter suppression laws, which would allow the overturning of unfavorable vote results by partisan loyalists as Trump urged the Georgia Secretary of State to do, and will be interpreted by doctrinaire Federalist Society judges rammed through by McConnell and co., he may get his chance, if he can stay out of prison.

End the filibuster or bust. How hard can it be to get resolute “centrists” Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on board?

Oh, yeah, I forget– push them too hard, they’ll vote to abolish the filibuster and then change parties to become Republicans, handing the highly principled Mitch McConnell majority leadership and officially ending the legislative process as we know it. LOL!!

[1]

In the late 1870s, the Southern Republican Party vanished with the end of Reconstruction, and Southern state governments effectively nullified both the 14th Amendment (passed in 1868, it guaranteed citizenship and all its privileges to African Americans) and the 15th amendment, stripping blacks in the South of the right to vote.

In the ensuing decades, various discriminatory practices including poll taxes and literacy tests—along with Jim Crow laws, intimidation and outright violence—were used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote.

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[2]

Republican Senator Ted Cruz finally took his seat in the U.S. Senate at noon today after finishing a marathon speech about President Barack Obama’s health-care law that lasted more than 21 hours and involved a reading of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham.

The Texas legislator began his overnight talk-a-thon Tuesday afternoon and by 7 a.m. ET Wednesday, he confessed he was “a little bit tired.” But he also said he was inspired and encouraged by the Americans who support his determined push to scrap Obamacare, as the health-care law is known.

“I intend to speak in support of de-funding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand,” Cruz, sporting running shoes with his suit, had said when he began speaking. “All across this country Americans are suffering because of Obamacare. Obamacare isn’t working.”

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PTSD

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not a recognized psychological disorder when the special forces veteran escaped from prison, carjacked a couple’s car, beat the man unconscious and repeatedly raped the woman. I was working for a criminal court judge at the time, the summer of my first year of law school, when several armed guards brought the shackled, manacled prisoner in to argue his case — PTSD made him do it and he should be released from prison on those grounds.

The prisoner was an imposing man, large, muscular and with a savage looking beard. I recall that one of his three or four armed guards walked ten paces behind him with a shotgun. There were also a few NYC policemen in the courtroom, and the armed court guard had his hand near his gun as the prisoner took his place at the defense table. I was glad the guy was in chains, he was right out of central casting for a scary looking, trained to kill dangerous maniac. He had a passing resemblance to a scowling Liam Neeson, playing against type.

The judge had a court-appointed lawyer ready for the hearing, but the prisoner angrily declined the help. He made his argument, pretty forcefully, laying out the traumatic SEAL training he’d undergone, including waterboarding, beatings and sensory deprivation he’d been forced to undergo in his counter-interrogation training, and claimed that since PTSD had not been a recognized condition at the time he was tried and sentenced, that he be allowed to present it now in his defense.

The judge considered this for a moment then said “so your claim is that when you were under stress, after escaping from the prison, it triggered your stressful training and you fell back into your learned behavior, you automatically did what you were trained to do?”

“The stress triggered my PTSD and I acted as I was trained to act,” said the prisoner.

“I’m still trying to figure out what in your training caused you to repeatedly rape the woman,” said the judge. The prisoner glared at him, his motion denied, and the armed guards carefully escorted him back to prison. If looks could kill, I wouldn’t be here to tell the story.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a real thing, of course. It is a serious, sometimes deadly, condition that is probably the cause of most of the 22 veteran suicides in the US every day (thank you for your service). It makes sense, if you think about it, that being in a traumatic situation (your best friend having his head blown off next to you, for example) would cause nightmares, insomnia, depression, anxiety and all the rest. Imagine how much worse your PTSD would be if the trauma was prolonged, extended day after day after day.

We don’t think of it this way, being in the middle of it, all of us determined to believe we are handling everything just fine, but this pandemic, exacerbated by the weaponization of medical precautions (anti-masker meet anti-vaxxer), exacerbated by obvious lies being constantly promulgated as “grounds” to suppress the right to vote, while claiming there can be no limits on our inalienable American right to own any kind of gun we like, as American poverty and food insecurity reaches new depths our top 0.1% now owns as much as our bottom 90%, having gained an additional $1,300,000,000,000 during the pandemic… it’s been a dizzying, traumatic shit storm, with no sign of an ending. Even if we reach herd immunity (assuming 49% of Republican men who claim they won’t be vaccinated are actually lying) and the pandemic stops killing so many of us, eventually goes down to fifteen deaths, then none… this has been a deeply traumatic more than year-long ride.

Last month (on Valentine’s Day, actually) the NY Times published a piece called ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. The sub-headline is Experts paint a grim picture of the struggle with lockdown isolation — a “mental health pandemic” that should be treated as seriously as containing the coronavirus. Nothing in the report is at all surprising, though it is also shocking.

Old folks like me may feel disoriented during these objectively odd, scary, isolated times, but we have a lifetime of experience, and long time social networks, to help us keep some kind of perspective as we stumble through the genuine bizarreness of this extended pandemic. Younger people are affected much more strongly, as we can see all over the world. I can’t imagine the damage this lockdown is doing to young children, teenagers, young adults. The understandable impulse to immediately return to “normal”, against the best medical advice, is endangering everybody right at the point that we are about to finally control this plague and get back to more normal social life.

What is the public response? There are still millions who insist the virus was caused by China, that it was deliberately inflicted and exploited to fraudulently end the glorious presidency of God’s chosen imperfect vessel, that the vaccine, developed at “Warp Speed” under that very president will somehow kill you, that an army of woke zombies is coming to take the assault rifles Jesus said we can all have. Beyond that, and more ominous still, a war of good (protecting children from pedophiles) against evil (sex traffickers of children who drink their blood) is raging, a wild fantasy promoted by some of our most extreme elected officials. This is all part of a response to trauma that creates additional trauma. We are living in a supremely dangerous time.

You can have the shit beat out of you, even be killed, simply for looking Chinese. The violence is not committed by geniuses, even very stable ones. The rioters in the Capitol trying to make sure Trump stayed in power (how, exactly?) were not deep thinkers, they were bold actors looking for the next in line for the presidency to hang by the neck until dead — since he was a coward and a traitor. They had a strong belief (never mind what it was based on) and they took action. Now, of course, powerful GOP officials like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, and Lyin’ Ted from Texas, are spinning the story of the riot, not even bothering to explain why 600 peaceful sit-in protesters were arrested at the Capitol in 2018 [1] but hundreds more, involved in a violent insurrection (in which 140 police officers were injured), were allowed to leave the scene of the riot unmolested.

To me, and call me a weakling, this all constitutes trauma, the kind of shit that can wake you at night with a sharp pang of the old PTSD. The trauma is ongoing, serious as cancer, corrosive as acid. Some days are better than others, mood-wise, and it is worth keeping in mind, I think, how traumatic the days we are living in now are, for everybody, Nazi and anti-Nazi, klansman and anti-klansman, moderate centrist and fiery radical alike.

[1]

Nearly 600 protesters, mostly women, were arrested on Thursday after they staged a non-violent action in the heart of a US Senate office building in Washington against Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy towards immigrants and separation of families at the border.

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Common Sense vs. the Death Lobby

Why can Congress not regulate gun ownership in any meaningful way in this country, even in the face of the disproportionate gun deaths here, including regular mass shootings? Why can we not have laws supported by more than 90% of us, regarding limiting the availability of guns, and banning the most lethal kinds.

Guns (even military assault rifles designed for instantly spraying an area with deadly fire for maximum killing in war-zone firefights) are considered essential to “freedom” and the continual mass shootings (and thousands of one on one gun murders and even more gun suicides here every year) are simply the price we pay for “freedom”. An asshole argument, made by cynical, indifferent assholes, sure, but you can get shot here if you want to argue about it too loudly. Every angry 21 year-old white American male gunman has a right, conferred directly by Jesus Christ Himself, to own as many guns as will make him feel safe and powerful.

You recall how hard it was to get tobacco companies to stop pushing cigarettes on children? They were a very, very powerful lobby representing billions in profits with brilliant, aggressive lawyers fighting off pesky wrongful death cases for decades. One of their biggest legal guns, former tobacco attorney Lewis Powell, after writing an influential memo on how Commies want to destroy our freedom by attacking corporations in court — and stressing the importance of having judges who will hold the line on corporate rights — went on to become a long serving pro-corporate rights Supreme Court justice. We have several of them up there now, dedicated corporatists like John Roberts, the self-proclaimed balls and strikes umpire and, before that, the creator of the brilliant, now ubiquitous “arbitration clause” that is in virtually every contract consumers sign with corporations.

Let’s pause for a second to appreciate how brilliant that arbitration clause is, from a corporate point of view. In signing the contract you agree to forego any judicial remedy outside of binding arbitration, for any injury, even death, sustained due to the actions of the corporation you signed the contract with. Instead of a costly class action where a million similarly injured customers can hold a negligent corporation accountable in a court of law, every individual customer agrees to a one on one arbitration, the costs usually shared evenly between the complaining customer and the corporation, and the arbitrator will decide whose rights have been violated and by how much. Plus, the beauty part, whatever the arbitrator decides is binding, no appeal. It’s right there in the fine print you signed, bitch.

Why does every Republican in Congress (and every “moderate” Democrat from a Red State, like right-leaning Joe Manchin) elected in the last 40 years need a triple A rating from the National Rifle Association? Second Amendment, yo! The Second Amendment is considered by millions to be the most important amendment in our Constitution. Its fans (including indisputable legal genius Antonin Scalia) argue that the ambiguously worded amendment that begins with the words “a well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state” is not about militias at all, but the inviolable right of every individual American to bear as many arms as possible to ensure freedom from all tyranny, including, significantly, the tyranny of a government that would come to take their guns — like they did on January 6th at the Capitol! Pry ’em from my cold dead hands, coercive nanny-state!

Heather Cox Richardson lays out the history of how the once reasonable National Rifle Association (one-time advocates of responsible gun ownership and sensible gun control) became, starting with Reagan, the most powerful right wing lobby in the country (and biggest single donor to our boy Trumpie in 2016, $30,000,000, baby). Heather, as usual, cogent and brilliant.

Why does the United States have such an off the charts number of gun homicides a year? The New York Times published a great article today, zeroing in on the number one cause of all that gun death here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We lead the world, by a gigantic margin, in the number of guns people have. Read this article, with its spoiler alert headline, Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Mass Shootings? Research Is Clear: Guns, I highly recommend it.

Around the world the opinion is that the US, which has 4.4% of the world’s population and owns 42% of its guns, is a violent, racist nation with a mental health epidemic raging out of control under an overpriced, inadequate health care system. I’d have thought that too, but it turns out, and the researchers make a great case: there is an amazingly strong correlation between the number of gun deaths in an area and the number of guns people own. We may be no more violent, racist or otherwise insane than citizens anywhere else, we just have ten or a hundred, or a thousand times more guns than any other country. Here’s a neatly chilling factoid from the article, an illustration of why so many more of us are killed here by guns, which are almost as ubiquitous as John Roberts’ fucking arbitration clause:

[It’s not that we have more violent crime here than elsewhere…] Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

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Fancy that.

Or, as this raging asshole would say, let the American people listen to the propaganda on both sides, go as deep as they want into any monetizable rabbit hole, and make their own informed decisions, which the lobbyists make sure get translated into the most lucrative possible policies, public and private.

$7,400,000 an hour — Bezos!

The world’s most successful greedy man, Jeff Bezos, made over $65,000,000,000 during the pandemic. That comes out to $7,400,000 an hour [1] for the man who heroically insists on paying his 1.3 million sweatshop workers $15 and hour for their hard work — and manfully advocates for that generous living minimum wage to be forced on all his competitors. We should note that from Jeff’s point of view, he is actually losing money since his wealth was calculated as increasing by almost $9,000,000 an hour just two years ago.

While Bezos is raking in this pandemic-driven windfall he’s fighting Amazon workers’ attempts to organize. He ruthlessly put down one such attempt in NY at the start of the pandemic when workers concerned with contracting a deadly virus spoke up about conditions in his crowded, un-sanitized warehouses, where they worked around the clock without PPE to fulfill the increasing orders of tens of millions of locked-down Americans and increase the vast fortune of world’s second richest man. Amazon warehouse workers apparently have a 100% attrition rate during their first year, because the working conditions are so atrocious. Bezos also clawed back their $2/hour hazard pay bonus in May, at the end of the third month of the pandemic.

Bezos has been spending millions in business costs to fight attempts at unionization of his vast Amazon work force. You can read all about his tactics of threatening and intimidating anyone in his work force who seeks a voice in working conditions, collective bargaining and so forth. A guy like this is generally considered a piece of shit, I certainly see him that way.

And, of course, eventually the political — a powerful greedy piece of shit’s unfettered right to do whatever he sees fit because he has an army of lawyers and will generally face no consequences for any of his actions — becomes personal. Here’s my petty personal anecdote about the genius Jeff Bezos.

I have a small collection of one-hand opening folding knives, assembled over decades. I find it handy to have a knife in my pocket, for picnic use or for opening otherwise impossible to open plastic packaging, for example. I rarely spend more than $40 for a knife, but each time I see a new design innovation that is cool (a new style of lock or improved deployment method), lightweight and not close to something I already have, I pick it up. With the excellence of Chinese engineering and manufacturing in recent years, it’s possible to buy a knife for $40 or less that not long ago would have cost well over a hundred dollars. We are living in a golden age of well-made, inexpensive, one-handed opening folding knives.

In New York State, for whatever convoluted reason, a knife that is opened with a flipper, a little tab on the back or front of the blade used to pop the knife open, is illegal. An axis lock knife (like the Benchmade mini Griptilian) that can be flipped open in a milli-second, with a flick of the wrist, is legal, as are assisted opening knives that have a spring that makes them fly open in a similar quick blink of an eye. A thumb stud is fine, and there are many knives that have bearings in them that allow them to be whipped open instantly with a flick of the thumb stud. For whatever twisted reason, NY and Massachusetts do not allow you to order a knife that opens with a flipper.

I saw a video of a cool looking flipper knife, made by the reputable CRKT, that was very inexpensive. The couple doing the video loved this knife, and lovingly demonstrated its smoothness opening and closing one handed. It indeed looked cool and I didn’t have one like it. Plus, the price was a steal, a knife that could easily sell for $50 was selling for about $12.

Apparently it was made by CRKT for a cut-rate gun company called Ruger and that company was selling this model on its website for about $12. I immediately went to the website, found the knife (LCK) and, seeing it was not available for shipping in NYC (the site did specify New York City), called a friend who lives ten miles out of the city and arranged to send them there. I ordered three or four, and with the shipping, they were about $15 each. Two would be gifts, one would live on the kitchen table, the other I’d carry around in my pocket.

A short time after I placed the order I got an email from the company informing me that my order had been cancelled, since it could not be shipped to an address in New York State.

I began arranging to send the knives to a friend in Tennessee, who would keep one and send the others on to me in a postage paid box I’d send him. But I was too slow. Bezos never sleeps.

These knives are presently only available on Amazon, at $49.95, because a good businessman is a sucker to leave money on the table. The worlds’ greediest piece of shit apparently bought out the inventory on this LCK flipper knife and priced it according to what the market would bear. Why would he not? Even assuming he paid full retail for the knives (he surely did not), that’s still a rather nice 300% profit– so, again, why not?

Fair is fair, y’all– you snooze you fucking lose. The greed of the greediest among us never sleeps.

Hopefully Bezos will have to deal with his first unionized shop, after the final votes come in on March 29th from his predominantly Black work force in Bessemer, Alabama.

[1]

This comes as a new study, out today, from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies has found Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has seen his personal wealth increase by $65 billion since the pandemic began a year ago. That means Bezos’s wealth increased on average by over $7.4 million every hour for the past year.

Meanwhile, Amazon workers in Bessemer and other locations are being forced to work 10-hour shifts with just two 15-minute bathroom breaks.

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The NY Times giveth, and the NY Times taketh away

The New York Times ran a very detailed and pretty decent article the other day entitled The Senate’s “Talking Filibuster” Might Rise Again. It contained this telling graph showing how many times the filibuster (raising number of Senate votes needed from 51 to 60) has been used to block Executive Branch appointments. Remember, Trump’s party is the party of the Unitary Executive, viewing the president as a powerful CEO who gets wide discretion in his appointments and blanket protection for every refusal to comply with norms, even laws. Unless, of course, they hate the current president and are determined to use every tactic to make him a failed one-term loser. In that case, all bets are off.

The man who finally broke the Senate, proud “Grim Reaper” Mitch McConnell, finding himself in the thinnest of minorities, threatened “scorched earth” if the Democrats “break the Senate” by attempting to curtail the minority’s right to obstruct every bit of legislation, if not every executive branch appointment.

“I want my colleagues to imagine a world where every single task requires a physical quorum — for which the Vice President does not count, by the way.

“Everything that Democratic Senates did to Presidents Bush and Trump… everything the Republican Senate did to President Obama… would be child’s play compared to the disaster that Democrats would create for their own priorities if they break the Senate.

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Go back to the chart above and read the numbers for how many Bush/Cheney appointments were blocked by Democrats compared to Republican denials of debate on Obama’s, a rather lopsided tally — an eye popping escalation of the use of the filibuster under the power-driven, ends-justify-the-means McConnell. As for Trump, the rules didn’t really apply. Trump boasted that he preferred to appoint acting loyalists to high government positions, an ever more unqualified and compliant species of loyalist, since that meant increased obedience, no vetting, no pesky advice or consent, no need to listen to any kind of debate, the ability to instantly fire or transfer acting appointees without oversight from anybody. McConnell wants credit for his principled stand in not caving to Trump’s demand that he abolish the filibuster, which would have made the unhinged Trump’s power virtually absolute.

The New York Times, always bending over backwards to be fair, includes this factually accurate but context-free analysis:

In the first months of Mr. Biden’s administration, Republicans have yet to use the rules to block any of his legislation, but battles are on the horizon. Some Democrats argue that filibuster reform is the only way to overcome united Republican opposition to pass a voting-rights bill or laws to bolster labor rights or to reform immigration policy.

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The Republicans have not actually used the filibuster yet, of course, only because the only law presented so far — voted against by every Republican in the House and Senate– was done by reconciliation, a budget process requiring only a simple majority (used by the GOP under McConnell/Trump to almost abolish the ACA — missed by a single vote– McCain’s famous thumbs down [1]– and to open the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve to oil drilling — both clearly more revenue-related than increasing the federal minimum wage to a living wage). The GOP’s united opposition to voting rights, for Democrats, is on display in 43 states where over 250 restrictive new voting laws have been proposed since Biden’s election.

MAGA, it turns out, is a determined return to the days when openly racist segregationists could use the filibuster, and the “states’ rights” ruse, to block the right to vote of any but their own — the Civil Rights Acts be damned (filibuster all of ’em!) and same for your goddamned Voting Rights Act (filibuster that unholy abortion too!) and stuff your “anti-lynching” laws too, n-word lovers, (we got a tall pine and a long rope for you in Georgia, boy).

But, the truth, of course, as the NY Times intrepidly points out, is that, in the first sixty days of Biden’s term, Republicans have yet to use a filibuster against any Democratic bill so far.

But here’s my favorite classic New York Times fairness tic: “Some Democrats argue…”

“Some Democrats” argue that a party that will not even hold its leader responsible for a inciting a violent riot to prevent the certification of an election signed off on by officials of both parties, a leader who allowed a lynch mob to roam the Capitol looking for his vice president (to hang!) for over three hours, a party that will cast not a single vote for a COVID-related rescue plan that does not immunize corporations for all harm and death resulting from corporate negligence or malfeasance during a deadly pandemic, who will not censure, or even contradict, colleagues who openly supported the Capitol rioters, continue to defend them and to insist the last election was stolen from Trump… Some Democrats, apparently, believe the GOP position on bipartisanship, even among Republican “moderates” and “centrists”, is not as reasonable as it might be.

What the devil is wrong with you, Grey Lady? I mean, seriously, lady, what the fuck?

Brings to mind the classic history headline from The Onion (America’s finest news source), perhaps the greatest deadpan imitation of the Grey Lady I’ve ever seen:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 20190326_121319-1-1.jpg

[1]

Fine, I oversimplified to make a point, slightly. Nothing even slightly broken about any of this shit:

On January 12, 2017, the Senate voted 51 to 48 to pass an FY2017 budget resolution,  S.Con.Res. 3, that contained language allowing the repeal of the Affordable Care Act through the budget reconciliation process, which disallows a filibuster in the Senate.[33][34][35][36][1] In spite of efforts during the vote-a-rama (a proceeding in which each amendment was considered and voted upon for about 10 minutes each until all 160 were completed) that continued into the early hours of the morning, Democrats could not prevent “the GOP from following through on its repeal plans.”[35][37]

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as President of the United States. Trump and many Republicans have vowed to repeal and replace Obamacare.[38] President Trump signed an executive order on January 20, 2017, his first day in office, that according to then White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer would “ease the burden of Obamacare as we transition from repeal and replace”. Spicer would not elaborate further when asked for more details.[39][40][41]

On March 6, 2017, House Republicans announced their replacement for the ACA, the American Health Care Act.[42] The bill was withdrawn on March 24, 2017 after it was certain that the House would fail to garner enough votes to pass it.[43] The result was in-fighting within the Republican Party.[44]

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Politics is personal

Politics is about power, who has it, who gets to hide behind it, who gets to use it for good, who gets to use it to punish people they hate. We have been living through an increasingly naked form of smash-mouth politics the last few decades, worldwide. Its foremost practitioner here threatens to “scorch the earth” he has already burned, salted and sprayed with poison, if the right of the minority to obstruct all legislation favored by the majority is threatened.

I came across an interesting, disturbing idea the other day, from the transcript of a Hidden Brain interview a friend sent me:

00:24:41]
When you refuse to apologize it actually makes you feel more empowered. That power and control seems to translate into greater feelings of self-worth.

[00:24:50]
And in some ways, this sounds to the inner dictator, when we apologize, in some ways we are disarming ourselves. And when we refuse to apologize, in some ways we are mounting a form of emotional self-defense.

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Some sick shit, sure, this zero sum unapologetic win/lose worldview, but it does explain a lot about how political power works. You can start a war to preserve the right of your richest citizens to have slaves, a war you will eventually lose militarily, a loss you will then transform into a glorious Lost Cause, one that never had a thing to do with slavery, only rights, a moral position that allows you to loudly assert the very thing you went to war to defend: the right to treat our own precious n-words however way we goddamned please, thank you!

You lose an election decisively, but you do not accept the loss, you refuse to bow to the bipartisan consensus of every expert that you lost a fair election. It feels good, and empowering, never to apologize or admit you could ever be wrong, or, God forbid, lose. The Jews stole it from us, or millions of Mexican rapists, or Muslims, aided by powerful pedophiles, the Blacks, the Browns, the Yellows! The demonstrably false story about massive voting fraud that you keep telling, a story thrown out of countless courts for lack of evidence, is good enough to enrage your followers. More than good enough, after a $50,000,000 ad campaign and many incendiary speeches and tweets, some are willing to get violent to defend “their country” against the threat of hoards of lying, fraudulent, ignorant, smelly, disgusting, immoral people who are nothing like us.

Politics is always personal when it comes to reflexive reactions towards certain kinds of murderers. You have a young maniac the press calls “very religious” get a gun in Georgia the other day. To get the gun in Georgia all he had to do was show ID and say “kill… those whores make me want to f-f-f-f … have sex with ’em… Second Amendment!” and the gun was in his hands. A few hours later he made the rounds of a few massage parlors and shot eight people to death, a ninth person he shot escaped death by luck. Most of the people he murdered were Asian women. The authorities are still trying to “figure out” if this murder spree was a “hate crime” directed at the women because they were Asian. America wants to know, and the jury is still out — what was the intent of this enraged, “religious” white man in killing the women? What was actually in his twisted mind as he was spraying the bullets at these women will make a difference, for some reason, at his trial.

We argue over hate crimes, the definition of “hate” of “crime” of what actually makes a crime a hate crime, partisans focusing it within one frame or another. Can we really say that a police officer just doing his job, who handcuffs a suspect and kneels on his windpipe until the suspect is unable to keep pleading for his life “killed” the suspect? Kill implies an intent that the officer, well…

Let’s take a much simpler one: how about those brave Capitol Police officers who stood up to a violent, armed crowd that outnumbered them ten to one (injuring 134 of them)? The House voted almost unanimously yesterday to give them Congressional medals for their courage. Who were the twelve who voted against it? Trumpist all-stars like Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz, new Q-Anon it-girl Marjorie Taylor Green, provocative extremists only electable because they ran in partisan gerrymandered districts where their extremist views, supported by “dark money,” could not be challenged in a fair election. These twelve were apparently indignant that the bill to honor the cops with medals infuriatingly referred to the peaceful January 6 protest by white Christian patriots inside the Capitol, to gently but firmly disrupt the final certification of the stolen election by the traitor Mike Pence, as an “insurrection.” Making partisan sport with a tragedy, trying to score political points on the back of a dead police officer, as the goddamned divisive, racist n-word Democrats always do!

Not one Republican senator (or House member, for that matter), not the moderate Mitt Romney, not the despised Liz Cheney, not a single one of them, voted last week to give relief to struggling Americans in a nation devastated by a deadly, super-infectious pandemic, a hands-off federal response and the economic tsunami it caused. Not a single vote, for aid to hungry children, for mental health care, for medical care, for food, for vaccines, by the party whose base, and several of its rising stars in Congress, insist that powerful Democrats are child-molesting cannibals.

I say politics is personal and I will try to illustrate that idea with a personal example. My former friend Paul, is a very bright guy, a proficient maker of compelling legal arguments in federal court, a well-read man with a subtle mind. His oldest friend tells him that he has been hurt by him. Paul goes to work. Now watch the actual work, it is exactly how Republican/right-wing politics works today, particularly the irrefutable, indignant, absurd closing position that clinches the deal.

Did any of this really happen the way you said? What did I specifically do, I still don’t understand? I was trying to help, are you faulting me for that, for trying to help? I appreciate that you took hours to try to explain yourself, and I thank you for not attacking me, it was generous of you, but, if you wouldn’t mind, and I’m not going to go into any of what you said now, or ever, but can you explain it again, please, since I still don’t get exactly what I did that hurt you. I know I may seem obtuse, and perhaps shrieking like an angry schoolgirl, hanging up the phone and texting that I’m done being reamed by you may be something you’d expect an apology for, particularly from a grown man and old friend — but why? Is my waiting weeks to make any apology at all part of the reason you might be clinging to your anger so petulantly? Isn’t it possible that your anger is distorting your view of what actually happened? Who can ever really know what is in another person’s mind, even someone you’ve known for decades? We are all mysteries, even to ourselves… etc.

This is all standard stuff for a certain type trying to defend itself. But here is where the shit turns personal/political — how you stick the landing. When I finally reduce our conflict to one issue: you asked me what was wrong, I told you, you kept saying you didn’t understand, I explained again, when I directed your attention to how intolerable it is to me to have no response to things I directly raise in reply to your own questions, not only don’t you respond, you dispose of the entire controversy and perfectly stick the landing by saying “I’ve read and considered everything you said, searching in vain for a single clue what the fuck you are so fucking upset about.”

Anyone who has read even one of these posts knows what a provocatively insulting statement the assertion that I give no clue is. And, like the provocative Republican insistence that racism is non-existent, except in the minds of enraged, irrational, radical, violent, thuggish n-words, there can be only one reason to make this kind of reductive, zero sum statement — to win.

I don’t care about your supposed good will, the strength of the facts you put together, appeals to our better natures, our long friendship, your generosity in not making me feel like the ruthlessly bitter asshole I’ve arguably been, your constant attempts at reconciliation — you lose and I WIN. That’s how this story ends, asshole. You could not provide a single clue, not even a clue, about why you harbor this irrational rage toward me.

Paul’s pessimistic belief is that people cannot change, they obey their darker natures in the end. To believe otherwise makes you pathetically deluded. By finally getting me to step back from my vow of mildness to tell him to go fuck himself, he proves his point. I try to be mild, but at bottom, I am the same vicious fuck I always was. People cannot change, or learn to be less of an asshole. Game and match. Zero sum, I win.

For contrast to this style of point-scoring and power plays, and a look at the best of political persuasion, watch Senator Raphael Warnock’s magnificent speech in support of HR 1, the For the People Act, a bill that would make voting easier, more universal and less corruptible in our great experiment in democracy. The GOP has already announced they will filibuster it, try to prevent floor debate on the bill, as the 6-3 rightwing Supreme Court seems poised to uphold Arizona’s voter suppression laws that were twice found illegally discriminatory by the lower federal courts. I can only picture the response of the outraged patriots, it will be very similar, in its essential enraged incoherence, to my buddy Paul’s provocative conclusion that I can’t put a few thoughts together coherently.

Watch Warnock’s powerful moving, speech and see if you can find a single flaw in it:

Suggested talking points for Tucker and the outraged right:

It is not that we are racists, or that America has ever been racist, in any way, it’s just that if we don’t stop [n-words] and their ilk from voting in huge numbers, like they did recently in Georgia to steal the Senate, we would find ourselves out of power, living in a country where a majority, not our own, decides what rights and privileges WE have. If the shoe was on the other foot, if we got real political power after centuries of being as murderously fucked by you as you claim to have been by us, we’d be vindictive as hell, as you would have every right to be, if we’d done anything at all bad to you. We’d put our knees on your necks so hard you’d never even be able to say, “I can’t breathe.”