Category Archives: current events

You don’t need information!

It is better simply to believe that those who run things know best and will tell you everything you need to know.   Once Donald Trump manages to get the WALL built, in spite of the obstruction of even people in his own party, the problems we face here in divided America will all be over.   That and locking up Hillary Clinton, and Ilhan Omar, and several other very nasty and divisive women and their “male” enablers.  Done and done, everyone will be happy, except, of course, for the haters, who are NEVER happy no matter what. 

Seriously, every oppressor, (every overbearing asshole, for that matter)  in history has first controlled the conversation by removing any “inconvenient truth” from it. This is the very first lesson in Authoritarian 101, remove anything harmful to authority from the conversation.  Look, if you can eliminate fact-based “dissent” that takes care of most of the problem.   Simple.  Just make them shut up, criminalize them, lock ’em up.   Don’t allow books like Dark Money, Democracy in Chains, Dirty Wars, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, How Fascism Works, A People’s History of the United States, to be published.   If they already exist, take them off the shelves and burn them, quietly, secretly, just get them out of circulation.  Make examples of a few of the leaders, the more grotesque the example the better, and the rest will fall into line.  Most people are not heroes.

I once read sections of Frederick Douglass’ autobiography (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave) to my class of third graders in Harlem.   They were shocked, had never heard any of this shit.  Couldn’t believe blacks allowed themselves to be treated that way.   They were outraged.  One tough kid, speaking for everyone, said if he’d been there in Africa he would have killed the slave kidnappers.   The class agreed.  I had him and the five other toughest kids stand up and come to the front of the room to play the Africans.  I then chose two of the smallest, most timid kids in the class and cast them as the Europeans intent on collecting slaves.   The class was relishing the confrontation that would set history straight. 

As they were about to begin I said, as if in afterthought, “oh, wait, you’ll need these,” and handed each of the frightened Europeans a rolled up piece of paper. “Those are your guns,” I told the class.   The two slavers smiled.   The Africans wanted their guns but I told them in those days Africans didn’t have guns.   Then they stood fifteen feet apart and began acting.  The hideous truth became clear as soon as the first African stepped up to tell the slavers to fuck off.   The room got very quiet as a supremely disquieting light went on overhead.

Without this obvious detail of gun vs. strength and courage alone you can build a whole story about the docility and inferiority of a people who “allow” themselves to be enslaved.  And killed, literally by the millions, during the long, cramped, stinking voyage from the life you knew to a life as a piece of property in the service of some god-fearing “white” person’s limitless wealth.   The Middle Passage, as the infamous trans-Atlantic voyage is called.

The suppression of important factual detail is essential for any narrative that justifies brutal inequality, persecution, tyranny.   In your personal life, notice how anyone who has ever sought to exploit you will always pressure you not to reveal the shameful details to anybody.  If you tell somebody, you’re some kind of rat, unmanly, a cowardly weasel who can’t simply be sodomized and take it like a choir boy.   My brother-in-law reminded me of this several times over the years.

In our neoliberal order only monetary profit has real value, increasing personal wealth is the only overarching goal.   As our recent liberal presidents have all done, you can support the civil rights of homosexuals, the rights of all minorities to be free from discrimination, the right of a woman or girl to seek an abortion if she needs one,  the right of every child to have a free, quality public education and also the right to live in a nontoxic environment and work at a safe workplace, the right not to be randomly mowed down by a maniac with a military assault rifle.   All these things are generally considered “liberal” positions and things that most Democratic (or “Democrat”) politicians support.  At the same time, as a neoliberal, you back policies and laws that make things easier for the wealthiest, and for those powerful, eternal, real-life vampires, corporations, to do what they do best: “create wealth”.

The only fly in this otherwise soothing ointment is that horrific systemic inequality flows from these practices.   If a small group owns almost everything, there is a gigantic group that will have to make do with almost nothing.    Call it the “free market” if you like, and forget the whiners who complain that those who pay the biggest price have nothing to say about the quality of the freedom they receive.    

There was a worldwide effort, started around the year 2000, the Millennial Development Goals, for the wealthy countries to greatly reduce poverty and hunger in the “underdeveloped world” by 2020 (if memory serves).   It turns out that all of the aid the wealthiest countries provide to the “Third World” (the global south) amounts to a tiny percentage of what is extracted from their governments every year just to pay the interest on the debt owed to the wealthy creditor nations for “development” loans.   Everybody wins under this global system, except for the one or two, or three, billion worldwide who live short, miserable, insecure lives of want, including unbearable hunger. 

The numbers did not look good for greatly reducing the metrics of poverty by the specified date.   So really smart people began tweaking the metrics (as American lawyers tortuously tweaked the definition of “torture” a few years back).  It turns out hunger numbers can be reduced by an impressive margin, with the stroke of a pen, if you define hunger as “severe and persistent malnutrition, less than 1,200 calories a day, that persists for more than a year.”   Heh, you see what we did?   If you get a good meal every ten or eleven months, problem solved.  We have now lifted a billion people out of hunger!  Have a blessed day and please continue your charitable giving.

The devilish details of this worldwide anti-poverty program are set out in an early chapter of a troubling book (sent to me by a friend)  called The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, by Jason Hickel.   I don’t have the book with me at the moment, so that quote about hunger, although true in essence, was pulled out of the memory hole.   The caloric number may be off, but the money shot is that hunger, as defined by these do-gooders and for purposes of creating a more uplifting narrative of success, must be persistent and last for at least a year to make the cut as something wealthier people need to feel any urgency to do anything about.  

Hickel states that the amount of food discarded daily in wealthy countries would, if somehow put into the hands of the starving, immediately solve the world hunger problem.   World food scarcity is not the result of actual scarcity, but of institutionalized not really giving a fuck about literally billions of starving people you will never see.   Go figure.

I am constantly reminded of this suppression of information needed to make informed, moral decisions, having grown up in a family where certain truths were never mentioned.   Thirteen years before I was born, in the region the family came from, everyone was murdered.  Our entire family, outside of five or six who came to the United States before the restrictive immigration law of 1924, slaughtered.   Not something that could ever be discussed because… oh, just shut up!   A father who was always angry, it turns out, had good reason to be disturbed, he’d been despised and whipped in the face since infancy by the violent little mother who called him “Sonny”.    He should have sought help, but he didn’t need to whine to some shrink like he predicted his children would.  End of fucking story.

Do you want to live in a world where you’re not allowed to know any unsettling background on anything that ever happened, anything that is happening now, anything that will happen in the future?   If you do, rejoice, there is nothing to think about!

 

   

FOX News Nails Rabid Anti-Trump Hatred

We’ve been watching The Loudest Voice, the Showtime series about Roger Ailes and top-rated Fox News.   You will recall that Ailes finally had to step down as head of Fox, after doing everything in his considerable power to help elect Donald J. Trump president.  Ailes had to leave because Gretchen Carlson got millions of dollars in settlement/hush money over sexual harassment from Fox when it came out that Roger had been molesting many women at Fox and Roger, apparently,  kept demanding things like short dresses and blowjobs from other women at the station.   I wasn’t there, of course, and this could be the same kind of liberal hit job that brought down Bill O’Reilly, Bill Cosby, Bill Shine [1] threatened poor Boof Kavanaugh’s entire life and even ended the career of liberal lion Al Franken.  [2]

So anyway, Fox had a bombshell today.   They had a Republic(an) Member of the House Judiciary Committee spill the goods on Trump-hater Jerrald Nadler.   Nadler, we learn, began an impeachment inquiry even before Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election (“widespread and sweeping” though “insufficient evidence of criminal conspiracy, due in part to perjury and destruction of evidence”) and obstruction of the investigation into Russian interference (“we can’t say he didn’t obstruct it, in at least ten different ways”) was released!   

Fox reports, under the banner DEMOCRATIC COURT FILING SUGGESTS TRUMP IMPEACHMENT PROBE BEGAN BEFORE MUELLER EVEN SUBMITTED REPORT,  that Nadler’s committee apparently initiated an inquiry on March 4, 2019 into

‘threats to the rule of law’ encompassing alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates and members of his Administration, one critical purpose of the Committee’s investigation is to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment against the president.

(per court filing yesterday)   

source

Of course, a nitpicker might point out that public corruption (including profiting from his hotel in Washington DC while president, regular publicly funded trips to his resorts, with full staff (armed with Mar-a-Largo credit cards), appointing unqualified family members to high government positions) and other abuses of power (declaring a state of emergency to overrule Congress and build his wall, ignoring court order to stop separating migrant children from their parents, telling subordinates to create false evidence and disobey all subpoenas, dangling pardons, bypassing security clearance screening for his son-in-law and others) were not within the scope of Mueller’s investigation.   

And a Trump supporter might say, as the President himself does, that this is all bullshit.  For example, anyone who had the power to do so would address a meeting of world leaders and pitch holding the next conference at his luxury resort in Miami.    Plenty of parking, huge beautiful accommodations, everything first class, the best, and in Miami– enjoy it before it’s underwater, folks.

Yes, there are partisan issues at stake here, as always.   Trump diverts over $155,000,000 from FEMA disaster relief funds, at the start of hurricane season, to shore up his operations at the southern border where the crisis (a hoard of rapists, if you must know) rages out of control.  The money will pay for additional detention spaces and new expedited courts to get more migrants lawfully deported.   Trump decides Planned Parenthood gets no money under Title X if it continues to counsel women about the option of abortion.   Trump continues to appoint lifetime judges off the Federalist Society’s list as his own team of lawyers fights disclosure of anything that could shed light on his suspected shady financial operations with entities like Deutsche Bank — even as he is the victim of history’s longest tax audit. 

There is also the sobering fact that we live in a country that has, under Trump, virtual state TV, the sole source of fair and balanced news for tens of millions of a carefully cultivated demographic.  On Fox, criticism of the president diverting a dump truck full of money from FEMA to stop a manufactured (“fake”) existential threat at the southern border is laughed away as typical liberal propaganda.   

As Fox tells us:  the Dems are pathetic, pretending to wait for the Mueller report while rushing to irrationally accuse the president of everything under the sun even before the report was even partially released.   Bill Barr said Trump was completely innocent, and right to feel that he was the victim of a witch hunt and fully justified in shutting down the investigation – which was totally within his legal prerogatives as POTUS–  into his totally innocent behavior.  Bill Barr, ladies and gentlemen [3].   The People rest.

 

[1]  Bill Shine (born on the Fourth of July), you may recall, was hired by the President as White House Communications director after Shine was fired from Fox for his longtime role in covering up sexual harassment (and worse) at Fox News.   

from Shine’s Wikipedia page:

In particular, those objecting [to Shine’s appointment as Trump’s Communications Director]  cited Shine’s awareness at the time of the channel’s hiring private detectives to intimidate alleged victims of Roger Ailes.[32][33][34] Later it was reported that Shine’s compensation upon leaving Fox was in the neighborhood of $15 million dollars.[35]

On March 8, 2019, it was announced by the White House that Shine was resigning from his position to serve as an advisor to President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.[36] Shine said in a statement about his resignation that he is “looking forward to working on President Trump’s re-election campaign and spending more time with family.”[36]  In May 2019, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told Politico that he did not intend to replace Shine with a new communications director.[37]

 

[2]  while looking for names to add to this list I came across this:

Donald Trump (R), the 45th President of the United States, was accused of sexual assault by 13 women during the 2016 election and he denied the allegations.[166] The allegations arose after The Washington Post released a 2005 video of Trump, recorded on a hot microphone by Access Hollywood, in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women.[167][168][169]Trump himself renewed the controversy a year later by alleging that the video was fake,[170] to which Access Hollywood replied, “Let us make this perfectly clear — the tape is very real. Remember his excuse at the time was ‘locker-room talk.’ He said every one of those words.”[171][172] The first reports of an alleged 2006 affair between Donald Trump and adult film star Stormy Daniels were published in October 2011 by the blog The Dirty and the magazine Life & Style.[173][174]

compare and contrast:

Al Franken Senator (D-MN), was accused by radio newscaster Leeann Tweeden of forcibly kissing her as part of a skit and later being in a photo pretending to grope her without consent (there was no actual physical contact) during a U.S.O. tour in 2006. Tweeden produced photo evidence of the pretend grope, taken of Franken when Tweeden was asleep. Franken admitted to the allegations and apologized for his actions and then resigned.[175]

just for fun:   (left to right: Karen MacDougal, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Melania Trump)

Clinton_Trump_2000_08.jpg

 

[3] a hell of a bagpiper, I’ve heard.

Vigilance, now more than ever

Be strong, watch carefully, and do not look away.

An old friend, as dismayed as I was when powerful late supporters of a hate-mongering bully from reality TV engineered history’s narrowest margin of an Electoral College victory, told me somberly that it was time to be vigilant.   I agreed.

Vigilance got harder and harder as the president with the orangutan hair began furiously flinging his feces everywhere.   Most people I know can’t look at the man, I have a hard time myself.   They have mostly stopped watching the news– too depressing, this unfunny clown has made America what he claimed it was before he climbed on to the tweeting throne: a laughingstock.  Meanwhile, everything Mr. T has touched with those dirty hands of his needs to be power-washed.

All that’s needed for bad things to flourish is for good people to look away.   (There’s a famous cliché to that effect, check it out — #3).   The outrages with this scenery chewing amateur actor happen so furiously, continually, colorfully, that it’s hard to recall yesterday’s outrages, let alone those of a year ago, two years ago.   

This is one of the tragedies of history, as it tumultuously unfolds the pattern is hard to see, until, like the famous frog slowly boiled in the pot, temperature raised one degree at a time as the amphibian relaxes, then sweats, then is parboiled, we’re done.   

The road to totalitarianism is composed of thousands of tiny steps.   If this orange guy had his way he’d do an MBS on every journalist “enemy of the people” and he’s shown us enough deliberate cruelty to assure us all that this is exactly what’s in his heart of hearts.

The following illustration is but one tiny, faltering step on the road to fascism.  It deserves not to be forgotten.  For one thing, it’s a horrifically typical attempted lurch toward tyranny.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the Alabama senator, was a man too racist to be confirmed to the federal bench.   Picture how racist you have to be.   Then, as a senator, he was one of the more rabid anti-immigrant voices in Congress.   When Trump announced his candidacy, the immigrant-hating, racist Sessions was the first “mainstream” politician of any stature to embrace Trump’s then-outlandish candidacy.   The loyal Sessions was the first powerful Republican to appear on stage next to Trump, introduce him at rallies, advocate for him.

The reward for this loyalty was the Attorney General job coveted by Chris Christie (no way – he prosecuted Jared Kushner’s felonious father) and Rudy Giuliani (a notably incoherent dotard with wildly bulging eyes), among others.    Jeff Sessions would become the lawless new president’s chief law enforcement official, in charge of the Department of Justice and all federal prosecutions.   

Note for a moment the irony that the DOJ was formed after the Civil War to prosecute guys like Jeff Sessions, people who advocated keeping the former slaves in their goddamned places, by any means necessary.   

To everyone’s surprise, Sessions showed a glimmer of respect for the law by properly recusing himself when it emerged (under Al Franken’s questioning) that he was involved in discussions with Russians prior to the 2016 election and immediately afterwards.   This recusal infuriated Trump, who saw it as a personal betrayal, of course, because the whole idea of the Attorney General, in his simple view, is to act as the president’s ruthless Roy Cohn and do whatever is needed to allow the president to do whatever he deems henceforth necessary for himself and the nation.  (Especially for himself  — just sayin’.) 

After humiliating him publicly for a long time Trump replaced Sessions with a shameless, brazen, well-spoken lawyerly sycophant, a brutally handsome pile of  human excrement who, apparently, is an expert bagpiper.   Confirmed just in time to control the Mueller report threat, he lied repeatedly to confused and credulous Americans about the troubling findings of the Mueller Report which he falsely spun as a complete exoneration of his unfairly persecuted new boss.  He then waited a month to release Mueller’s own damning summary of his findings and the rest of the long report, in redacted form.

This is all well-known, but recall this small, easily forgotten, detail, reported in Jason Stanley’s excellent How Fascism Works,  (which I am ‘re-reading” as an audiobook).  The ugly incident really underscores what these creatures have been up to from day one.     

It was at the Sessions confirmation hearing, early in 2017.    One of his supporters, fellow Alabama senator Richard Shelby made a patently ridiculous statement in support of his colleague.  He claimed, with a pompous straight face,  that  Sessions’ “extensive record of treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.”

This occurred shortly after Trump’s historically well-attended inauguration, the crowd larger than any crowd ever seen anywhere on earth in the history of crowds.   It was a historically well-funded inauguration, anyway.   Donors lined up to hand over bags of cash, to curry favor and gain access to the new president.   No president ever had more money ponied up for a lavish inauguration celebration than the transactional Mr. Trump who openly told wealthy people that they could buy access to him at Mar-A-Largo and other luxurious Trump resorts.  Much of that money is still unaccounted for, of course, but that’s another story for another team of investigative “enemies of the people” to eventually uncover and tell.  [1]

A small group of comically attired protesters from the anti-war group Code Pink were at the Sessions confirmation hearing.   On hearing Shelby’s unintentionally hilarious statement about Sessions’ well-documented commitment to treating everyone fairly, one of them, Desiree Fairooz, burst out laughing.  source

If she’d been sipping milk when Shelby deadpanned his outlandish, whimsical remark, it would have shot out of her nose.   It was a spontaneous reaction to the “abzurd” statement, delivered so perfectly by the outraged gentleman from Alabama in defense of his fellow Alabaman.

It would take almost a year before the DOJ called off the hyperactive federal case it brought against Fairooz for the twin misdemeanors of “disrupting Congress” and “unlawful demonstration on Capitol grounds”.   They wanted to lock her up for the maximum one year, at least, and to extract the largest allowable fine.   The DOJ even got a conviction (which was overturned by a judge), before finally admitting defeat and withdrawing the case against her.   (The Trump administration apparently has an impressive 6% victory rate in cases in federal court — all other administrations average a mere 70% win rate in court challenges.)  [2]

As National Public Radio, notorious communist front group, reported on the judge overturning Fairooz’s conviction for laughing at Shelby’s unintended comedy:

Chief Judge Robert Morin decided that the government improperly argued that Fairooz’s laugh alone — not her reaction to being removed from the courtroom — would be enough to find her guilty. Reilly reports:

“Morin said it was ‘disconcerting’ that the government made the case in closing arguments that the laughter in and of itself was sufficient.

” ‘The court is concerned about the government’s theory,’ Morin said. He said the laughter ‘would not be sufficient’ to submit the case to the jury, and said the government hadn’t made clear before the trial that it intended to make that argument.”

source

No doubt, if, during the long prosecution of Fairooz,  Trump mentioned her horrible disrespect at one of his Nuremberg style rallies, the crowd would have erupted with a muscular, full-throated “Lock her up!  Lock her up!”   Anybody with that kind of sick, unAmerican sense of humor is clearly (if you wear the red, or white, baseball cap) a traitor, disloyal, deserving of the full weight of the law, and the most serious and heavy, literally, federal case, against her.

That’s what you use the law and the Department of Justice for, motherfuckers, not investigating a president’s active and ongoing campaign of obstruction– of justice and so-called common decency.  Ask the bagpiper!   He’s the top law enforcement official in the USA.  Nothing to see here, you lying sacks of shit.   USA!   USA!!!!

 

 

{1]  As this excellent podcast does, from their summary of the follow-up podcast about the inauguration:

Elsewhere in the podcast, we report that the inaugural committee was so eager to book space at Trump’s hotel in Washington that it encouraged hotel management to cancel another event — a prayer breakfast — so space would be clear for the inaugural celebration, according to a lawsuit against the committee filed by the reverend who organized the breakfast.

The hotel did briefly cancel the breakfast, invoking “force majeure,” or an act of god. In this case, they predicted civil unrest over the inauguration week.

source

[2]  Federal judge on sudden withdrawal of millions in funding related to teen pregnancy:

“This much is clear: A federal agency that changes course abruptly without a well-reasoned explanation for its decision or that acts contrary to its own regulations is subject to having a federal court vacate its action as ‘arbitrary [and] capricious,’ ” she said in her ruling, quoting the APA’s most recognizable incantation.

source

Avoiding Climate Disaster

Woke up to the wrenching news that city workers, arriving early outside Sekhnet’s home, were well into the process of cutting down a healthy 60 year-old tree that shades the house.   Sekhnet ran out, spoke to the guys busily taking the old tree apart, and saved the tree, or at least the trunk and half of its top.   Turns out, when the workers called in to confirm, that they were cutting down the wrong tree.   Sekhnet got emotional as she told the workers about the day, when she was a young child, she stood next to her father as he put a tire around the base of the seedling to protect it.  One of the guys gave her a hug.   

The planet is losing trees, the lungs of the earth, at an alarming rate.   Much of the Amazon rainforest is currently on fire as the would-be dictator of Brazil, a true fascist, talks about selling off the entire rainforest to the highest bidders.   What does he give a shit?   He’s as smart as Trump, as tough, as much of a winner.

An old friend of mine got so worked up about this mindless destruction of the earth that she went back to school and got a doctorate in how to do her part to save the planet.    She learned about a process of sequestering carbon in the soil that, if practiced globally, would do a significant amount of good.   It would prevent about 13% of the carbon that is currently being released into the atmosphere from leaving the ground.  It turns out that “modern” agricultural practices release massive amounts of CO2 into the air.    Carbon in the form of CO2 is one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for warming the planet.   The catastrophic effects of this warming can already been seen many times every year and the best case scenario gives earthlings twelve years to get CO2 emissions down to zero.   If not, we’re toast, leaving a dystopian horror story to the next generation.

Severe drought leads to massive suffering as crops fail and people become parched and hungry (see, for example, what started the Syrian civil war).   Floods and landslides displace poor people at an alarming rate.   Wildfires are raging in places where there were never fires.   We have earthquakes in areas that never had them (thank you, hydrofracking) and tornadoes in places that never saw them before.  Killer storms that dump oceans of water rage regularly.  Once enough polar ice melts (and it’s going fast) the sea level rise will create new disasters.   Populous regions will become uninhabitable.   Tens or hundreds of millions of climate refugees are no joke.  There will be widespread chaos, starvation and cannibalism.  The US military, armed with data amassed by government scientists, has long been warning about the destabilizing effect of millions of desperate, starving, homeless people on the verge of becoming cannibals, looking for a place to live. 

Armed with her doctorate, my friend is doing her part to prevent this approaching nightmare.   She’s working on a proposal to get food corporations (starting with one that’s already preaching sustainably sourced food) to incentivize farmers to follow a two step carbon sequestration process.   Two tweaks to our current agricultural methods would prevent many tons of C02 and other greenhouse gases from getting into the atmosphere.   This carbon remains in the soil if farmers plant without tilling the soil and plant cover crops in between cash crops.   Turning over the earth, it turns out, releases tons of carbon into the air.   Having a cover crop on the land actually captures carbon from the air.    The best science shows these practices would reduce atmospheric CO2 by 13%.    If humans stopped refining and burning fossil fuels today, that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 75%.   As one scientist pointed out, hair on fire “it’s all hands on deck!”

I tried to do my little part yesterday by helping her tweak the proposal she’s been improving for weeks now.   We spoke for a long time, and I thought of two main points that needed to be emphasized.   One was to put forward the scope of the problem at the top, to kindle a little wildfire of urgency under the proposal reader’s ass.   The other was to emphasize the bottom line — of all the ways to keep carbon out of the atmosphere, this is by far the cheapest, as well as the simplest.   Check it out.  

The increase of carbon in our atmosphere is warming the planet and already causing massive climate disruption: floods, droughts, wildfires, deadly storms, widespread extinctions.  Modifying our agricultural practices can remove a significant percentage of atmospheric carbon, help us mitigate these increasingly common disasters and avoid climate catastrophe.

The monetary cost of implementing no-till and cover crop agricultural practices to sequester carbon is minute compared to other methods.  The price to remove one ton of carbon from the atmosphere has fallen by 300%  since 2011, to an avg. $150/per ton (ballpark figures, she’ll calculate more precise numbers), the price for removing one ton of atmospheric carbon by this method of carbon sequestration is about $13, less than a tenth of that.    More importantly, it is sustainable, the carbon sequestration is ongoing once these changes are implemented.

I urged her to eliminate the “only 13%” language, because a 13% reduction is significant.  If you got a 13% return on any investment you’d be happy.  If you improved your test score by 13%, same thing.   If a .250 hitter improved his batting average by 13% he’d be hitting a very respectable .283.     All hands on deck.   All hands on deck!

The Federalist Society and the 5-4 Supreme Court Majority

All five right of center judges on the Supreme Court are, or have been at one time or another, members or supporters of the Federalist Society.   I have mentioned that society of conservative lawyers and law students often whenever writing about the Supreme Court  — both of Trump’s Supreme Court justices were selected from a list of twenty-five carefully vetted Federalist Society recommended ideologically pure candidates.    Here is a feature article about the Federalist Society  which gives a lot of excellent background, history and some chilling reporting. 

This is David Montgomery from that detailed piece in the Washington Post Magazine:

There is much for this crowd to celebrate. The conservative and libertarian society for law and public policy studies has reached an unprecedented peak of power and influence. Brett Kavanaugh, whose membership in the society dates to his Yale Law School days, has just been elevated to the Supreme Court; he is the second of President Trump’s appointees, following Neil Gorsuch, another justice closely associated with the society.  They join Justice Clarence Thomas (who said last spring he’s “been a part of the Federalist Society now since meeting with them … in the 1980s”), Chief Justice John Roberts (listed as a member in 1997-98) and Justice Samuel Alito (a periodic speaker at society events). The newly solidified conservative majority on the court will inevitably decide more cases in line with the society’s ideals — which include checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning. In practice, this could mean fewer regulations of the environment and health care, more businesses allowed to refuse service to customers on religious grounds, and denial of protections claimed by newly vocal classes of minorities, such as transgender people.

The creators of the Federalist Society understood that controlling the narrative to shape public opinion is an important precondition to making laws favorable to that point of view.   Moscow Mitch on the Federalists, from the David Montgomery piece:

“My goal … is to do everything we can for as long as we can to transform the federal judiciary, because everything else we do is transitory,” McConnell says. “The closest thing we will ever have an opportunity to do to have the longest impact on the country is confirming these great men and women and transforming the judiciary for as long into the future as we can.” McConnell notes that the judges list played a big part in getting Trump elected. The majority leader looks out over the gathering almost mistily as he concludes: “I hope you are proud of what we’ve done.”

As far as the Federalist Society’s longterm effect on culture and the law:

Much of the Federalist Society’s influence comes not from its very public Washington victories but from its behind-the-scenes, grass-roots ability to shift the law at the idea level, even the cultural level.

The creators of the Federalist Society, who also created many influential “think tanks”, ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (authors of “Stand Your Ground” laws and others like it), endowed university professorships, generously funded otherwise fringe, insurgent political campaigns, put on-point talking heads into every public debate, funded “grassroots” political “movements” like the “Tea Party”, hired public relations firms and pollsters to promote their views — and private investigators to find kompromat on enemies they consider dangerous (they found nothing on Jane Mayer when she was investigating the Koch network) have largely succeeded in mainstreaming their once extreme, unpopular views.   Here’s a description of one of countless similar campaigns.    The Federalist Society’s professional network is an integral part of this larger plan.

Surfacing promising judicial candidates who can be nominated when conservatives have electoral power is just one byproduct of the network, and on its own maybe not the most important one, Teles explains. There’s a supply-and-demand relationship between the judges and the network. The judges need scholarship and arguments extending Federalist principles into new areas. Where new legal theories depart from the status quo, they need them to be vetted and legitimized through public debate. They require targeted cases raising questions that provide an opening to move the law. Without professors and lawyers in the network filling that demand, Teles says, “you’re not going to maximize what you got through the electoral process.”

Some very fine people, the finest people, one suspects.  Like Federalist Society members George Conway and Don McGahn, both giddy at the recent black tie Federalist Society victory celebration bash.

 

King of The Jews

Our world-savior president, Donald J. Trump, recently embraced the exalted new name bestowed on him by tweet (by an impressive maniac in his own right) and doubling down on that inspired compliment (Trump’s only move in any situation) referred to himself (with a point at the heavens above) as “the Chosen One.”   Done and done.  The best friend the Jews ever had, since Reinhard Heydrich, and I say this as a Jew. 

The messianic president should be on guard now, I think.    I say this as a Jew, as a loyal American, as someone with Google on his phone.    Last I heard, things did not go well for the last person to wear that “King of the Jews” crown (which was made of thorns).   Y’all remember Jesus of Nazareth, “King of the Jews”?    Just type “King of the Jews” into your smartphone and you get this:

The acronym INRI represents the Latin inscription IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM (Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum), which in English translates to “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews” (John 19:19).         source

That mysterious INRI on the sign shown in many old paintings of Jesus being crucified stands for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”.   It was a final vicious mockery of the Prince of Peace, a flicker of that old Roman sense of humor. 

Likely suggested, as we are told by devout men, by the hateful “disloyal” Jews of the time, Jews that Christians soon blamed for the crucifixion of God’s son (the alternate story, that Jesus was executed by the Roman authorities, would not have been popular in Rome — and Rome controlled most of the world’s known population at the time).   Hey, it’s all about P.R., after all, if you plan to proselytize widely and become a major world religion.

It is not known whether the crucified in 33 A.D. King of the Jews had a sense of humor.  I like to think Jesus did.  It is a mark of a gentle character, to see the humor in things.  Laughing together is a beautiful way of bonding, a blessed moment of relief from oppression of every kind, a gentle reminder to be humble.   Of course, a talent for laughter is also the mark of a good Nazi, the comradely ability to see the undeniable humor in the wretched humiliation of a hated enemy.   The jury, I suppose, must be eternally out on whether INRI had a sense of humor.

A thought about humor, and who laughs, and why:  

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” [1]

Humor is clearly a double-edged sword. 

Seriously, then, our president, The Chosen One, an “extremely stable genius” (with an historically gigantic member), tweeted that he is not going to Denmark next week because he was insulted that his ridiculous proposal that the United States buy Greenland was characterized by the Danish prime minister as “abzurd”.   Greenland, by the way, is one of the places on earth where global warming is happening at a disastrously higher rate than predicted.

“‘Abzurd’,” the president repeated in disgust, quoting the mortal insult again, a moment before characterizing the Danish prime minister, a woman, as “nasty”.   

Donald King of the Jews knows a lot about nasty, vindictive, hateful bitches, always the victims, always blaming him because they are sexy, or good looking, or ugly, or powerful, or smart, or incisive, or use a word, or a tone, that wounds him.  The real victim is always the savior of mankind, about to be crucified by really unfair, totally conflicted, disloyal, nasty witch hunting bitches of both sexes, of many sexes.

I would love to be undistracted, to concentrate, back inside my imagination and my memory, on the things I need to write.   There are things in my mind much more compelling than the most recent ass-tweetings of an unstable attention-craving idiot.

My sister, for example, at the age of three or so, grabbed the largest pointed knife in the kitchen, a long, sharp meat slicer with a white handle, and plunged it toward me.  I backed away quickly without turning around, backpedalled out of the kitchen, five years old myself.   She followed a step behind, holding the large knife in front of her, tottering unsteadily forward on her tiny feet as fast as she could.   I was afraid to turn my back on her to flee up the stairs.   The pursuit ended in the front closet, me somehow backed inside it, against the coats as my sister brandished the knife, thrusting it forward, smiling fiendishly.    Why did I not simply overpower her, take the knife?   I was afraid of blood, of the aggression of this tiny child, afraid that either of us might be spouting blood out of a severed artery if a struggle over the large knife took place.  Afraid.

A friend told me that some of my writing in the first draft of the memoir of my father was “extreme”.   She was hard pressed to explain why she felt that way, beyond that it was just too brutally honest, and the conversation veered into other subjects before I could learn more.    Weeks later I read an old piece that was pretty good, but contained an objectively extreme phrase, describing my father’s angry stare as “the unblinking mask of a psychotic” or something like that.   Extreme.  My father was not psychotic, not by any definition. 

Not only was it not a good description of his face at that moment, it was a weak and distracting one, a lazy one.    It betrayed unrestrained emotion, undermined my credibility and instantly pulled the reader away from the more important truth I should have been establishing: my father, a good man, smart, funny, sensitive and idealistic, was eternally desperate and it was this desperation that kept him on guard and frequently enraged at his children.   

How the story is told is very, very important for passing on the intended message, the discovered insight.   One sloppy stroke and the reader is rightfully distracted, shakes her head “fucking guy, pretty interesting piece, but he lost me there” and then on to the next link.

Instead of making forward progress in my own life of leisure and genteel poverty (I can live without working as long as I don’t spend much money), I drink my coffee while reviewing a few events that made the news since last night.    The NY Times reports that the president called any Jew who was prepared to vote against him “ignorant” and “very disloyal”.   I know this guy simply talks out of his face and his ass interchangeably (no comment about his breath) but found that I had to read a little about it.  Which led to a youTube clip, which led to another, which led to an article and so on.

Back to the King of the Jews and disloyalty to him.   My father had a colleague and good friend named Evelyn, who later became a hated former friend and former colleague.   I  looked her up decades later and we began a correspondence.  Evelyn had converted to Judaism in the intervening years and was trying to convince me that then-presidents Bush and Cheney, the neoCons and the Evangelical right, were the best friends of Israel and all Jews.   The invasion and occupation of Iraq was very good for Israel, she argued.  The one-time socialist scholar was not very persuasive, she was unsuccessful in her mission to convert me to extreme right wing politics, in the name of Judaism and what is best “for the Jews”.   An  old saw:  two Jews in an elevator, five strenuous differences of opinion.  

An old joke, by way of  illustration:   Two Jews are stranded on a desert island for many years.  When the rescue boat finally arrives the rescuers find the two Jews have built three synagogues on the island.  “I don’t understand,” says a rescuer, “there are two Jews, why three synagogues?”   The Jews point to the third synagogue and answer, in one voice, “nobody goes to that one.”

There are Jews today who, to me, are indistinguishable from Nazis in their core beliefs, which include a righteous, well-justified refusal to regard “enemies” as human beings.   If you sincerely believe that every Palestinian two year-old is a hate-filled terrorist you might as well let them live in open air prisons until they are old enough to shoot with live ammunition at the border fence.    

If you believe, as Jews have long been urged to do by our tradition, in the importance of protecting the weak, being hospitable to the stranger among us (a tradition modern-day desert nomads still practice), you will have a much different attitude toward the suffering of any child, Palestinian babies, Israeli babies or the tiny children (and their parents) in the privately owned for-profit hell-holes that Trump’s ICE uses to keep stinking, unwashed human asylum seekers in cages.  

It is only a Nazi type who justifies inflicting  this kind of suffering on others, wholly innocent of anything themselves, insisting their victims deserve their cruel fate because they are part of an infestation of an invasive species of subhuman.   That’s Nazi shit, my friend.

To me, speaking as an American Jew, this self-appointed King of the Jews, seriously, is more like the fancy King of the Very Fine Nazis, the finest Nazis, some very, very fine Nazis.  Hey, what a cool idea: a King of the Nazis!  I guess you could also call that heaven appointed ruler the Fuhrer.  Got a nice ring to it, I think.

Nazi fucks…

 

 

[1]    Senator Leahy:  “You’ve never forgotten them laughing at you.”

Blasey Ford “They were laughing with each other.”

Leahy:  “And you were the object of the laughter?”

Blasey Ford  “I was underneath one of them, while the two laughed.”

source

A few last thoughts from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

which I must transcribe for you now, since the overdue tome I’m holding on to must go back to the library now. Shoshana Zuboff writes:

As Hayek [Friedrich Hayek, influential radical free-market economist – ed.] told Robert Bork in a 1978 interview, “i’m operating on public opinion. I don’t even believe that before public opinion has changed, a change in the law will do any good… the primary thing is to change opinion…” [1]

Indeed, and this has been a longtime project of the movers and shakers of the radical right for literally decades, since at least 1978. Changing public opinion needs to be everyone else’s project now, and going forward.

Shosahana Zuboff:

When I speak to my children or an audience of young people, I try to alert them to the historically contingent nature of “the thing that has us” by calling attention to ordinary values and expectations before surveillance capitalism began its campaign of psychic numbing. “It’s not OK to have to hide in your own life; it is not normal,” I tell them. “It is not OK to spend your lunchtime conversations comparing software that will camouflage you and protect you from continuous unwanted invasion.” Five trackers blocked. Four trackers blocked. Fifty-nine trackers blocked, facial features scrambled, voice disguised.

I tell them that the word “search” has meant a daring existential journey, not a finger tap to already existing answers; that “friend” is an embodied mystery that can be forged only face-to-face and heart-to-heart; and that “recognition” is the glimmer of homecoming we experience in our beloved’s face, not “facial recognition.” I say that it is not OK to have our best instincts for connection, empathy, and information exploited by a draconian quid pro quo that holds these goods hostage to the pervasive strip search of our lives. It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance, and desire to be catalogued, manipulated, and then used to surreptitiously herd us through the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit. “These things are brand-new,” I tell them. “They are unprecedented. You should not take them for granted because they are not OK.” [2]

[1] p. 520

[2] p. 521

from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (c) 2019 Shoshana Zuboff — published by Hatchette Book Group

my “review” of this masterpiece by Shoshana Zuboff

Don’t Worry About a Thing, he’s got the whole world in his hands

Our nation is in the hands of a world class financial genius.   He knows just how close to the brink to go before snatching victory from his adversary’s hand.   He’s crazy as a fox — and he’s never failed, never.   He was also the hero of one of America’s most popular and longest running reality TV shows ever.  He is a tremendous hero to some 60,000,000 or so great Americans.   

Pay no attentions to naysayers who try to frighten you about his supposed “impulsiveness” or “recklessness”.  His enemies will keep pointing to his several business bankruptcies, BUSINESS bankruptcies, not one of them a personal bankruptcy — personally he’s filthy rich.  Winners always play with house money.  Don’t forget this guy used to run some very successful casinos.

Still, there are those who won’t be happy until they see him fail, see America fail.  They write crazy, critical things, like this John Cassidy fellow in the New Yorker typed out in May of 2019:

The financial reprieve that Trump’s businesses received turned out to be temporary.  In 1991, his Taj Mahal casino, in Atlantic City, filed for bankruptcy protection, and, not very long after, so did his other two casinos—the Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle. In 1992, the Plaza Hotel filed for bankruptcy, and Trump agreed to turn over many of his remaining assets, including Trump Shuttle, to his creditors. With the help of the banks and his father, who repeatedly gave him money, Trump managed to escape the humiliation of personal bankruptcy, but his days as a swashbuckling entrepreneur were done. For a decade, or more, he largely confined himself to licensing deals, entertainment ventures, and minority investments that cashed in on his personal brand, which somehow survived his dramatic fall.

In May, 2019, this is all distant history, of course. But don’t let anyone tell you—not Trump, nor Newt Gingrich, nor any of the President’s other apologists—that the businesses Trump operated were successful, or that the huge losses they sustained were simply tax dodges. They weren’t.    

source

The lying mass media will show misleading graphics like this one, purposefully designed to make him look bad:

Screen shot 2019-08-16 at 3.56.29 AM.png

Real Americans LOVE this guy, and the way he’s making America great again, so do the rest of us a big fat favor, MSNBC and the failing so-called New Yorker (whatever that is) and just shut the hell up, OK?

Imbecile-in-chief intent on laughing last

Of all the damage this destructive narcissist has done so far, the thing that probably irks me the most (from a competitive list) is his despicable championing of a down-the-line partisan hack with multiple skeletons in his closet for a lifetime position on the Supreme Court [1].   The Federalist Society poster boy (a life member who was in its inaugural class at Yale Law School in the 1980s) will rule on important legal issues, unappealably, for possibly decades.  Every one of his votes can be predicted based on the issues involved, the position radical, corporatist conservatives favor, and his thoroughly consistent past rulings.   There were twenty-four other names on the list the Federalist Society gave Trump, yet the president chose to force the most despicable controversial and openly divisive of them on America.   For a generation.

Looking at choir boy Kavanaugh’s perpetually smiling face, looming out of his black judicial robes, makes me sick.   It’s tempting to use words like “scumbag” and “piece of shit”, but you get the point.   If an ugly, syphlitic penis had a face, it would be that self-satisfied, smirking mug.

I just read an excellent article by a writer named Megan Garber about the power of uproarious mockery and how Trump used it against Christine Blasey Ford, whose testimony was so vulnerably candid and powerful that even FOX news was in despair, during the break in the hearings, wringing its collective hands that Kavanaugh’s chance for appointment to the Supreme Court was over.  That was before Kavanaugh “manned up” in the afternoon session to forcefully strike back against his vicious enemies, crying, snorting and accusing, aided by a shrill, indignant Lindsay Graham and an insurmountable one vote Republican party-line majority in the Judiciary Committee.

A few days later, while the FBI was doing a very limited, five day complete investigation into Blasey Ford’s accusations, Trump, in Mississippi, had a rally of supporters cracking up at her expense.    From Megan Garber’s account:

“I had one beer,” the president, imitating Ford, said, thrusting his index finger upward to emphasize the number. He kept the digit upraised. “I had one beer!”

The president then added another character to his routine: an anonymous interrogator of Ford. “Well, do you think it was—” he began to ask.

“Nope!” he said, gleefully interrupting himself and his fictional questioner. “It was one beer.” The joke built speed. “How did you get home? I don’t remember.How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember.How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

At this, the crowd at the rally guffawed. They cheered. They broke out into applause. The president, thus galvanized, thus supported, thus loved, continued his one-man interrogation: “What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”

Of course, she remembered an awful lot of specifics, including, vividly, Kavanaugh’s drunken, dickish face looming over her as he held her down and groped her and his drunk friend Mark Judge nearby.  She remembered enough for the FBI to have easily found the exact home in which the attack took place that summer afternoon in 1982 — within a walk of the Country Club where she swam–  in  a locked room on the second floor, across from the bathroom at the top of the stairs.   Had the FBI been permitted to fully investigate, or even interview more than a small, select handful of “witnesses”, let alone talk to Kavanaugh or Blasey Ford, the specifics could easily have been confirmed.   Instead “Boof” Kavanaugh was.

Megan Garber includes this from what should have been Blasey Ford’s “end of story” testimony: 

“What is the strongest memory you have, the strongest memory of the incident, something you cannot forget?” Patrick Leahy, the Democratic senator from Vermont, asked Ford last Thursday, during her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The professor of psychology, serving as her own expert witness in the attack that she alleged Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge perpetrated, replied: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”

“You’ve never forgotten them laughing at you,” Leahy said.

“They were laughing with each other,” Ford replied.

“And you were the object of the laughter?”

“I was underneath one of them, while the two laughed.”

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”

Contrast this level of certainty and detail to what was contained in the written answers Trump gave to the Special Counsel during the investigation of his possible criminal conspiracy with Russia during his historic 2016 presidential campaign and his ongoing (and continuing) pattern of obstruction of justice, a pattern that escalated dramatically and immediately once the Special Counsel was appointed. 

Remember that these written answers were submitted because the president’s lawyers had ruled out an interview with Mueller, a guaranteed “perjury trap”  since the president has proved himself, over and over, to be simply incapable of not lying.    Trump’s lawyers’ written answers claimed he had no memory of anything, no detail too large or too small for him to have no recollection of.   

Mueller called these answers “inadequate, incomplete, imprecise and insufficient”.  A good description, certainly of the stand-up guy president’s final answer, to a detailed question about the soon to be sentenced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

TRUMP:

[no answer provided] 

Why this has hilarious FUCK YOU not been more widely publicized, I have no idea.   

The evasive and “inadequate” written answers and Mueller’s detailed queries have been on-line for a while.  You can read them here.  Scroll down to the last one for the punchline, or just check out the question and its “insufficient” answer below.  [2]   

Hilarious, no?

 

[1]  multiple accounts of years of his black out “beer” drinking, two independent, credible and detailed accounts of gross sexual impropriety (the one at Yale never investigated at all, in spite of numerous witnesses to it coming forward during the confirmation hearings), his denial of details of his close association with his disgraced former mentor Alex Kozinsky (and Kozinsky’s sexually explicit listserve), a long pattern of extreme partisanship including aggressive prosecution of then president Bill Clinton and undisclosed, classified services rendered to Dubya Bush, including during the controversial Florida recount episode.   

There was enough controversy that the voice of American Jesuits said Kavanaugh must withdraw his name from consideration.  Instead the blameless jurist made a tearful, snorting partisan speech accusing the Clintons of launching a well-funded dark money campaign of revenge against him — an unhinged speech that should have disqualified him.   To wit:

A calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. 

[2]

SPECIAL COUNSEL’S OFFICE:

b. Following the Obama Administration’s imposition of sanctions on Russia in December 2016 (“Russia sanctions”), did you discuss with Lieutenant General (LTG) Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, Erik Prince, or anyone else associated with the transition what should be communicated to the Russian government regarding the sanctions? If yes, describe who you spoke with about this issue, when, and the substance of the discussion(s).

c. On December 29 and December 31, 2016, LTG Flynn had conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about the Russia sanctions and Russia’s response to the Russia sanctions.

i. Did you direct or suggest that LTG Flynn have discussions with anyone from the Russian government about the Russia sanctions?

ii. Were you told in advance of LTG Flynn’s December 29, 2016 conversation that he was going to be speaking with Ambassador Kislyak? If yes, describe who told you this information, when, and what you were told. If no, when and from whom did you learn of LTG Flynn’s December 29, 2016 conversation with Ambassador Kislyak?

iii. When did you learn of LTG Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak’s call on December 31, 2016? Who told you and what were you told?

iv. When did you learn that sanctions were discussed in the December 29 and December 31, 2016 calls between LTG Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak? Who told you and what were you told?

d. At any time between December 31, 2016, and January 20, 2017, did anyone tell you or suggest to you that Russia’s decision not to impose reciprocal sanctions was attributable in any way to LTG Flynn’s communications with Ambassador Kislyak? If yes, identify who provided you with this information, when, and the substance of what you were told.

e. On January 12, 2017, the Washington Post published a column that stated that LTG Flynn phoned Ambassador Kislyak several times on December 29, 2016. After learning of the column, did you direct or suggest to anyone that LTG Flynn should deny that he discussed sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak? If yes, who did you make this suggestion or direction to, when, what did you say, and why did you take this step?

i. After learning of the column, did you have any conversations with LTG Flynn about his conversations with Ambassador Kislyak in December 2016? If yes, describe when those discussions occurred and the content of the discussions.

f. Were you told about a meeting between Jared Kushner and Sergei Gorkov that took place in December 2016?

i. If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, the substance of the discussion(s), and what you understood was the purpose of the meeting.

g. Were you told about a meeting or meetings between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev or any other representative from the Russian government that took place in January 2017?

i. If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, the substance of the discussion(s), and what you understood was the purpose of the meeting(s).

h. Prior to January 20, 2017, did you talk to Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, or any other individual associated with the transition regarding establishing an unofficial line of communication with Russia? If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, the substance of the discussion(s), and what you understood was the purpose of such an unofficial line of communication.

TRUMP:

(No answer provided.)

Suicide by gun doesn’t count! UNFAIR!

Our democracy is pay to play, now more than ever.   The Federalist Society caucus on the Supreme Court, in its infamous (unanimous) 5-4 Citizens United v. FEC decision, in 2010, ruled that money is speech and limiting its power in politics offends the First Amendment’s freedom of speech.   If you have more money, you get more speech, unlimited money equals unlimited speech, fair is fair.   Even if you’re a legal fiction, a certain perpetual type of business organization, you get additional, unlimited speech as a “person”.   Corporations are people.   You want proof?   They have freedom of speech, the intoxicating freedom, since 2010, to spend unlimited sums to advance their political aspirations.  That’s freedom, baby.

Sometimes such freedom is not reasonable or explainable.   Let me explain.

I’ve long noticed that gun suicides, an alarming number of American dead every week (about 458 at the 2018 rate), are not counted for purposes of gun fatality statistics in the United States.  I know, I know…  The National Rifle Association (reputedly Trump’s largest single donor during the 2016 election cycle) insists that including the bloated number of gun suicides would totally skew the gun fatality numbers and make gun ownership look way more dangerous than it actually is.  They don’t even have a rationale for not including gun suicides in the tally, but, the beauty part, they don’t need one.  The mass media always seems to go along with the NRA on this.

I noticed last week that PBS (our public broadcasting service), in a recent NewsHour piece about gun violence, didn’t mention the shocking number of suicides by gun — which they excluded while simply noting that gun suicide “makes up the largest proportion of gun deaths in America.”    PBS reported, in another recent piece I found, that last year 23,800 Americans killed themselves with guns.    We also hear that American suicide numbers are going up constantly and that suicide by gun is by far the most successful of the way of doing it, comprising more than half of the deaths (although only 6% of all attempts).  [1]

An hour after sending off a piece on this hideous truth to the Times, which I titled Et tu, PBS? I was watching a clip of Ari Melber from MSNBC that made me add (to myself) Et tu, MSNBC?  Melber spoke of encouraging signs of bipartisan progress on combatting the gathering climate catastrophe and our American plague of deadly gun violence.   He showed this graphic of gun deaths so far in 2019:

Screen Shot 2019-08-14 at 8.39.24 PM.png  

I did a quick mental calculation of 7.5 months of 23,8000 annual suicides by gun and realized the Gun Violence Archive (whatever that is) [2] had not counted (here I reached for my calculator) at least 14,875 victims of fatal gun violence (seven and a half months at last years rate).  Neither had MSNBC. 

So here we have another cooked “statistic” that is served up to us as a sobering “fact”.  Ari Melber and his team could easily have done the quick search and the calculation I did — in our instant information age it would have taken them a moment to get the actual number of gun fatalities in America. 

The number they would have arrived at for 2019 gun deaths so far is 23,967 (using last year’s gun suicide number).  Admittedly, 9,092 dead sounds better than 23,967 dead — by a long shot (or even a point blank shot to the skull), but still…

What the fuck, what the fucking fuck?

We live in emotionally unstable times, the predominant public emotions being fear, anger and hatred.   These emotions are stirred constantly by personally tailored notifications on the little computers we all carry with us in our pockets.   Our president, the billionaire offspring of the son of a lawless man deported from his native Germany (tax evasion and draft dodging) and a dirt-poor Scottish domestic servant, speaks on behalf of the desperate Americans who are setting new records for blowing their own brains out and killing themselves by drug overdoses in areas that no longer have paying jobs.  The president says, most recently, that only immigrants who are not dirt poor, or criminals (as he’s pointed out, many Mexicans are rapists.  they’re rapists) are welcome here.   Fuck refugees, people fleeing horrors of every kind, fuck all those subhuman fucks.  No room.  Get the fuck out.  USA!   USA!!!!

This troubling, divisive, false creature has a puncher’s chance of winning re-election, particularly in a system where a 78,000 margin in “swing states” is good enough to win, no matter how many millions of “popular votes” that candidate loses by.  Add to it that his party is successfully resisting all efforts to safeguard the integrity of our elections and ensure fair and accurately counted voting.   This in the face of proof that the 2016 electronic voting systems  were sweepingly and systematically hacked into, in all fifty states.  We’ll never know if vote totals were manipulated since there are no longer any paper records to consult.   The status quo seems to have favored Trump, look at his historic election mandate, so his party sees no problem with it.

Donald Trump may seem like a vain, thin-skinned strutting idiot who has no business running a candy store, let alone the world’s most powerful nation, but at least 60,000,000 Americans love him unconditionally.  His support has never varied much from around 40%, no matter what he does.   A writer named Adam Serwer put it perfectly, at the top of his piece The Cruelty is the Point:   [3]

President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear. 

Meanwhile, due to the policy of a powerful lobbying group, the voting public can’t even get basic information like how many of our desperate fellow citizens are using a few of their 393,000,000 constitutionally protected guns to blow their own heads off every day (about 65).   The NRA says “nothing to see here” and “UNFAIR!”.   And so it is.

Opinions are like assholes, true, but it would be nice if they were washed once in a while.   Lots of clean water would help, and some soap.  Sunlight, we are told, is the best disinfectant. 

 

 

[1]  I wrote a long, detailed piece on this the last few days, larded with quotations and citing every number I included,  that I was urged to send to the New York Times.   The Grey Debutante has two business days left to tell me if they’ll run some version of the overwrought piece.  They want an exclusive, so I had to take down the original and rewritten pieces from this blahg, just in case they did a google search.   If I don’t hear back by end of business Friday, I’ll be free repost it here.  And I shall.

2]  The nonprofit Gun Violence Archive has this cryptic statement on its daily ledger of gun deaths:  22,000 Annual Suicides not included on Daily Summary Ledger.  

{3]  The article ends with this beautiful, horrific paragraph:

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

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