Truth, critical thinking and adherence to the facts matter more now than at any time in our history. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse lays out an irrefutable case for Trump’s cynical weaponization of the government against the People. The case is irrefutable, except by calling Whitehouse a hysterical, sick, dangerous, partisan lunatic, and somehow discrediting, among the lowest information Americans out there, the truthful and factually detailed report he delivers to the Senate, and to the People, in this latest installment of The Scheme.
Category Archives: current events
Speaking truth to powerful idiocy
Marks [former top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, who submitted his resignation today after being given the choice to resign or be fired] said that although he was willing to work with Kennedy on his plan to review vaccine safety, “it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
And truthfully, what psychopath could possibly desire less than that?
Move Fast and Break Everything
Project 2025, the Koch network’s radical reactionary plan to let the richest .01% off the leash of government regulation, confiscatory taxes, majoritarian tyranny and accountability for crimes, while subjugating everyone else, is being carried out on the smash and grab fast track in every one of its fine points.
The authors of the radical blueprint for autocracy that Trump lied about knowing the details of (at the same time claiming to disagree with some of the manifesto he said he knew nothing about), was written by many members of Trump 1.0, who are now back in powerful roles in the insane two-year old’s second administration. It is a detailed action plan for rooting out disloyalty to the Unitary Executive and implementing a fully fascist, corporately-controlled US, fueled by revenge and intimidation of all dissent. Full steam ahead!
The only problem for Project American Hitler and the Richest White Men of North America, and it may be a problem that saves this tottering experiment in democracy and respect for basic human dignity, is that much of what they are doing is plainly illegal and unconstitutional. As well as cruel, thoughtless, rash, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, economically imbecilic, driven by a psychopath’s unquenchable need to prevail, destroy the opponent and have every bit of revenge he’s entitled to.
For example, only Congress can create a government agency, so an outfit like “DOGE”, strictly speaking, and in spite of numerous sworn lies as to who is running Musk’s little “agency”, and the mass media all referring to it as a Department, as though legally created and not pulled directly out of Charles Koch’s crusty 90 year-old sphincter, is illegal under our laws, traditions and the Constitution which vests the power to create a monstrosity like the “Department of Government Efficiency” solely in Congress. Congress is also the only branch of government that can allocate and spend tax money, whether in the interest of “efficiency”, lack of accountability, covering up crimes or any other purpose.
An unelected, insane, unqualified, oligarch political donor unilaterally ending the sixty year foreign aid program to keep starving children alive, protect millions of children in danger of death from malaria, fund NGOs that care for war orphans abroad, defunding the Veteran’s Affairs suicide hotline (for fuck’s sake!), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, closing Social Security offices, illegally mass firing key staff throughout the federal government via email, the illegal round-up and televised deportation of persons subject to the jurisdiction of the US and its Constitution, the mafia don like shake downs of all perceived rivals, bullying, baseless lawsuits against cowed, spineless mass media corporations, compliant universities, a prominent non-MAGA law firm — all fucking illegal.
Who enforces the law? On the federal level a loyal MAGA lie endorsing diehard who was too corrupt and radioactive for Trump to hire back in 2017. After all, as Florida AG under the Viktor Orban-like Ron “Go-go boots” DeSanctimonious, she had recently taken a $25,000 campaign contribution from Trumpie to drop Florida’s investigation into his fraudulent, now shuttered, Trump University. Now she’s 100% team Trump, the criminal president’s personal lawyer in a way even the pathetic, historically corrupt Bill Barr refused to be, including endorsing the fiction that the 2020 election was rigged and illegally stolen from the rightful winner, Mr. T. Pam Bondi is eager and ready to do anything Aileen Cannon would do if she were the AG. Cannon, of course, is poised to occupy Alito’s or Thomas’s incredibly foul smelling seat among the Immortal Nine, The Federalist Society Six. Extremists, if they occupy even a one vote majority, can have the final say on virtually everything. And that is their plan, to seize democracy by a one vote majority and shut the whole goddamned experiment down.
Fortunately the courts are holding so far. They have called bullshit over and over on weak, stupid and lying arguments made by MAGA officials defending illegal actions in court. We may be headed for an Andrew Jackson moment, I sure hope not, but it’s not unlikely when you depend on angry, vengeance seeking psychopaths to do what’s right for others. Jackson was a pugnacious psychopath with a famously foul temper who told the chief justice “you’ve made your ruling, now where’s your army to enforce it, bitch?” I asked a friend who knows American history in uncanny detail what happened after Jackson made that challenge.
“The Trail of Tears,” he said, referring to a mass killing death march under the Indian Removal Act, a death march the Supreme Court had tried to stop as unconstitutional. Fuck me, I thought, no wonder Old Hickory is Old Orange’s favorite president. Made millions capturing and selling slaves, told the Supreme Court to suck his hickory stick, regretted not personally hanging his disloyal Vice President and fellow psychopath John C. Calhoun. No wonder Trump put the guy’s portrait in the Oval Office. Jackson is a president after the Orange Polyp’s own heart, an American Putin, (minus the kompromat on the current American “president” — notice how Trump always claims to know nothing about the actions of his own executive branch).
The mass pain that this president of subnormal intelligence and supernatural stubbornness is inflicting directly on millions of his supporters, as well as on America’s allies (on behalf of a war criminal dictator involved in the, LOL! “Rusher Hoax” that helped place him in office two out of three tries) will not help him in the court of public opinion when the idiotic ideas he’s implementing really start hitting the fan, like the proverbial poop these dumb ideas are.
Trump’s best hope to become the American Hitler is mass public violence (and he has the proven violent goon squad standing back and standing by, awaiting his next command) and the strong, powerful right arm of devout Christian Pete “I didn’t rape that lying bitch, I was drunk, my lawyers fucking paid her, shut up, for Christ’s sake, I have a hangover!” Hegseth and his generals ordering US troops to open fire on dissenting Americans under an invocation of Mike “Q-Anon” Flynn’s favorite American law, The Insurrection Act.
I’m betting on democracy, no matter what the oddsmakers and bookies in Las Vegas are saying. Call me Anne Frank, but I’m betting that Americans are better, and much smarter, than Trump and his movement think we are.
Message from Big Balls
There is literally no limit to how stupid, vicious and incompetent psychopaths like father of 13 (all by IVF) Musk, his front man DJT and their young, unprincipled anti-government hackers (on the payroll of the government) are. I went on to the Social Security website to download my 1099. In order to log in I needed an email sent to me with a security code. Here’s the email that came from ssa.gov:
Google says: you can’t trust a message from Social Security, proceed with caution, red flag, red flag!
Apparently you can pick up one of these MAGA hats in Greenland or Canada. God bless these United Shayyssssh.
Traitorgate
Mary Trump posted this picture at the top of her piece called The Ongoing National Security Debacle. I have only one word to add to the caption of this picture worth thousands of words. Mary’s caption is fine, excellent, really.
Morons.
I have read several excellent pieces about this foul bit of ongoing fascist foreplay, the illegal, asshole use of a chat group, on personal phones, to plan and gloat about a secret military strike. Timothy Snyder’s analysis of the larger point of this group chat bullshit is brilliant. Heather Cox Richardson’s keeps to her very high standard of excellent, insightful reporting — if you only read one, her’s is the one to read. Robert Reich is on fire on the obvious, burning question of Where Are the fucking Democrats at this moment?
This kind of coverage (the three mentioned above, I haven’t read Mary’s yet) is a huge part of the fight we all need to participate in, now and not when we are done trembling about the lack of amenities at the eventual death camp many of us will be shoehorned into.
When you are up against Nazis you are fighting psychopaths, whatever spineless mainstream Democrats may say about the virtues of playing possum while the Nazis magically self-destruct because of their own hubris, irrationality, stupidity and incompetence. The very things that drive Nazis. The exact things we have to remain educated about, highlight and fight at every turn. At every fucking turn, my friends.
By the time posting a picture like this is “domestic terrorism” American will be great again (and I will be interned in Camp Schumer)
I’m going to take a break from thinking about my vexing personal situation, worries about a suddenly intermittent ability to pass bloody urine since an unnecessary urethral surgery done by a master salesman so confident he felt no need to do a single pre-surgical test, to muse a bit about another dangerous psychopath everyone in the world knows, and a good percentage of the world hates.
Those who hate him, or course, suffer from a special mental illness his handlers have cooked up (a regurgitated version of [Dubya] Bush Derangement Syndrome from the pre-Obama era), so we can, fairly and honestly, consider him universally loved, perhaps even intergalactically so.
(Why should I be required to show more courage than Columbia University, ABC, Disney, Chuck Schumer, bumbling numbskull John Fetterman, the Republican-led Congress, various law firms the president has threatened? Only one reason, actually: not to obey a wannabe American Hitler and his stinking horde in advance, fighting fascism fucking 101, brothers and sisters. I know well how many of the dead the original Hitler caused to be slaughtered (full disclosure, I may have an ax to grind, dozens in my family were killed by Elon’s and Don’s Herr H.), his one small fault now reduced by many to merely hating Jews a little bit (and who doesn’t? [1]), though the well-documented history of his impressive mass murder score is being erased, possibly by Musk employee Big Balls himself, as I tap this keyboard)
Anyway, sorry for the distraction. I was going to show you a picture, which I display under the for now robust protections of free expression provided by the First Amendment, which may soon be banned, even criminalized as “domestic terrorism” by Elon “Free Speech” Musk, enemy of unelected bureaucrats, and Pam “Too Corrupt to Serve in Trump’s first term” Bondi. Here you go:
Now these two photos of the same man are equally handsome, a fair minded person might say. One wears makeup, had painful scalp reduction surgery (which caused him to violently assault his first wife, who’d suggested the plastic surgeon who left him in agony) and spends twice the average worker’s annual income every year in hair dressing to make himself look tall and tan and young and lovely as the Girl From Ipanema. The other, non-cosmetically enhanced head merely reflects the results of 78, going on 79, years of life’s inevitable changes.
We live in a culture of illusion/deception by advertising, with a focus on youthful beauty, and Trumpie is touted as a genius because he has played to this illusion/deception “like nobody’s ever seen.” Leave aside the well-known fact that the man is a compulsive liar. There are other ways to refer to someone who constantly spouts falsehoods (see — NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, Völkischer Beobachter). In the law there is a distinction between “puffery” — making exaggerated claims of one’s own power to intimidate an adversary that do not cross the line into outright lies — and making false statements under oath or as an officer of the court (all lawyers who appear before judges are considered officers of the court) which are punishable as perjury. I apologize, insincerely, for this perverse insistence on drawing logical and semantic lines in the sewage we are all ankle deep in during Musk/Trump 2.0 Triumph of Wanton Irrationality Crusade.
The entire billionaire funded reactionary right-wing project of the last several decades, now in full stinking flower, has been to destroy meaning, to nullify rationality itself. Our current age of irrationality makes actual dialogue or negotiation between political opponents impossible since an irrational argument, asserted loudly and repeatedly, is just as good, for purposes of swaying public opinion, as a detailed, fact-based one that logically and completely refutes the other based on a body of what was once called incontrovertible evidence. Today, these irrational monsters controvert and crowds cheer, it’s not a problem at all.
This “the only the reality is what we say it is” leaves only constant warfare between hated enemies, rather than the sometimes contentious policy debates integral to a functioning democracy. Nazis don’t want democracy, they want Nazism, duh. You are either a woke snowflake who hates everything the rightful oligarchs of America stand for, OR, a courageous and fearless patriot who wants to turn America back to the paradise it was before insane deep state regulations destroyed the ability of Robber Barons to make, and keep, unregulatable wealth and operate as they saw fit, for the benefit of themselves and their poorly paid virtual slaves alike.
I was hoping for something a bit more profound today, and frankly I’ve disappointed myself. It’s hard to get out of your own feelings about being injured, physically and psychically, by a master salesman psychopath by writing about another one we are all sickeningly familiar with, or in love with his carefully manufactured false image (those who do not suffer from the widespread plague of TDS). His image again, please:
This thin-skinned stable genius strongman was recently bitterly crying over an official portrait of his, hung somewhere in 2019, that shows him looking a bit fat, bloated, an unhealthy color more like the unretouched one above than the carefully beautiful John Boehner-toned one he projects every day (he bragged that he was prettier than Kamala Harris, you be the judge, carefully…). The portrait’s painter, according to the strongest, most secure man in the free world, is a hack who is losing her skills, a bitch, probably an abortionist, sick, dangerous, a deranged enemy lunatic pet-eating sickie who deliberately tried to humiliate the world’s most handsome man after making Obama look so much more handsome than she made him look. Or, perhaps she’s just a portraitist who faithfully painted what she saw.
What do I know? The best I can do is something like this self-pitying self portrait as a partially crucified Picasso with pissbag and stylish, crucifix-coordinated shorts.
[1] By the way, according to Hannah Arendt’s short, encyclopedic primer on the original Nazis, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin edition, 2006, p. 133), Hitler himself had a list of 340 Jews on his personal “don’t touch Moishe” list.
An American leader even stupider and more spineless than Trump
I wrote this last night, before several members of the opposition party folded and made a catastrophic deal with, do not flinch from this word, read history, American Nazis.
This is the insane, erratic, enraged, two year-old, whose opposition leader apparently has no memory, courage, sense, dignity or access to the internet. The only man capable of making a very stable genius, who is actually a very unstable, stupid person, look like the artist of the deal.
Criticized? Read this Chuck, you stupid motherfucker (and forward it to Gillebrant and the other invertebrates who voted with you). This is the last time Trump shut down the government, in his previous temper tantrum showdown with sick, dangerous enemies. Wikipedia, jackass.
The United States federal government shutdown from midnight EST on December 22, 2018, until February 9, 2019 (35 days) was the longest government shutdown in US history[1][2] and the second[a] and final federal government shutdown involving furloughs during the first presidency of Donald Trump. It occurred when the 115th Congress and Trump could not agree on an appropriations bill to fund the operations of the federal government for the 2019 fiscal year, or a temporary continuing resolution that would extend the deadline for passing a bill. The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal departments or agencies from conducting non-essential operations without appropriations legislation in place. As a result, nine executive departments with around 800,000 employees had to shut down partially or in full, affecting about one-fourth of government activities and causing employees to be furloughed or required to work without being paid.[3] The Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown cost the American economy at least $11 billion USD, excluding indirect costs that were difficult to quantify.[4]
The shutdown stemmed from an impasse over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in federal funds for a U.S.–Mexico border wall.[5][6][7] In December 2018, the Senate unanimously passed an appropriations bill without wall funding, and the bill appeared likely to be approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Trump. After Trump faced heavy criticism from some right-wing media outlets and pundits for appearing to back down on his campaign promise to “build the wall“, he announced that he would not sign any appropriations bill that did not fund its construction. As a result, the House passed a stopgap bill with funding for the wall, but it was blocked in the Senate by the threat of a Democratic filibuster.[8]
In January 2019, representatives elected in the November 2018 election took office, giving the Democrats a majority in the House. The House immediately voted to approve the appropriations bill that had previously passed the Senate unanimously (which included no funding for the wall). For several weeks, Trump continued to maintain that he would veto any bill that did not fund an entire border wall, and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the Senate from considering any appropriations legislation that Trump would not support, including the bill that had previously passed.[9][10] Democrats and some Republicans opposed the shutdown and passed multiple bills to reopen the government, arguing that the government shutdown amounted to taking civil servants “hostage” and that negotiations could only begin once the government was reopened.[11][12][13][14]
On January 25, 2019, Trump agreed to endorse a stopgap bill to reopen the government for three weeks up until February 15 to allow for negotiations to take place to approve an appropriations bill that both parties could agree on.[15] However, Trump reiterated his demand for the border wall funding and said that he would shut down the government again or declare a national emergency and use military funding to build the wall if Congress did not appropriate the funds by February 15.[15][16]
Trump’s approval rating dropped during the shutdown.[17][18] A majority of Americans opposed exploitation of the shutdown as a negotiating strategy and held Trump responsible for the shutdown: A CBS News poll found that 71% of Americans considered the border wall “not worth the shutdown”[19] and a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 53% of Americans blamed Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, compared to 34% who blamed Democrats and 10% who blamed both parties.[20]
On February 15, 2019, Trump declared a national emergency to fund the wall and bypass Congress, after being unsatisfied with a bipartisan border bill that had passed the House and the Senate a day before.[21]
Musk ought to name the first vernichtungslager after you, Schumer, you pathetic unwitting, democracy betraying, weak, easily played, collaborator motherfucker. Nice work, asshole, now do the Roman salute.
Why is any of this hard for America to grasp? (rhetorical question)
The power to create federal agencies resides exclusively in Congress. Leaders of these agencies must be confirmed by Congress, after FBI vetting, conflict of interest checks and public hearings. The power of appropriating tax dollars and spending them is exclusive to Congress. Congress holds the power of the purse. Yet Trump creates a fake agency, cutely named DOGE, appoints an unelected, unvetted billionaire disrupter, with multiple conflicts of interest and many investigations into his shady business practices, experienced only in slashing his workforce, spreading racism (“free speech”), setting a modern record for buying access to power ($270,000,000 and growing) and creating chaos to head the “agency”. The president’s lawyers deny in a sworn statement to the court that this unhinged maniac is in charge, as he illegally mass fires government workers, closes agencies, withholds funds Congress has voted to disburse.
Everyone acts as though this clear violation of multiple laws, and the constitution itself, is all perfectly fine, or at least a matter for the courts to sort out. The NY Times, and virtually everyone else, refers to this fake agency as The Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) as though it’s an actual, legally created government department with unlimited power over every other department. It’s all perfectly normal, by the looks of it, insane and arbitrary as it also clearly is.
A group of reactionary billionaires, in their most recent manifesto, Project 2025, begs to differ with the constitutional order. They regard efficient, elected government as “majoritarian tyranny” that persecutes the billionaire class. They are persecuted by regulations on how they may treat their workers, how much pollution their factories can emit, how safe their products must be. So they prefer an all-powerful CEO with the power to make all these persecutions vanish.
They played the long game, orchestrating the capture of the Supreme Court, achieving a 6-3 majority of ideological purists, “Originalists”, from a far-right judicial fraternity called the Federalist Society, funded the by the same folks who fund the Heritage Foundation and all other reactionary “think tanks”. This majority ruled that unlimited, dark money is political speech (for corporations and the super wealthy, anyway), that racist voter suppression laws and racial gerrymandering are fine unless made with explicit racist intent, announced explicitly during the hearings for the law in question, that anti-bribery laws only apply in certain specific scenarios, that government scientists don’t get the last word on scientific decisions, white Christian legislators and judges do, that the president may sometimes have to commit criminal acts in the course of his core duties (how about a hypothetical there, boys?) and that these criminal acts may not ever be prosecuted. They added a cherry to this shit sundae (which also, of course, abandons the fate of raped, pregnant girls and women to their individual state legislatures) by ruling that no presidential pardon, even if sold outright in public, may ever be questioned in court.
Granted, MAGA is absolutely a cult and Trump has been vetting it for loyalty with extreme zealousness since his loss in 2020. The Republican party has rid itself of any elected officials who defy the cult leader. They are as spineless, and infinitely flexible in their views, as they are punitive and driven by a thirst for vengeance. But where is the opposition party? Outside of a small handful of elected Democrats, and a group of Democratic attorneys general, there is barely a peep from the corporate Democratic leadership. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx) is great, we hear from Jamie Raskin (D-Md), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) but rarely a murmur from anyone else.
How is it that DOGE is not denounced daily as an illegal “agency”? It was not created by Congress, it was pulled out of Charles Koch’s crusty nonagenarian ass. How is the illegal shuttering of USAID, the decimation of Medicaid, the mass firing of IRS, Veterans Affairs (thanks for your service, assholes) Department of Education civil servants, and thousands of others, just subject matter for law suits? How is a hopped up, unelected oligarch’s idiotic refrain of ridding us of “unelected bureaucrats”, not routinely and regularly slapped down as the simpleminded self-contradictng bullshit that it is?
I understand that rage is not amenable to reason. Strong emotion beats a beautifully articulated logical argument in the court of public opinion, but still — how about a little fucking truth and clarity once in a while?
Has America really succumbed to an irrational narrative? This narrative is perpetrated by corporate media, for profit. There are two sides to every story, and almost half of Americans polled approve of the insane two year-old whose vocabulary has shrunk to the level of an eight year old. Fine people in the Nazi party (führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft, sure, but don’t call us Nazis, those are Roman salutes!) and among those enemies the Nazis target. False nuance swallows a very clear narrative: one side relies on constant lies, the stoking of rage and flagrant violations of law to fire up their angry base, the other side believes good policies, fairness in law enforcement and acknowledged equality and respect for human dignity win the day among their reasonable supporters (and wealthy/corporate donor base).
In the battle between lies and truth, there is no middle ground. What the fuck, America? The truth ain’t that threatening, call out the lies every single time, put the proof on the table. Trump failed to rig the 2020 election and incited a riot to culminate a seven tentacled conspiracy to cling to power. It appears he did a much better job in 2024, the first ever election in the Trump era that was not “rigged”. His “mandate” is the narrowest in decades, his approval rating, at this point in his presidency, the lowest on record (breaking his own record from 2017). Plus, he’s clearly insane. What the fuck, America?
January 6, Day of Love
Here’s what the commander-in-chief told the crowd at The Ellipse on January 6th, right before sending them off to fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore.
Fascism is always based on lies. It cannot function without a lying counter narrative contradicting what everybody is able to see, hear and smell with their own senses. That this shameless enraged 2-year-old is a master of lying temper tantrums, should not distract anybody from his essential nature. Note the simplistic elegance of this particular lie:
The 2020 election was stolen, the proof of the rigged election was covered up by a corrupt bipartisan coalition of sick and insane haters, therefore, anything we need to do now is fully justified in the eyes of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Now go hang that traitor, Mike Pence!
I will try to post an infamous MAGA lie here every couple of days, until this insane fucker self-destructs, or I am arrested in the middle of the night and sent to a dark site somewhere.
Viral speech
Every citizen who does not believe in dictatorship as the best form of government should listen to this speech. A masterpiece of clear thinking and statements of simple truths I wish American politicians were able to duplicate. Fascism is always based on lies, it cannot function without them. This French senator is from a center-right party, he’s no socialist. For that reason his frank words should carry even more weight with the average minimally informed American. Forward this link to everyone you know. Bravo, Claude Malhuret!
gratuitousblahg 