Category Archives: current events

Criminal Obstructionists

Our nation’s top law enforcement officer, Bagpiper Bill Barr, Trump’s third and most aggressively protective Attorney General, is instructing all eye witnesses to and those knowledgeable about Trump’s likely obstruction not to testify.  This applies to former DOJ employees who came forward voluntarily and anyone who has received a legally sufficient subpoena to testify.   Barr is fighting all subpoenas in court under a very weak (but effectively clock-running) blanket “protective executive privilege” argument.   Barr is currently trying to prevent Mueller from more than a token appearance before Congress.   Mueller’s July 17th  appearance is now in question, according to Friday’s reports it’s been suddenly rescheduled for July 24th.

NOTHING TO HIDE, YOU FUCKING LOSERS!!!   NO DO-OVERS (except for my boss!)!!!  NO COLLUSION, NO OBSTRUCTION, WITCH HUNT!

Bagpiper Bill is unscrupulous, and dishonest.    His loyalty to his boss, admirable in some circumstances, is despicable in the context of who he’s defending, based on the many sworn witness accounts of ongoing obstruction set out in the Mueller report,  and how he has been defending him– often with outright lies (more about that in a moment).  He shamelessly shills for and doggedly defends his president (who has his own army of lawyers and appointees to do this), rather than serving as the head of a legitimate and fair Department of Justice charged with the administration of justice, which is another word for “fairness”.

Barr echoes each of his boss’s most ridiculous claims, gives them the imprimatur of the head of the Justice Department.   He announced that the DOJ is investigating “spying” on Trump during the Russia-involved Trump campaign (recall, 100 plus instances of coordination between is campaign and Russia do no amount to “collusion”).  Heroic obstructionist Mitch McConnell had told Obama that he would flay him publicly for “interfering in the 2016 election” if Obama revealed the intelligence about and investigation into Russian interference when they were all briefed on it prior to the election.  Barr is investigating the “partisan” Republican-appointed investigators into Trump’s likelier than not obstruction.   Barr is a giddy bully with the power of the Department of Justice to throw behind his threats.   He is currently intimidating witnesses.

We are at a breaking point for this experiment in democracy.  If a one vote majority is good enough to confirm a divisive, ideologically driven partisan Supreme Court justice, and decide, 5-4 (along ideological lines), cases that affect millions and millions of Americans — well, that’s very close to the breaking point of representative democracy.

Oh, yes, just a small bouquet of Barr’s transparent lies.  It is bracing to consider that the new standard for untruth that we need to be concerned with, under this compulsive liar who is the nation’s thrice bankrupt CEO, is chargeable criminal perjury that will result in a 100% conviction.   The Overton Window has been moved radically in the last few years– lying to advance one’s cause is no longer considered anything to be ashamed of.  In the famous phrase of soundly defeated ahead-of-his-time Republican extremist Barry Goldwater “extremism in defense of freedom is no vice”.  Look at Trump, McConnell and Barr.  They’ve learned that this works especially well when done in slow motion.    NO VICE!   LOSERS! 

Here’s Barr, in April, three months back, toward the beginning of his long, slow stalling tactic, designed to run out the clock on legal opposition to his boss’s (and his) obstruction, lying his ample ass off (arguing for no do-over):

Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims. 

Only a carping “enemy of the people” would point out the well-known details of the White House’s “full cooperation” (which we all see demonstrated daily, on display alongside the president’s famous sense of fair play):

a) access to campaign and White House documents was extremely fettered.  Trump is currently defying the law and not turning over subpoenaed documents.  He has several cases in court now blocking access to requested documents, financial and otherwise.  In the Deutsche Bank case these documents could be very embarrassing to the president, if not also incriminating.   He’s been ordered to turn them over but has ordered his legal team to appeal the ruling.   Trump has long been what Shakespeare called an “action-taking knave”, a wealthy scoundrel who “lawyers up” to weaselishly get what he wants from people who have the better of the argument.   Delay is the action-taking knave’s best friend and both he and Barr know this well.

b)  key witnesses lied to the FBI and to Mueller, or, like the president and his family members (two of whom are highly placed officials in his administration) simply refused to testify.   The Acosta/Epstein-like deal Trump struck with Mueller was to answer only written queries, each of which, except for the last one, he answered by pleading no memory.  The last question was so unnerving that his lawyers had him actually refused to answer it at all.   Mueller tactfully called this refusal to answer “inadequate”.  Trump also refused to answer Mueller’s follow-up questions.  Inadequate, you know, truly and 100% beyond argument: inadequate..  ONE BITE AT THE APPLE, LOSER!  Senior aides and others were (and are, under this bogus privilege claim) forbidden from giving testimony to anyone, in any sworn setting (NO DO-OVERS, LOSERS!  NO PERJURY TRAPS!)

c) a flimsy protective privilege for all testimony and documents related to the redacted Mueller report has been asserted, on Barr’s written advice to the president.  It is virtually certain that this asserted blanket privilege will eventually be dismissed as groundless, but it might be a crucial year or two before that happens.  In Barr’s defense, it was the one part of his statement he wasn’t lying about, at the time.   Although he later urged the president, in the interest of gaining maximum stonewalling time, to assert this privilege, at the time he spoke, in mid-April, the Orange Menace had asserted no absolute, all-encompassing executive privilege.

As no less an authority than Bill Barr himself said, during a network television interview toward the start of this latest round of blatant obstruction of justice (hey, the top cop from the party that controls 3 of the 4 power centers of our democracy doesn’t have to worry about anyone dropping a dime on HIM):

Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good.  They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have.

They start viewing themselves as the guardians of the people that are more informed and insensitive than everybody else. They can- in their own mind, they can have those kinds of motives. And sometimes they can look at evidence and facts through a biased prism that they themselves don’t realize.[1]    

source

Me?  As soon as the legally gerrymandered election of 2020 is over, I’ll be waiting in line for my tattoo, and instructions about which train to get on, to the designated branch of the independently owned Trump American indigents’ Luxury Detention Center.

 

[1] It’s fascinating, and a bit sickening, to watch this interview, in light of what we know now, having seen more of Mueller’s actual findings, including Trump’s inadequate non-answer to Mueller’s most probing question.   We can now see that this immoral lawyer lies as shamelessly as his current master;  he’s smarter, and much more disciplined, but just as shameless.

Here’s a gem from that interview:

WILLIAM BARR: I’d rather, in many ways, I’d rather be back to my old life but I think that I love the Department of Justice, I love the FBI, I think it’s important that we not, in this period of intense partisan feeling, destroy our institutions. I think one of the ironies today is that people are saying that it’s President Trump that’s shredding our institutions. I really see no evidence of that, it is hard, and I really haven’t seen bill of particulars as to how that’s being done.

From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring.

 

Aktions and Trump

Piecing together what we thought we knew about the location of the hamlet in the Belarusian marsh our grandparents came from, my cousin and I settled on a spit of land across the Pina River from Pinsk.   It fit the descriptions we had, though it was not marked on any map anyone could find [1].   Assuming that’s where they lived, it is a simple matter to find out the dates of the Pinsk Aktions, the Nazi mobilizations to round up and liquidate the local population, and we always assumed it was on those dates that the Nazis killed everyone in our family who had not made it to America by 1923 or died before those terrible dates.

Aktion is what the Nazis called these round-ups and “liquidations”.   They’d assemble all the undesirables, the poisoners of the genetic pool, the deadly enemies of the people, down to the tiniest children, and lead them off to their deaths.   An aktion usually involved a bunch of men with guns and a large ditch, sometimes dug, at gunpoint, by the victims.   

The men who did the killing during an aktion, the einsatzgruppen, had a famously hard time, many became alcoholics and drug addicts.   This is one reason the Nazis mechanized the process, to spare their people the horror of what it was necessary to do.  There were simply too many enemies of the people to be killed and it is hard for a human being to shoot dozens, if not hundreds, of unarmed civilians day after day.    No matter how strongly one believed in the ultimate justice of what one was doing.   How many children can you murder before it gets to you?

I would not put that question to our president.   I seriously don’t think the suffering or even the death of an illegal Mexican rapist child means anything to him.   Look at the evidence.  He’s got untold numbers of children from Central America in child prisons, dirty, disease infested, cramped, unhealthy child prisons.  Concentration camps, actually (and recall, these facilities are not nearly as bad as Death Camps where actual mass killing was carried out).   Concentration camps.   For children.   

His spin is that these kids have it great, much, much better than in their shithole countries, even if the food and sanitary conditions are sometimes not fantastic.  Whatever he’s been ordered by federal courts to do about this brutal policy of family separation, he clearly doesn’t give a shit.   Neither do the people running these brutal facilities where kids are not allowed to wash, where they sleep on the floor, where disease proliferates, where every sort of abuse is winked at.

Recently the president has been making a lot of noise, for the benefit of his angry base and to fire them up about his reelection campaign (which began the day he was inaugurated, before a historically gigantic crowd of supporters), about rounding up millions of these illegal alien fuckers and doing whatever is necessary to get these sons of bitches out of our country.  OUT!  NO MORE ROOM!   OUT!   BACK TO YOUR SHITHOLE COUNTRIES, LOSERS!

The president often behaves like an angry psychopath.  His people love it!   He was planning his nonlethal aktion for the July 4th weekend, then decided not to politicize the day, just having military jets fly over him as he made a patriotic speech.   But now he announces it’s going to happen, as promised, a massive round up of perhaps millions, simultaneously in more than ten cities where they are hiding these filthy, violent criminals.   His base, crazed with inchoate fear and hatred that Trump understands intimately, loves this kind of macho no prisoners theatre.

When journalist and legal American resident Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi embassy where he was strangled and dismembered on the orders of MBS of the Saudi Arabian monarchy, Trump was sympathetic.  To his killers.   He changed his tune over and over as the various transparent lies of MBS and his people came out.  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “MBS is denying it very strongly, very strong denial.  So, you know.”    Even when it was shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that Saudis close to MBS planned and carried out the grisly execution, Trump shrugged. It was hard to think that Trump wouldn’t love to be able to have some of these fake news enemy of the people fuckers given the old Khashoggi treatment.

You know, without the illegal leaks, and the people who won’t shut up, and the laws, and the courts, the unfair courts that only get it right when they dismiss a suit against Trump for lack of standing or some other technicality, and the press, the goddamned disloyal press — oh, and subpoenas and so-called legal process — but especially the press, the media, with their constant airing of very unfair facts, and photographs, and videos and interviews with lying, disloyal people who won’t shut up, who think they are fighting for some kind of justice (fake justice) there would be no problems.  Trump and his people know what to do.   Get rid of all the fucking illegal immigrants.   Is that too much to ask?

Without the goddamned lying media, A.G. Bill Barr’s (arguably) false public statement:

Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims. 

would be an unchallengeable slam dunk, don’t you see?  Only an enemy of the people would point out that access to campaign and finance documents was extremely fettered, that key witnesses lied or refused to testify, that the president submitted only to written queries and answered each one pleading no memory before finally simply refusing to answer at all, that senior aides and others were and have been forbidden from giving further testimony (NO DO-OVERS, LOSERS!) and that a flimsy protective privilege for all testimony and documents related to the redacted Mueller report has been asserted, on fucking Bagpiper Bill Barr’s written advice to the president.

It’s hard to think that someone as childishly impulsive and transactional as Trump wouldn’t jump at the chance to silence a particularly vicious “enemy of the people” by any means he could get away with.  This is a man who paid off women he probably paid to have sex with, had them sign non-disclosure agreements and fought them to a standstill in the courts.  This is a man who repeatedly called for the execution of five NYC boys who were completely exonerated of the crime they were convicted of.   Kill them anyway.  This is one sick puppy.

This planned nonlethal aktion against “illegals”– I’m sure Trump is wishing it could be something even more dramatic.   Imagine the polling numbers if he could actually go on TV and shoot a few of these raping fucks in their ugly, desperate faces?

 

[1]  It turns out, according to a Belarusian geneologist named Yuri that my cousin hired,  the shtetl was not across the Pina from Pinsk, but 40 something kilometers east, closer to Stolin (Plotnitsa being the closest town on a map).  There was, of course, an aktion there too.   The Nazis were nothing if not thorough.

Bagpiper Bill’s increasingly desperate defense of Donald Trump

Weeks before releasing any part of Mueller’s report (including the redacted summary Mueller had provided to Barr, along with the report) suddenly squirrelly (details below) Bill Barr defended the innocent, unfairly persecuted Unitary Executive this way:

There is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.  [1]

You’ll have to take my word that this is a verbatim transcript of what the skilled and highly principled evasionist/obstructionist said in explaining that the president was understandably angry and frustrated, as anyone would be, by his sincere belief that he was innocent and being persecuted.   I transcribed this from an audio recording, made a few months back when I heard it excerpted again on Preet Bharara’s podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet.   (I can tell from the background music that Preet played the clip, it’s possibly from  the 3/25/19 episode).

According to Barr, if someone (in his party) has a sincere belief (like Boof Kavanaugh’s that he was never drunk enough to fall on a younger woman and paw at her clothes, or drunkenly thrust his penis in another woman’s face at Yale) then THAT SHOULD BE ENOUGH.   What do you people want?   He had a sincere belief that his enemies wanted to harm him.   How do you expect him to feel?  Of course he was furious, and frustrated, who wouldn’t be?!   They were going to undermine him, and his political opponents were ready to pile on, and things we classified top secret, because they were harmful to him, were illegally leaked by sinful traitors who wouldn’t know loyalty if it came up and buggered them!

We have all noted that in these kinds of disputes (Trump vs. the lies of the partisan Mueller report that totally exonerated him) facts and Reason are easily cast aside in our bloodthirstily tribal culture.   It’s emotions that matter, get people worked up enough to go to the polls, where, if they are not black, or hispanic, or young, or in college, or old, or transexuals, or activists, they can easily cast their votes to Make America Great Again.

We want to undercount millions that the constitution requires be enumerated every ten years because — WE ARE DEFENDING THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT!  Yes, that’s right.   We are defending the federal law that says states cannot discriminate against citizens who want to vote because of race, or to favor a more racist political party, as has been, admittedly, done in our past, particularly, but not only in, the states of the former Confederacy, for a century or more.   That’s why we don’t want to count inhabitants of hated ethnic and social groups who may or may not be citizens.   To protect the right of all Americans, not only Democrats, to vote!

The Federalists on the court all liked this reason, found it good enough to pass Supreme Court scrutiny.  Only John Roberts (now the “swing vote”, God help us) pointed out that the administration’s “reason” for asking a citizenship question on the 2020 Census appeared to be contrived, and counter to the evidence.   Roberts suggested that a sensible reason, no matter how flimsy, would have sufficed, but this Voting Rights Act “reason” had the smell of the thing Boof Kavanaugh’s mother warns judges to be wary of, in using their common sense to separate likely truth from likely crap.   In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the fury on FOX and the president’s tweets, Barr fired the DOJ legal team who had argued the case and tried to replace all the lawyers.

Of course the reason Roberts and the others rejected 5-4 was obviously bullshit.   The administration has made every attempt to suppress votes, even establishing a short-lived commission (headed by famous supporters of voter suppression laws, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and the irreproachable Mike Pence), to prove that Hillary Clinton’s three million popular vote majority was based on massive nationwide voter fraud.  Opposition to  Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was widespread and bipartisan. 

It wasn’t just Democrats who were resisting. Mississippi Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said that when he received the data request, his response would be to tell the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from.”       source

The commission had been set up to investigate the fraudulent votes of three million dead, sneaky, illegal Mexicans that Trump tweeted about.   We can’t have millions of zombie voters here in the land of the goddamned Voting Rights Act!   Trump disbanded the commission after a few months (they found no evidence of this army of dead voters) but… nothing to see here!   We now fully support the goddamned Voting Rights Act!   How does this argument smell to you?  Not for nothing footnote (from the same source) [2].

Back to suddenly squirrelly Bill Barr.  Barr, like Trump, initially said he had no problem with Robert Mueller testifying (Trump also initially claimed he supported releasing the entire un-redacted report, if memory serves me).    Barr said Mueller’s testimony would only confirm his judgment that the report, since it did not explicitly state that the president was guilty but only detailed many, arguably, highly suspicious actions by the president, exonerates the president of all wrongdoing.  Barr read the report carefully and is as well aware as any reader of the disturbing findings throughout.  Barr knows that his definitive, public relations winning “interpretation” is an outright lie. 

Even if Mueller doggedly sticks to the four corners of the report, as he has vowed to do, and as he has always done in the past when testifying, there is a lot that, if simply read aloud by Mueller on live television, is extremely damaging to Barr’s/Trump’s creative narrative of exoneration.   Mueller states unequivocally in clear prose that his report does not exonerate Trump, certainly not of his past and ongoing obstruction of justice.   Exoneration and Case Closed is Barr’s story, and he’s sticking to it, desperately.

Barr has been providing sound bytes to the media the last few days, as we all wait for the televised July 17th Mueller testimony.  Barr told the world yesterday that if Mueller doesn’t like being under subpoena the DOJ will have his back if he doesn’t want to testify.    The DOJ is also trying to bar (Barr) closed door Congressional Committee testimony by two former DOJ employees, both of whom worked for the Special Counsel, who are scheduled to appear voluntarily.   NOTHING TO FUCKING HIDE HERE, YOU FUCKING IRRATIONAL HATERS!!!  It is routine for a former employer to forbid former employees from doing things!

Barr has reason to be squirrelly.   He auditioned for the Attorney General job with an impressive, unsolicited legal memo supporting the arguable legality of whatever the Unitary Executive feels he has to do.   He was evasive during his confirmation hearings, protesting his long friendship with and great respect for Robert Mueller, a man whose findings he promised to honor, a man he quickly threw under the bus when those findings turned out to be problematic for the Unitary Executive.   He lied to the American people about Mueller’s duty under the present “Special Counsel” statute (which apparently bound him to the OLC memo prohibiting indictment of the president) and announced that since Mueller had been indecisive, as judge and jury he, the A.G., was exonerating Trump and holding on to the report for a month or so to let that message sink in.   NOTHING TO SEE HERE!.  Which is why we have to cover it up in every possible way.   What don’t you irrationally angry liberal ass-dicking Christ-haters not understand about fucking CASE CLOSED!!!

To some true believers, Bill Barr is a man of unwavering principle and devotion, a devout Catholic conservative who believes that Christ infallibly guides him in this world of darkness.  To me, Barr is a dangerous fanatic, whether or not he would have been a fantastic lawyer for Torquemada and the devout, pious Christian torturers of the holy Spanish Inquisition.

 

[1]  The full paragraph, from right before Mueller spoke on the day he resigned:

Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion. And as the special counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks.   Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.    source

click here for a perfect example of but one part of that full cooperation Barr lied about

 

[2]   from the rabid communists at fake news NPR:

One of the five Democratic members died in October as well, and a researcher for the commission was arrested on charges of possessing child pornography.

Bagpiper Bill– NEW LOW

This amazing guy, handsome Bagpiper Bill Barr, keeps topping himself.    He is a dangerous true believer, and very smart.  What he believes in, apparently, is the divinity and absolute moral authority of Jesus Christ and the absolute, unchallengeable power of the wealthiest Americans, particularly right-wing presidents.   He protects the Unitary Executive no matter what.

He did this for George H. W. Bush when Bush’s  involvement (denied by Bush for years) in the Iran Contra Scandal was about to be revealed during the trial of prodigious notetaker Caspar Weinberger.   Barr was spectacularly creative, crafting a pre-trial pardon for Weinberger that prevented the compromising notes from ever becoming public and closed the cover on the scandal forever.  He also orchestrated the pardons of everyone else who’d been caught in the scandal, to ensure that the lid was nailed shut.

He did this for Donald Trump when he first promised to protect him and then twisted the findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation into arguable (though counterfactual) complete and total exoneration.   He did this by arguing to America that any innocent man would be angry and frustrated, as Trump was, and would do whatever he was in his power to end the torment.   Another term for this doing of whatever is in your power to end what you perceive as persecution: obstruction of justice.

Bagpiper Bill indicated yesterday that he would recuse himself from the federal sex trafficking prosecution of longtime child sex impresario billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.  Epstein had a taste for young girls, 14, 15, 16, and he had the money and power to have a parade of them come to his mansions, disrobe, oil him up, with all that followed.  He did this countless times.   

Epstein was prosecuted by federal prosecutors in Florida, under then federal prosecutor Alex Acosta (Trump’s current Secretary of Labor) and, pursuant to a secret plea deal (negotiated by a legal “dream team” including Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr), pleaded guilty to a single prostitution charge and was allowed to work six days a week as long as he consented to spend nights, and Sundays, at a minimum security prison — for thirteen long months.   The original charges for the wealthy sexual predator carried about 40 years of prison time for the serious crimes Epstein was charged with.

Was the deal a scandalous miscarriage of justice?   Certainly.  Then there’s the inconvenient detail that the law requires prosecutors to inform victims before any deal with the perpetrator is signed– but Acosta didn’t inform anyone until the deal was done [1].    You know, Jeffry Epstein, whatever else he is, is a power broker, he’s not some random black kid smoking a joint on the street.  He hung out with Trump, Clinton, Alan Dershowitz and many other powerful and famous people.  He flew them places on his private jets and was apparently a generous host.

Federal prosecutors are now about to try Epstein again, on behalf of many other girls he had take off their clothes, oil his naked body up as he pleasured himself and felt them up.   The feds found piles of nude photos of these girls at his Manhattan mansion.   

Bagpiper Bill announced yesterday that since he had once worked at the law firm that defended Epstein in the prior sex trafficking case, he was recusing himself from supervising this federal prosecution.   

Barr had another conflict he didn’t mention, another appearance of impropriety — Barr’s father, while head of the elite Dalton School, had hired an under-qualified Epstein to teach high school math.

Today a spokesman for Bagpiper announced that Barr will not recuse himself from the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein after all.   This is presumably because during the years of boisterous girl chasing friendship between Trump and Epstein there may have been compromising photos taken of the two of them, with a couple of young beauties.  Or perhaps it is just protection against possible sworn testimony that Trump had simply enjoyed nude photos of the underage girls, taken home copies of his favorites.   You never know with Trump, anything, literally, could be true.   (We know Trump enjoyed, and bragged about, barging into the changing room for the Teenaged Miss America pageant he hosted).   

It is not worth taking chances, for Defender Barr– better to be present to decide exactly what evidence becomes part of the case, making sure to shield our Sexual Predator-in-Chief, the Unitary Executive, the living spokesman for Christ Himself, from any possible liability for anything.

Truly a shameful day, even for a law-toting blowhard as debased as Bagpiper Bill.

 

[1]   Alex Acosta addressed a room full of reporters and answered questions about the light slap on the wrist Epstein got in the non-prosecution deal Acosta oversaw.  He is by far the most impressive Trump appointee (not a very high bar, granted) and acquitted himself well at the news conference, even if he spent the entire time justifying himself as smoothly as you please.   

You’d be impressed, if you didn’t know he approved a tender, playful, secret slap on the wrist for the wealthy serial child abuser.  You’d think he was very candid in answering all questions.   Surprisingly intelligent, especially for a Trump administration official — although, it must be noted, he gave not a hint of an apology for his shameless secret deal with a serial child molester, nor more than a sniff of sympathy for the many young girls his well-connected friend literally screwed.

How to argue against putting innocent refugees in concentration camps

What to do when your government is criminalizing asylum seekers, brutalizing children, cramming them into unhealthy cages where disease proliferates as abuses by guards are ignored?   With, of course, a rotating cast of government officials that continues to lie about this brutal mistreatment of innocent “others”.   This, from today’s Democracy Now! broadcast:

In Washington, D.C., 18 Jewish activists with the group Never Again Action were arrested on Capitol Hill Tuesday as they protested against the jailing of migrants and called on lawmakers to shut down the detention camps and defund ICE and CBP.

Protester: “Congress once again voted to increase funding to ICE and CBP by passing a supplemental funding bill to send $4.6 billion to bankroll the criminalization, detention and deportation of those seeking refuge on our southern border. We thank the 95 representatives who voted against funding hate, and say ‘shame’ to the 305 representatives”—

Protesters: “Shame!”

In a statement, Never Again Action said:

 “As Jews, we know what the separation of families, the covert rounding-up of people and the creation of concentration camps can lead to. We refuse to wait and see what happens next.”

They also said:

“We know what happens when people unaffected by crises act as bystanders and look the other way. We will not stay silent while our historical trauma is weaponized to distract from the terror that our government is unleashing on immigrant communities.”

(emphasis mine)

source

Oh, yeah, this too

Trump’s latest: we don’t have to abide by a Supreme Court decision, especially one that calls our arguments “contrived”.   We’ll do the thing these so-called judges called illegal by executive order, or whatever Bill Barr manages to pull oubit of his capacious ass.   Barr promises to find a work around to overcome an adverse Supreme Court decision (even as he recused himself from the Jeffery Epstein federal sex trafficking case– but not because his father once hired Epstein to teach at the exclusive Dalton School).

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the explanation offered by the Trump administration for adding the question “appears to have been contrived.” But he left open the possibility that it could provide an adequate answer.

Executive branch officials must “offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” the chief justice wrote. “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”    source

The Trump administration fast-tracked the case about asking a citizenship question on the 2020 census and got it heard by the 5-4 Supreme Court by its June 30 deadline.   The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s argument that this question was necessary to somehow protect the Voting Rights Act (an act whose applications they otherwise oppose).   

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that executive branch officials ordinarily have broad discretion to make policy judgments. But he said the record in the case demonstrated that Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, had not given a full and accurate account of his decision to add the question.

In sworn testimony before Congress, Mr. Ross said he had decided to add the question “solely” in response to a Justice Department request in December 2017 for data to help it enforce the Voting Rights Act, or the V.R.A. Three federal trial judges have ruled that the evidence in the record demonstrated that Mr. Ross was not being truthful.

Chief Justice John Roberts declared that the Commerce Department provided a pretextual reason for wanting the citizenship question that was merely “a distraction,” in violation of the legal requirement that agencies disclose the true reasons behind their decisions.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the evidence in the case showed that “the V.R.A. played an insignificant role in the decision-making process.” Instead, the chief justice wrote, Mr. Ross had tried hard to find a rationale for adding the question.

“The secretary,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the attorney general himself to ask if D.O.J. would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process.”

“Altogether,” the chief justice wrote, “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the secretary gave for his decision.”            source

None of this mattered to Boof Kavanaugh and his Federalist colleagues (all of whom voted to allow the citizenship question that will help to consolidate Republican power for the next decade), even though Trump didn’t give them anything to work with.   The Voting Rights Act argument was a transparent piece of toilet paper. [1]

Let’s not even touch the recent 5-4 majority’s stinking ruling on federal oversight of gerrymandering– according to the Federalists on the Supreme Court the corrupt practice of drawing tortured electoral maps to favor one party is, like the treatment of blacks or other despised minorities, strictly up to the local authorities to oversee.  Not a matter for the federal government to interfere in — states’ rights, you know.   Here’s the Grey Lady on that:

[The Supreme Court’s rulings on gerrymandering and the census have profound implications for American politics. Here’s what the decisions mean.]

It is well-known that asking the citizenship question on the census will cause various minority groups, already being rounded up by armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents  and deported or shipped off to concentration campsconcentration camps, not to answer the census at all.    This will result in lower population numbers in urban areas and, ultimately, fewer votes for these under-reported areas in Congress.  That’s because the census is used to apportion House seats.   Lower urban census tallies equals more power for non-urban populations.    More power for non-urban populations equals four more years of Trump, McConnell, Pence and their supremely well-funded malodorous ilk.

This open defiance of a Supreme Court ruling is, by the way, another argument for impeaching this vile orange piece of authoritarian shit.    

 

[1]  Here is a summary of the Federalist Society dissent (all five conservative justices are members, check it out), from the same NYT article:

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the majority had done something extraordinary. “For the first time ever,” he wrote, “the court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale.”

Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh joined Justice Thomas’s partial dissent.

Justice Thomas said the courts should give executive branch officials the benefit of the doubt. “I do not deny,” he wrote, “that a judge predisposed to distrust the secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and — with a jar of pins and a spool of string — create an eye-catching conspiracy web.”

He said the consequences of the majority decision would be far-reaching. “Now that the court has opened up this avenue of attack,” he wrote, “opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed his own partial dissent.

“To put the point bluntly,” he wrote, “the federal judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons.”               source

A fascinating hour, well-spent

I didn’t intend to listen to this entire reading of the Obstruction “counts” of the Mueller Report, but it is fucking fascinating.   Every American should hear this. 

It’s called “A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts”.   Each act is a separate instance of the president’s obstruction of justice.

There is no doubt, after hearing  these readings, that Mr. Trump acted, throughout the investigation into his corrupt acts, with corrupt intent.  The intent needed to sustain obstruction of justice charges.

1  President Trump asked the FBI director to shut down the investigation into National Security Advisor Michael Flynn

2  President Trump said he fired FBI director Comey because of the Russia Investigation

3 President Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller   

4  President Trump attempted to curtail the Special Counsel’s investigation 

5  President Trump prevented the public disclosure of evidence 

6  President Trump wanted Attorney General Sessions to “unrecuse” from the Russia investigation   

7  President Trump directed White House counsel Don McGahn to create false documents that covered up the truth from investigators

8  President Trump tried to discourage Campaign chairman Paul Manafort and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn from cooperating with the Special Counsel’s investigation 

9  President Trump encouraged Michael Cohen to lie about Trump Tower Moscow

10  President Trump tried to get his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen not to cooperate with the investigation.   

Check it out.

Since the actions reported in the Mueller report President Trump has continued to behave like a guilty man.  He forced Jeff Sessions to resign (for not protecting him), made an interim appointment of an unqualified loyalist A.G. (without Senate confirmation), appointed a well-known obstructionist Unitary Executive zealot as A.G., he and his A.G. made repeated false, self-serving assertions about the findings of the Mueller report, his A.G. suppressed the report for a month while they spun the findings,  at his A.G.’s advice Trump asserted a flimsy protective privilege claim as part of a strategy to run out the clock, he publicly instructed subordinates and former employees to defy all subpoenas, continued to defiantly tweet obstructive messages, attacked Mueller and the Special Counsel’s team as “very sick and dangerous [criminals]”, has continued to insist the he is the completely innocent victim of a witch hunt.   A witch hunt that completely and totally exonerated him.   The man is an irrational, ethics-free, perpetual victim.   A national embarrassment and an international threat.

The motherfucker desperately needs to be impeached.  If you still don’t believe me, listen to the reading of the charges by Mueller.

Moron-in-Chief

from the White House transcript of Trump’s historic July 4, 2019 speech accompanying his American military extravaganza:

In June of 1775, the Continental Congress created a unified army out of the revolutionary forces encamped around Boston and New York, and named after the great George Washington, Commander-in-Chief.

The Continental Army suffered the bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware, and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown.

Our Army manned the air (inaudible), it rammed the ramparts.  It took over the airports.  It did everything it had to do.  And at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.  And when dawn came, their Star Spangled Banner waved defiant.  (Applause.)

source

and Cornwallis of Yorktown, yo.

oh, yeah, and this:

Outnumbered, American warriors fought through the bunkers of Pork Chop Hill and held the line of civilization in Korea.

In the elephant grass of Vietnam, the First Cavalry made its stand amid a forest consumed in flame, with enemies at every single turn.

The Army brought America’s righteous fury down to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and cleared the bloodthirsty killers from their caves.

They liberated Fallujah and Mosul, and helped liberate and obliterate the ISIS caliphate, just recently, in Syria.  One hundred percent gone.  (Applause.)

 

 

Frederick Douglass on the 4th of July

This is the guy President Trump noted is getting a lot of overdue recognition, presumably gaining ‘followers’ on twitter.  Frederick Douglass, an American genius, born a slave, died around the time the first Trump arrived on these shores, too late to make a fortune from slavery. 

Douglass gave a fiery speech on July 5, 1852 (almost nine years before first shots of the so-called Civil War) that the great James Earl Jones reads (and Democracy Now! seems to broadcast every July 4).    Happy Belated Birthday, America.

Not a concentration camp!

Screen Shot 2019-07-08 at 12.34.31 PM.png

You may have a better name than concentration camp for this kind of mass detention, shown in a photo apparently, released (for some reason) by the Department of Homeland Security.   The scene above could be from any old concentration camp, as far as I can see.   Pod 2, indeed.

Take a moment to consider that the word Homeland was never used to describe The (eh..) United States of America before the attacks of 9/11/01.   Naomi Wolf pointed out the origin of the word in her Bush/Cheney era book warning about creeping fascism.   The word was recycled by self-styled American patriots who got the idea from real fascists; the Nazis called their land die heimat.   

USA!   USA!!!