Category Archives: current events

A frustrated citizen, shouting into the silent darkness

My fourth attempt to reach the Senate committee that oversees the operations of the US Post Office.

Federal Voter Suppression Scheme, under color of law, in full effect

fourth attempt to reach your committee

Partisan megadonor Louis DeJoy preps the federal agency he heads to suppress millions of targetable ballots against the candidate he’s made massive donations to.  There is a quorum of governors in place to replace him (two vacancies being Tubervilled?).  Not even their Election Mail Committee seems concerned about the inexplicably long nationwide delays in mail service ahead of what is expected to be an unaccountably close election. 

I would like to send you the letters I sent to the USPS Board of Governors with details about this terrifying reality that nobody, including the Senate committee that oversees the Post Office, seems at all concerned about.   HOW DO I DO THIS?

Is there any way to get a response to my query?   I have had only silence, and an automated reply, from my two senators, my congressman, your committee.

Is democracy worth fighting for, or is the radical right’s position that “majoritarian tyranny” has put this failing country in a fix only autocracy can save us from the more intelligent assessment of the challenging moment we face as a nation?

I decided, and I think wisely, not to add “what the fuck is wrong with you useless fucking fucks? Are you all already preparing to transition to full Nazi rule, you goddamned mercenary mother abusers?”

I also didn’t trouble them with the damning fact that within two months of DeJoy’s appointment in June 2020, he had already ordered 671 high volume mail processing machines dismantled.  He also ordered the removal of mail boxes across the country (guess which zip codes were affected). 

Trump refused, in August 2020, as the pandemic raged, to release funds ($3,000,000,000, approved by Congress) needed to get the Post Office up to full speed before the election and ensure the timely delivery of ballots cast by mail. Instead DeJoy’s post office sent letters to millions of voters informing them that their mail in ballots might not be available in time for them to vote by mail. The Post Office Inspector General apparently did not find that DeJoy, who predicted additional Post Office cutbacks and massive delivery delays before Election Day, had done anything unethical, or maybe not.

Here is the Postal IG’s report. The Inspector General concluded that there was no ethical conflict with the Trump megadonor and his wife, Dr. Aldona Wos (Trump’s nominee to be US Ambassador to Canada) owning between $30,100,000 and $75,000,000 in assets in Postal Service competitors like UPS and trucking company J.B. Hunt as DeJoy met all ethics requirements regarding disclosure, divestment and recusal from decisions in which he may have a conflict.

Of course Trump’s Postal IG found that. [1] Why wouldn’t he, or if you prefer, why would he? Recall Trump’s imbecilic retraction of his statement about Putin meddling in the 2016 election. The world’s most prolific liar said, with the straightest of faces, that he’d obviously meant exactly the opposite of what he said, as one does.

It turns out that the Trump “megadonor”, who is nowhere near a billionaire (net worth a puny $600,000,000) gave a piddling $2,500,000 to Trump and the RNC in the last election cycle or two. Here is the website for Louis Dejoy and Aldona Wos’s charitable foundation.

[1] From the IG’s report:

On July 21, 2020, and August 3, 2020, DeJoy provided written memoranda to the Board of Governors (the Board) and Ethics recusing himself from participating in matters involving the remaining 14 company holdings identified by Ethics. In the memoranda, DeJoy also instituted a screening process to avoid participating directly or indirectly in any matters involving those identified holdings. DeJoy took these preventative measures within the three-month period required by federal ethics regulations.

Trump megadonor Postmaster General has the ability to halt delivery of millions of mail-in ballots from selected zip codes

While most people I know are crushed by despair at the seeming inexorable grip Nazis have on our problematic, vulnerability riddled democracy, and fretting about Biden’s widely propagandized inability to continue as a highly effective president [see video below for a reality check], I am taking action. When Nazis are preparing to come for you, don’t stand there worrying aloud about how strong, brutal, contemptuous and undefeatable they are, find every way in your power to stop the weak-minded, true-believing, goose stepping fanatics.

As I wrote to several nonresponsive elected officials I voted for, and today several media outfits (and friends in various states and electoral districts to send to their senators and representatives):

I know I can’t be the only American voter aggravated that Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy is still in charge of mail delivery.  He has routinized long, random, inexplicable delays in mail delivery and has the ability to target individual zip codes to not deliver mail from, in a nation where 43% of votes in the last presidential election were cast by mail.  A small number of uncounted ballots in strategic districts equals Electoral College victory.  DeJoy has the ability to make sure tens of millions of likely anti-Trump votes are never received and never counted.

Attached is my hair on fire letter (re: ability of Trump megadonor Postmaster to indefinitely delay delivery of and void millions of mail in ballots) to the governors of the US Postal Service.  I send it to you in hopes that you can help get this outrageous situation public attention and scrutiny, and that democracy can then take the needed steps to combat this insidious voter suppression plan being carried out under color of law.

I’m alarmed that it’s not a major news story, not even being reported on:  

Partisan megadonor preps the  federal agency he heads to suppress millions of targetable ballots against the candidate he’s made massive donations to.  There is a quorum of governors in place to replace him (are the two vacancies being Tubervilled?).  Not even their Election Mail Committee seems concerned about the inexplicably long nationwide delays in mail service ahead of what is expected to be an unaccountably close election.

Blah, blah, blah. I feel as old as Biden looked as he shambled out onto that CNN “debate” stage the other night to face down our own American Hitler, with no moderator present. You object to the comparison to Hitler because there are no death camps? Give the Orange Turd a chance, he’s already got plans drawn up for massive concentration camps. Hitler didn’t open the death camps overnight. Took almost ten years in power. Give MAGA time! Auschwitz wasn’t built in a day, boys and girls. 

Here’s the inarticulate dotard Biden, pretending not to be senile. Take heart, and as Mary Trump wisely said the other day, if you’re in a panic and feeling desperate, don’t make public statements until you calm the fuck down:

Nazis 6 Democracy 3, again

When I say Nazi this is what I mean: a supremely ambitious person with a doctrinaire set of beliefs, the advancement of which, and their unappealable imposition on everyone else, is justified by any means necessary including violence and lawlessness. These obedient mymirdons derive their intoxicating power from an all-powerful leader whose will and actions in accordance with that will may not be questioned, except on pain of death.

After all, Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft (“the Führer’s word has the force of law.”)

NY Times posts one letter critical of their pro-Trump editorial

After noting that the Times editorial board’s “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race” is still on its homepage, you peruse the letters to the editor.    You have to read a few letters that agree with the NY Times position that the Democrats must create a process to make Biden step down before you get to this one, followed by several more agreeing Biden must step down (a sampling the Times no doubt considers a “preponderance of the evidence”).  The NY Times, at its best:

To the Editor:

So let me get this straight. A presidential candidate who is a convicted felon gives a debate performance that is often incoherent, consists primarily of obvious lies, and includes a refusal to unconditionally commit to accepting the results of the presidential election, and your editorial is filled with histrionic calls to remove the other guy who’s run the country ably and ethically for almost four years because he had an off night on the stage?

You really should have consulted with your theater critics, who can school you in the many ways the run of the show ultimately matters more than the blips in previews. Your failure to focus your outrage on Donald Trump’s truly bizarre and bewildering statements in favor of such an overwrought and shortsighted response to Mr. Biden lets the real danger to our democracy off the hook.

Judith Hamera
Pennington, N.J.

Nicely done, Judith.

And this nice, self-evident bit from one of our nation’s greatest winners, a billionaire:

Profile in trembling cowardice

I have many bones to pick with the New York Times.  It is often hard to tell, based on their moral suppleness in presenting propaganda and spin right next to plain, old-fashioned fact, how the Times editorial board differs from that of any Rupert Murdoch rag.   The Times ran dozens of articles, including, and especially, today, about questions over Biden’s age (81) and now, the predictable “we told you so” editorial.  

Here is their latest, about which, in spite of the Grey Lady’s vast influence and my vexation over its complicity in right-wing spin, I am also philosophical. The essential status quo embracing spinelessness of the journal of record just got demonstrated again. Here’s a sample:

As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.

Let’s parse a little bit of this bullshit.   

Reckless gamble?  More reckless to leave this helpless, doddering, ancient fossil on the ballot after his bad night in a TV debate format his handlers never should have signed on to (no fact checks, no moderator intervention, one minute to respond to Trump’s many lies) than to create a process to oust your candidate, make a last minute change, admitting your incumbent president/candidate is unqualified for reelection, in spite of his many accomplishments in the face of unified MAGA resistance? 

Democratic leaders better equipped (to acquit themselves better in a 90 minute televised campaign battle called a debate?) — which ones?   Does this ability qualify them to defeat Donald Trump and the reactionary billionaire backed MAGA movement?

No reason for the party to risk not changing their candidate in the weeks before their convention?   Just because there is no process for it and the very few times it was tried, this close to an election, the replacement candidate was trounced, just because it would show hysteria and cowardice, and confirm MAGA propaganda– while also guaranteeing Trump’s election, to do so now?

Another morsel:

Ending his candidacy would be against all of Mr. Biden’s personal and political instincts. He has picked himself up from tragedies and setbacks in the past and clearly believes he can do so again. Supporters of the president are already explaining away Thursday’s debate as one data point compared with three years of accomplishments. But the president’s performance cannot be written off as a bad night or blamed on a supposed cold, because it affirmed concerns that have been mounting for months or even years. Even when Mr. Biden tried to lay out his policy proposals, he stumbled. It cannot be outweighed by other public appearances because he has limited and carefully controlled his public appearances.

The president’s performance cannot be written off as a bad night?

It can’t be outweighed (not by his record, the respect of his fellow democratic leaders worldwide, the many good decisions he continues to make, his bearing on the world stage) by other public appearances because he has limited them in the past?

The Grey Lady finally spoke some plain, indisputable truth, buried toward the very end of a piece urging Democrats to create a process to force their candidate to voluntarily step down:

It is a tragedy that Republicans themselves are not engaged in deeper soul-searching after Thursday’s debate. Mr. Trump’s own performance ought to be regarded as disqualifying. He lied brazenly and repeatedly about his own actions, his record as president and his opponent. He described plans that would harm the American economy, undermine civil liberties and fray America’s relationships with other nations. He refused to promise that he would accept defeat, returning instead to the kind of rhetoric that incited the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.

Followed by:

Democrats who have deferred to Mr. Biden must now find the courage to speak plain truths to the party’s leader. . .The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.

The courage to cower, the clearest path, create a process, indeed… so simple when laid out with the authority of the NY Times editorial board. 

Conclusory, opinionated, cowardly, stupid, ill-reasoned, ahistorical, serving not democracy but Trumpism.  Aside from that, and making references to propaganda promoted in its own pages as proof (dozens of articles about Biden’s alleged decrepitude and semi-senility) this shameful editorial is a very fine piece.  Read it for yourself.

Grey Lady Editorial Board

Trauma produces empathy or sadism

When a person survives trauma, particularly early in life, at the hands of family, the people who are supposed to protect the child, there seem to be only two responses. Some people emerge hurt, damaged and empathizing with others who are hurt and damaged. These people can heal to a large extent, with sufficient help, determination and luck. Tragically, many people emerge from childhood trauma hurt and damaged and intent on never being hurt again, convinced that they can never be at fault for anything, recruiting admiring allies and preying on people they perceive as weaker than them. These people are trapped in a lifetime cycle of abuse they will pass on to the next generation and beyond.

You come out of trauma either more fully human or a kind of bullying monster. I have no idea what the deciding factor in this outcome is, beyond some loving adult in position to support the abuse victim and help them through their pain at crucial moments in the young person’s development.

Everybody knows the only thing that stops a bully is the equivalent of a hard punch in the face. It stops them in their tracks, every time. They will not fight somebody once they are afraid of being beaten to a pulp, looking bad, being exposed for their cowardice.

Nothing is more terrifying to a bully than the thought of “losing”. When this happens they whine, threaten, claim to be the victim, lie, make excuses, change their story wildly, completely stop making sense in any way we can understand, beyond being the predictable, desperate shuffle these creatures always do when they feel terrifyingly disoriented and threatened.

Application in Politics

Bullies who unite under a banner of religious faith, patriotism and “exceptionalism”, who have unlimited money to influence political outcomes, and a smart, unappealable way to obtain more and more power (say by arranging to have six of nine members of the country’s highest court members of its doctrinaire, activist conservative-libertarian-Christian judicial fraternity) are very hard to beat. You can’t step up to a political movement and punch it in the face. This is particularly true of a movement steeped in intoxicating mob violence and relishing any chance to unleash the deadly force of the state.

Fascists can only be defeated by the united courage of every citizen who opposes the rule of a few indomitable psychopaths, prone to any excess you can imagine. Very few original Nazi party members signed on gleefully imagining the day when millions of Jews would be killed, along with all political opponents, “degenerates” and other inferior “races”, in enormous, mechanized death centers. It was not their dream, though they all accepted it when it became reality because that’s what this type does. Murder of “enemies” is the predictable outcome when a party in power blindly follows the unquestionable will of a madman leader they have sworn an oath of loyalty to, on pain of death, which is always the case in fascism.

Joe Biden, who began the debate looking 130 years old, got rolled last night. His handlers agreed to a ridiculous format — two minutes to talk fast and one minute to rebut countless lies that were not fact-checked or questioned by CNN moderators, who then moved on to an unrelated topic/talking point. The format allowed for no nuance, virtually no back and forth on complex subjects — and no intervention by “moderators” no matter how outrageous the lie told was. I even heard one of the two corporate shills mention, right before Biden’s 60 second rebuttal, that seven states do seem to allow abortions even on the day of delivery, supporting one of Trump’s steamiest lies about Democrat [sic] infanticide.

It was a format that favored a compulsively lying con man over a thoughtful man who is also a lifelong stutterer. Biden looked so bad, so weak and doddering, rushing to answer a barrage of unchecked lies in 60 seconds and getting confused, that we had to shut the debate off a few minutes in. I understand that he found his footing later, and delivered some excellent points, and that virtually everything his confident, increasingly incoherent opponent said was a lie, but the first few minutes gave right wing media every clip and sound byte they could have dreamed of deep faking.

Before the debate it looked like a mute switch would squelch Trump’s pernicious tactic of talking over people, advantage Biden (wrong, the muted mic made Trump look restrained). The lack of an audience was seen as a major coup, as Trump feeds off his adoring crowds, advantage Biden, in theory. The format… uh… on a cable station that had moved to the right (falsely calling it the “center”) and allowed Trump a national “town hall” to spout his usual lies virtually unchallenged? What could go wrong? It was apparent three minutes in.

I thought Biden should have agreed to a drug test immediately prior to the debate. Biden clearly had not had so much as a cup of espresso before taking the stage. Trump, in contrast, spoke calmly and with unaccustomed focus and clarity (for him, anyway), even as virtually everything he said was a demonstrable lie. Every cognition and focus enhancing drug Trump’s surrogates baselessly accused “jacked up” Biden of taking — Provigil, Adderall, caffeine, cocaine, steroids, diet Mountain Dew, was undoubtedly injected into Trump’s ass (he wasn’t sniffing like a coke fiend this time) before he took the stage. I’d have loved to have seen Biden call Trump’s bluff on the drug test. How might the results of that test have changed today’s headlines calling for Biden to step down?

The sickening farce of the CNN debate will leave a stink for a while, and clips will be played continually during the campaign as Biden is portrayed as an ancient, weak, doddering, foolish, vain idiot incapable of accomplishing any of the many significant things his administration has objectively accomplished. The articles counting Trump’s lies, which probably number in the hundreds, will come out, and be met with yawns about Trump being Trump. We knew he was a snake when we took him in, as he likes reminding people.

This is the politics of our time, corporate mass media framing everything to its exacting profit-driven standards. Lying used to disqualify a candidate, as Biden himself was once booted for delivering lines as his own that were somebody else’s words. Lying is fine now in American politics, as long as it’s not under oath, and if it is ruled perjury, simply attack the law, the courts, the crooked judges, the rigged jury, the deep state, The Department of Injustice, the communists, the fascists, a Jewish billionaire, pedophile cannibals, criminally insane illegal immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, disloyal Jews who’d better shape up, intellectuals, elites, transsexuals, ten year-old rape victims, etc.

The work is still ahead of us and the job remains the same. Get the truth out to everybody who is still, somehow, “undecided”. Biden fell short on a night when he was determined to face down evil, a modern day Hitler if there ever was one. The only book the incurious very stable genius Trump ever cracked was the compendium of Hitler speeches he kept next to his bed.

Imagine the burden on Joe Biden, whose popularity based on his achievements should be very high, instead of at Trump level, standing alone against a dictatorial devil intent on unchecked power to punish his enemies, who was allowed to do his thing, with no interference from the “moderators”, determined to prove he was up to the task of wrestling Hitler to the ground and pinning him. How many of us would not appear a little shaky the first time a torrent of confident lies was spouted at us and we had sixty seconds to respond, without stuttering, without hesitating?

As always, Heather Cox Richardson has a brilliant analysis, today it is of the historic CNN debate.

All hands on deck moment

If you think this is a moment to stand on the side, cover your ears and eyes and let heroes save you, I’m here to tell you that nobody is coming to save you. The only heroes who can save us are us. We are in an all hands on deck moment here in the free world. Whatever you personally can do in this fight, you need to do. The fight is against a determined, well-funded, tightly organized movement that believes destruction of all enemies is the will of God Almighty.

This moment is not the same as any other historical moment, except perhaps the eve of a cataclysm like World War Two. The overpopulation of the planet, the rising heat, rising oceans, mass extinction, disappearing water, historically savage inequality, restless armies of enraged grievants serving the will of our most psychopathic citizens, authoritarians ruling most of the planet — a recipe for mass murder if there ever was one.

It’s unpleasant to be reminded that a group like the Nazis started in a room, arguing among themselves, until the proper organizational and promotional geniuses arrived. Within a decade you had a potent, violent political force, organized under a rousing banner, indomitably roiling the most civilized nation in Europe. Before the next decade was over you had an unrivaled military power, with a Nazi as the commander in chief, declaring its right to unlimited living space. The rest, as they say, is history.

Once there is sufficient momentum for this kind of movement of true believers, and the voices of reason are silenced, this impulse to dominate the “weak” turns into an avalanche. People at one time merely supremely opportunistic, ambitious, competitive, greedy, superior become the defenders of death camps as necessary to the maintenance of the status quo, the protection of decency and godliness itself.

The Nazis didn’t open a series of death camps in their first year, or their fifth, or even their tenth. Opening mass killing centers is a process that marches step by step, inexorably, carried out by rabidly loyal partisans who ask no questions along the way and echo whatever the leader says, no matter how otherwise insane it might be.

This is what we are looking at right now, boys and girls. You can choose to ignore it, of course, the same way you can ignore history or any other cause and effect in your life. It may not be a wise choice, in the long run, or even in the short run, but it is certainly a popular one.

Nonpartisan far-right doctor aspires to far-right opinion polling-backed nonpartisanship

Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative-libertarian Heritage Foundation, calls the aspirations of the far right “think tank” nonpartisan. Let’s take him at his word. He was interviewed on MSNBC the other day, about the Heritage Foundation’s autocratic Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.

MSNBC: Is your organization going to accept the results of the 2024 presidential election?

Dr. Roberts: Yes, if there isn’t massive fraud like there was in 2020.

MSNBC: There was not massive fraud in 2020.

Dr. Roberts: Yes, there was massive fraud… we have an election fraud database that has documented that over years. By the way the Heritage Foundation has been concerned about election integrity for decades, not just about 2020. We’ve been documenting this problem for a very long time, and if, one of the…

MSNBC: I believe, according to the Heritage Foundation, sir, by your count, Heritage Foundation has done an investigation and according to your count there have been 1,513 proven instances of voter fraud across the United States since 1982. 1,513.

Dr. Roberts: They’re very hard to document, and the Democrat [sic] party is very good at fraud. The key thing here, which I think we would both agree on, is that we aspire at Heritage Foundation to seeing a poll after this election where every American believes their vote was counted. I care as deeply about someone on the political left, with whom I disagree, saying that they have confidence in the outcome of the election, it seems rather than turning this into a partisan conversation, which you do a good a job of at MSNBC, we might say we aspire to something more noble, which is that every American believes their vote counts.

Something more noble, specifically, Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft! (“the leader’s word is LAW”)

You can listen to Dr. Roberts giving it to the partisans at MSNBC here.

For more details on the Heritage Foundations “election integrity” efforts over the years, here’s a good digest, from September 2020.

Nonpartisan — a new alternative definition

If everything you say is based on passionately held feelings, and your goal is to persuade people of the absolute rightness of your provably wrongheaded positions, and you don’t mind being untruthful and resorting to tired tricks to avoid answering basic questions, you can give exactly the interview this “nonpartisan” MAGA spokesman for the Koch Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 did on MSNBC.  A masterclass in all that really.

Robert Reich explains what Project 2025 is, asking for support for Inequality Media so they can spread the word on this brazen blueprint for a “conservative-libertarian” dictatorship:

https://www.inequalitymedia.org/

Heather’s concise history of the roots of MAGA

Heather Cox Richardson, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Klan murders of three voting rights activists in Klan controlled Mississippi:

Those opposed to Black equality saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act as a call to arms. On July 16, two weeks after Johnson signed the bill and a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared and while they were still missing, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for president. To thunderous applause, he told delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The votes of the delegates from South Carolina, the state that launched the Civil War in defense of American slavery, were the ones that put his nomination over the top.

On August 4 the bodies of the missing men were found in the dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

It turned out that Deputy Sheriff Price, who had arrested Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, and his boss, Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Price had alerted his fellow Klansman Edgar Ray Killen that he had the three men in custody, and Killen called the local Klan together to attack the men when they got out of jail. Then Price dropped the three civil rights workers into their hands. 

While the state of Mississippi would not prosecute, claiming insufficient evidence, in January 1965 a federal grand jury indicted 18 men for their participation in the murders. The Ku Klux Klan members, who were accustomed to running their states as they saw fit, did not believe they would be punished. An infamous photograph caught Price and Rainey laughing during a hearing after their federal arraignment on charges of conspiracy and violating the civil rights of the murdered men

Ultimately, a jury found seven of the defendants guilty. Killen walked free because in addition to being a Klan leader, he was also a Baptist minister, and a member of the jury would not convict a minister. Price was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he served four). Rainey, who was not at the murder scene, was found not guilty, but he lost his job and his marriage and blamed the FBI and the media for ruining his life.

Voters in the 1964 election backed Johnson’s vision of the country, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide. Ominously, though, Goldwater won his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The Republican Party had begun to court the segregationist southern Democrats. 

In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men had been found.

“I believe in states’ rights,” he said. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”

source