Category Archives: current events

Orange turd in the punchbowl

Merrick Garland solemnly intoned that we have one rule of law here, the same laws for the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the powerless and so on.  The last few years have shown that is clear bullshit. 

A young military guy showing off a secret document on-line to impress his buddies, well after the FBI searched Mar-a-Largo and seized evidence that Trump illegally held on to classified documents, has already been convicted and is serving a sixteen year Espionage Act sentence. 

The young man committed a crime that is a small fraction of what the Orange Polyp committed in taking a trove of top secret documents, lying to government agencies about having them, storing them in public places around his gaudy country club home, insisting he had every right to keep the documents he rightfully took, or that were planted by the FBI, obstructing an investigation into whether he had them, instructing lackeys to destroy surveillance video of moving the boxes of secret documents and all the rest.

One big difference in the two cases, the kid who put the classified document on line surely doesn’t have $230,000 a day to spend on lawyers like the Big Guy does. Another big difference, he didn’t get to choose a judge he’d appointed to lifetime office who’d already demonstrated her fawning loyalty to him.

A NY appeals court did the Orange Turd a big favor Monday by reducing the bond he has to post to appeal his fraud case from close to a half a billion to a more manageable $175,000,000.  On the same day he got the news that starting on April 15 he will be sitting at the defendant’s table in NY criminal court four days a week until a verdict is reached in that trial, a trial that also involves his fraudulent business practices as well as election interference.   The boy is not holding up well.  In a late night rant he wrote “CROOKED JOE BUDEN MISINFORMATES AND DISINFOMATES ALL THE TIME”.   Point taken, Honest Don.

He’s going down, whether you buy his gold-painted high tops or his special Make America Prey Again Bible or any of the other bullshit he’s peddling.  On Fox they’re screaming about NBC firing discarded former Trump lackey Ronna Romney McDaniel who will be paid $600,000 by NBC per her contract, even though she won’t be on the air after massive pressure to get rid of her.  Fox insists people have the right to hear all sides, someone still claiming that the election of 2020 was stolen, and that the fake electors were real, and that the Republican party must pay all of a certain criminal defendant’s legal bills is just as entitled to those credible views as anyone who honestly stormed the Capitol on January 6th, or sincerely believes that Jewish space lasers are regularly employed to control the world.

We are living in disorientingly crazy times, just ask any of the elusive Buden superfans the NY Times was hunting for recently…

Benghazi Impeachment news

Heather Cox Richardson reports:

As Justin Rohrlich of The Daily Beast put it, “Comer…stepped on rake after rake during the hearing, consistently undermining his own conference’s case.” Finally, after Democrats had pointed out the many missteps of the committee’s Republicans, Bobulinski told Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) that “the American people are well aware of the Bidens’ corruption.” “Perfect!” Moskowitz replied. He told Bobulinski to ask Comer why he hadn’t asked for an impeachment vote. Moskowitz even offered to help the Republicans out by making a motion to impeach President Biden, urging Comer to second it. Comer declined.

Moskowitz said he wanted “to show the American people that they’re never going to impeach Joe Biden. It’s never going to happen because they don’t have the evidence. Okay, this is a show. It’s all fake. They just want to do these hearings. It’s not leading to impeachment. They’re lying to their base on Newsmax and Fox leading these people to believe that they’re going to eventually impeach the president. It’s not going to happen. At all. Ever. Period.”  

Heather

Trump calls on Manafort

Convicted money launderer, witness intimidator, tax and bank fraudster and all around good guy Paul Manafort, pardoned by his benefactor Trump six weeks after Honest Don Trump lost the election in 2020, gave sensitive polling data to a Kremlin agent allowing a foreign power to help swing the four states that gave Trump his 78,000 vote Electoral College win in 2016.  This is according to the Senate Select Committee Report (chaired by Marco Rubio, R- FL), which should be released in its unredacted form now that Trump is in talks to bring Manafort into his presidential campaign again.

What could go wrong with desperate, deranged, cash-starved Trumpie hiring this longtime Russian oligarch-connected lover of obscene luxury and enabler of corruption to raise and launder foreign oligarch money for his 2024 legal defense and campaign run? 

It’s not as though Manafort’s former partner and fellow rat fucker, Roger Stone, is in any way involved in MAGA’s 2024 campaign or ever had anything to do with any right-wing riot to achieve a political end with violence or the loud threat of violence, neither the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot [1]  nor the MAGA/White Christian Patriotic Riot of January 6, 2021 [2] . Stone, Manafort’s long time partner in political crime, also pardoned by Honest Don, made sure to dismiss his Proud Boy body guard contingent and get out of town the night of January 5th.  USA! USA!!

[1]  The Brooks Brothers riot was a demonstration led by Republican staffers at a meeting of election canvassers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on November 22, 2000, during a recount of votes made during the 2000 United States presidential election, with the goal of shutting down the recount. After demonstrations and acts of violence, local officials shut down the recount early.  Details

[2]  On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob[33][34][35] of supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep Trump in power by occupying the Capitol and preventing a joint session of Congress counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. The attack was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing the certification of the election results. According to the House select committee investigating the incident, the attack was the culmination of a seven-part plan by Trump to overturn the election.[36][37].        details

Federalist Society Endgame

The Federalist Society, a rightwing judicial fraternity, was created and is funded by ultra wealthy, right wing privilege holders. It was established to use the law to better protect the privileges of our best citizens, which is to say, inheritors of vast wealth, and those who join their ranks through their own efforts. It is devoted, by strict doctrine, to giving their political benefactors political wins in every possible case. Their judges often do this, especially in cases otherwise lost, by going well past what they need to find in order to make their rulings.

Their style of activist judging always includes a political victory for their agenda, to dismantling the regulatory/administrative state, limiting “majoritarian tyranny” (will of the voters) and ensuring full rights of citizenship only for our best citizens, corporate and human, regardless of the facts, the law, a 98-0 vote in the Senate.

For example, the Supreme Court Federalist Society contingent went much further than necessary to overrule the Colorado courts where Trump was disqualified as an insurrectionist. Without touching the facts of his insurrectionist plan and shameful, criminal behavior they made a ruling that allows every elected federal official who aided Trump in his insurrectionist plan to overturn election results forever immune from disqualification under the constitutional clause designed for that purpose by the framers of the 14th Amendment. The Federalist Society Six effectively wrote one of the most important democracy enforcing clauses out of the 14th amendment. In the name of demented Originalism, or some other Federalist Society endorsed doctrine pulled out of their collective, doctrinaire ass and protected not only Trump but his wide circle of elected insurrectionist henchmen and henchwomen.

In Georgia, Federalist Society member and political appointee Judge McAfee ruled correctly that there was no actual conflict of interest between the DA prosecuting Donald Trump and his criminal co-conspirators, and anybody else involved in the case. He did this after a long delaying circus in which the DA was asked extensively about her sex life and her father was interrogated about it too. The Klan itself could not have staged a more amusing spectacle than the one McAfee allowed.

Then after ruling properly, so as not to be overturned on appeal, he went out of his way to besmirch Fani Willis by writing of her “unprofessional” demeanor on the stand , a “stench of mendacity” and recommending a host of ethical and disciplinary remedies for her uppity attitude. He made these disparaging, jury poisoning remarks in dismissing an unsuccessful attempt to smear the district attorney, who, it turns out, had no conflict of interest of any kind. The Federalist Society spin, smearing a political opponent he could not legally remove from the case, is perfectly permissible among these endgame motherfuckers. McAfee gave his team the smear the frivolous motion was intended to create, after providing team Trump with a healthy and distracting delay.

Take Federalist Society member and former DOJ official MAGA Robert Hur. The finding of his report was that Joe Biden did not have the requisite intent to commit the crimes that Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated, as proved by his many attempts to cover up the crime and his repeated obstruction of justice. Hur distinguished the behavior of the two presidents to make the contrast and show that Biden lacked Trump’s clear criminal intent. That was the take away, Biden has not committed the crimes Trump stands accused of and that was all Hur was appointed to decided.

But a report stating that Biden was innocent of the crime Trump is a criminal defendant for was in no way helpful to the MAGA, or as I think of it, the American Nazi, cause. Hur therefore made the focus of his report, and the Breaking News headline takeaway, Biden’s cognitive feebleness. Based on lies? Going well beyond the scope of your appointment? Call me pisher!

The Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida (who assumed office after Trump lost reelection, talk about letting the voters decide), Aileen “Loose” Cannon, who, giving her the benefit of the doubt, is probably too stupid and inexperienced to handle a high profile, politically charged espionage case against her benefactor regarding his illegal retention of top-secret government documents, at least has experienced, brilliant Federalist Society counsel available to her.

This allows her to endlessly delay a trial that Trump will 100% lose with little risk to herself or her already damaged professional reputation. By not making any final orders about anything, Cannon has been able to spin this straightforward case out with no end in sight. And arguably because she has made no final orders of any kind, she has not given DOJ grounds for an appeal. Things she has done, no matter how stupid (inviting amicus briefs from the likes of Stephen “Death to immigrants” Miller and Citizens United), how biased toward one party (and against the federal government) or how clearly designed to give a criminal defendant the delay he always demands, are protected under her discretion as the trial judge.

If you had any cause to wonder whether allowing the widespread appointment of members of a doctrinaire right wing extremist judicial fraternity could cause any problems for democracy, the rule of law or the fair administration of justice, look no further than the loyal judicial fraternity members referenced above.

Nazi adjacent spin

Turns out that MAGA former DOJ official, Robert “Ben” Hur, appointed Special Counsel by Merrick Garland (and coached by Trump’s team before he testified), actually lied in his 300 page hatchet job on well-meaning, doddering, forgetful old Joe Biden. The transcript of his interview with Biden, released the day Hur resigned from DOJ, shows that Biden told him the exact date that his son Beau died yet all of the headlines afterwards quoted Hur’s report as saying Biden couldn’t even remember the date that his son passed away.

This lie was repeated week after week, regurgitated in The NY Times and other legacy media as often as the unfounded, inflammatory headline that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 atrocity. As authoritatively and widely embraced as the alternative fact that Joe Biden and the Democrats, in coordination with commies, RINOs and other lying traitors, stole the 2020 election from the real president.

Now American Nazis are in full spin cycle, whirling like demented dervishes to preserve their holy mission against “the Biden crime family”, in the face of zero evidence. Their smoking gun witness a Putin asset, in prison and apparently paid by Putin/MAGA? Not a problem. A Biden impeachment will prove to tens of millions that Biden is just as corrupt as Trumpie.

Presumably, once they impeach Biden twice, to even the score, all of the corruption of both will become a wash. Since public lying is now perfectly acceptable political speech in the USA, particularly by devotees of Mr. Chrump, they say all this with a completely straight face, secretly praying for the day Rosie O’Donnell and her filthy ilk finally wind up in one of Trump’s for-profit death camps.

Capitalist tool goes full Nazi-style propaganda
from Robert Hur’s scrupulously non-political report, MAGA will not be happy!
crawling out from under his tenured at UC Berkeley rock, torture memo man checks in

Gray Lady offering “context” to Hur’s report declining to prosecute Biden but emphasizing Biden’s supposedly feeble mental state

The Grey Lady, with one of her more mealy mouthed pieces of spotty reporting:

Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for including what some have described as disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state might come across to a jury as relevant and proper to discuss. . .

. . . Still, at several points, Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania induced Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like, “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.”. . .

. . . The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-scrutinized line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller made no decision on whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, only writing, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice. . .

. . . Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest person elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters from both parties. He and his allies have rejected those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.

No mention in the New York Times report of lines in the recently released transcript, spoken by Robert Hur, that directly contradict false assertions he made in the report. For example, at one point Hur noted Biden’s “photographic” recall of the layout of a house. Hur also claimed Biden didn’t even know the month or year of his son’s death. The transcript shows that Biden said “oh, God, May 30th…” and agreed when a staffer added it was 2015.  No mention in the New York Times of this rather glaring bit of partisan Bill Barr/John Durham-style lying. Making inaccurate or false statements is New York Times-speak for lying, but there is no note of even false or inaccurate statements by Hur in their article.

The Times also doesn’t report that one of these recorded sessions took place during the international negotiations immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel October 7th.

Nor does the Times include this fairly important fact for assessing Hur’s candor and his agenda, (or allude to anything like an immolation of former Trump DOJ partisan Robert Hur):

House Republicans asked Hur to testify before the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan (R-OH). Hur prepared for his testimony with the help of Trumpworld figures, and he resigned from the Department of Justice effective yesterday, so he appeared before the committee today not as a DOJ employee bound by certain ethical guidelines, but as a private citizen. . .

. . . Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote on social media: “I think Biden’s State of the Union address last week and Hur’s immolation today will go down in political history as Reagan’s ‘I am not going to exploit…my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment…only on steroids.” Conway was referring to Reagan’s response in a 1984 presidential debate to a question about his own age; Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.

Heather

This is another more intelligent assessment of what happened at the hearing, immolation or no.

No hint about any of this is given to readers of the New York Times report on the latest backfired attempt by MAGA diehards to magnify their wild claims that, unlike very stable genius Donald Trump, Biden is a feeble, stuttering old dotard who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, even when he is handing MAGA hecklers their asses on a platter in front of a live national audience.

Suffering is not a contest

You may have noticed that certain people treat suffering like a competitive sport.  There’s long been a senseless, passionate public debate, for example, about who had it worse:  

a) millions of people, over hundreds of years, kidnapped, sold, dragged in chains across the ocean, packed together like sardines, countless souls dying and thrown overboard to the sharks that always trailed such ships, the survivors sold into lives of unspeakable horror once they got to their new, eh, I suppose we call it “home”, or, 

b) millions of people, over a span of a few years, chosen by their religion, herded into disease-ridden slums for abuse and eventual collection to be taken by cattle car to camps where they could be killed en masse, the lucky survivors getting to work as slaves until they could work no more.

In a world that was not insane, you would have to be insane to argue about which atrocity was worse. Can any atrocity be worse than either one of those? And there are many other atrocities in history, and even in the present world, that are as bad as those two, particularly for the victims and survivors of those atrocities. 

But I’m not here today to write about politics. I’m thinking of something more personal, the suffering of people around us, the suffering of people in our lives.  if you are not a guitar player, or a violinist, or someone who uses one hand for a specific, skilled task, sharp pain and stiffness in your left hand, annoying and concerning as it may be, is not a reason for despair. If you play music every day, and it is one of your great comforts, and suddenly one of your hands is too stiff and painful to do that, fuck.

Humans look for comfort (all animals do, actually), we look for empathy, we look for help when we are in trouble. Not everyone is built that way of course, some take comfort only in feeling superior to others. In their citadel of desperate superiority there is little space for empathy and for helping anybody except for quid pro quo maintenance of the humble servants of their need to feel better than others.

When I come across one of these assholes, I have to remind myself of my vow to first do no harm.  To forget that is to become more like the thing I hate.

Federalist Six working for their fraternity and benefactors

As Boof Kavanaugh’s mother taught her snarling, partisan son, when judging a controversy use common sense to decide what makes sense, what smells funny and who has the most to gain by claiming what smells funny. Now consider the stench her boy and his judicial fraternity frat bros (with apologies to Amy, a woman’s woman and also a Federalist Society member) have been busy creating since he became an unappealable lifetime ruler on what is justice and what sucks ass.

When it was time for the Supreme Court to rule on a state’s right to kick an insurrectionist off the ballot, for, at minimum giving aid and comfort to Capitol-sacking rioters who stopped the certification of an election Trump lost, the rightwing frat boys quickly rewrote the 14th Amendment (writing section three out of the law) and hurried to release their ruling in time for the big primary day called Super Tuesday. No quid pro quo by the three Trump appointees, no conflict of interest for Clarence and Ginni, they’re all on the same side, with our greatest secretive billionaires!

Trump one, Constitution and the rule of law zero.

When it came to Trump’s absurd Nixonian/Dershowitzian claim that if a president, or even a former president, does it — no matter what it is — it can’t be prosecuted as a crime, the same six extremist fraternity members decided to delay the hearing from December, when Jack Smith asked for it and they kicked it to the DC circuit court of appeals (who took their time writing an unappealable decision), to the end of April for a ruling by the end of June when they break for the summer. Criminal trials for the big orange turd? Not if the Federalist Six can help it! Only a bit of a lie was needed to make their delay holding Trump has no such right fly. Trump two, Constitution and the rule of law zero.

The Fourteenth Amendment was put into place to ensure rights for newly freed Black citizens. It was written to guarantee federally enforceable rights against state governments seeking to re-enslave or otherwise abuse certain citizens under color of law. Its purpose was to ensure that no state could give a citizen rights less than the federal ones protected by the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights. The fourteenth enforces the Bill of Rights against encroachment by the states. It guarantees equal protection under the law and a right to all the privileges and immunities of US citizenship. It was soon put into a 90 year judicial coma by a series of sickening Supreme Court decisions, relying on dirty tricks (like limiting the privileges and immunity to an irrelevant three or four and leaving the rest up to the states) but that is another story for another day. Section three, disqualifying insurrectionists and those who give aid and comfort to insurrectionists, like the rest of the fourteenth amendment is self-executing (as the Supreme Court conceded in relation to candidates for state office only.)

When I read Shelby County v. Holder, the case where John Roberts and the boys did away with enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, I saw easily, once I read RGB’s brilliant dissent, that Roberts had lied. His strongest argument, that the Act had worked to correct historical racist voter suppression and that Congress reauthorized the Act based on forty year-old data, was pulled completely out of his impeccable corporate/Federalist Society ass. There had been many hearings in Congress, reams of current data studied, including documentation that the ‘plaintiff’, Shelby County, Alabama itself had recently engaged in racist voter suppression highjinx, not to mention that 98-0 reauthorization vote in the Senate. Days after the decision dozen of new racist voter suppression laws were enacted, or resurrected, in various states.

In Anderson, the recent case from Colorado that wrote the disqualification section out of the 14th Amendment for candidates for federal office, the Roberts court engaged in the same outright lying and judicial deception. Section five, held the court — without any support in law, history of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment — means that if Congress does not make a specific law to enforce a specific provision of the 14th Amendment, courts may not enforce it. This is a plain and easily demonstrable lie.

Cases are brought by the dozens every day in federal courts all over the country based on violations of clauses of the 14th amendment, equal protection, privileges and immunities, and so on, with no federal enabling statute in existence. Section five was included to make sure that if a specific law was ever deemed necessary to enforce the rights under the amendment, in some unforeseeable way (like the Ku Klux Klan Act, for example), Congress was specifically authorized to address it. Balls and strikes umpire Roberts turned the Constitution on his head, no doubt in the spirit of Originalism, or perhaps in the name of the supremely flexible, Federalist Society tweaked Political Questions Doctrine.

Don’t take my word for it. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse does a great presentation on this very issue, the Supreme Court’s ability to rely on false statements in unappealable decisions, which I saw yesterday. He refers to these ongoing decisions based on false premises, decisions that are not later overturned or corrected to address their failure of truthful analysis, as zombie decisions. His talk is easily digestible, super informative and highly recommended.