Category Archives: current events

MAGA’s got priorities…

“Thank you for your service. Now go shoot yourself.”

Republicans were able to wrest this small victory out of the temporary postponement of their ongoing threat to shut down the government.

Republicans were able to use the spending legislation to curtail a policy instituted by the Veterans Affairs Department that aims to prevent veteran suicides by flagging to a federal gun background check system when veterans are found to lack the mental capacity to handle their own finances.

Under language the G.O.P. insisted on, the V.A. could not do so without a court order. Republicans contended that the current practice relies on an overly broad definition of incompetence and could infringe upon veterans’ Second Amendment rights.

source

God forbid veterans who are facing extreme emotional and financial challenges aren’t able to continue killing themselves in the ungodly numbers they do every day, by any means necessary. If there’s one thing guns are particularly great for, it’s suicide.

Chuck Chuck BoBuck Grassley and the Grey Lady

It’s shocking to me that a newspaper like the New York Times can print a sentence like this with a straight face (see below). Either their editorial standards have slipped, they truly don’t give a shit about the facts, they are trying to please people on the extreme right, as well as their more distracted liberal readers, or they truly have a Nazi bent somehow.

Read this bit from a recent article about MAGA reliance on a now debunked informant statement in their rush to find a crime or misdemeanor to impeach Biden for and let me know what you think about the word choice “payback for Democrats’ treatment of … Trump” rather than something about partisan retribution for the impeachments brought to try to hold a rogue president, now doing his damnedest to dodge criminal trials for 91 felony counts in four jurisdictions, accountable.

By the way, former DOJ States Attorney Scott Brady, the Trump loyalist who brought the form 1023 to the attention of the public, a guy who resigned one month into the Biden administration, (as he had previously refused to serve under Obama), appears to have knowingly lied to Congress not long ago about the reliability of what turned out to be Putin’s propaganda fed through an informant now in prison and under indictment for lying to the FBI about millions in bribes supposedly paid to Hunter and Joe Biden by a Ukrainian oil company.

Wake up Merrick Garland, a six-year investigation into Hunter Biden’s dick, in the interest of appearing scrupulously fair, means that you have to at least investigate the complicity of fucking MAGA asshole Scott Brady. You already have the letter from Jerry Nadler of the House Judiciary Committee asking for the investigation. Just fucking do it.

Clarence Thomas casts deciding vote to protect MAGA Congress (and J6 rioters) from being ineligible under the 14th Amendment (sec.3)

The four female members of the court, while joining the 9-0 vote against a state’s right to disqualify an insurrectionist from the ballot — if that insurrectionist is running for federal office — wrote that the five men (and I use the term very loosely) had gone too far, had overreached.

Then the court ruled 9-0 that no candidate for federal office can be disqualified as an insurrectionist unless the MAGA-crippled Congress enacts a constitutional law to enact the disqualification section of the otherwise self-executing 14th Amendment.

The court also scrupulously avoided any discussion of the Colorado Court’s finding that for purposes of the 14th amendment Trump is an insurrectionist, and as such rightfully disqualified under the second Civil War Amendment (and arguably the single most important one in the Constitution for modern democracy).

Doing the math we realize that the 9-0 judicial overreach (to once again favor a Republican, in this case also a Nazi) hung by one vote, that of Black Klansman and corrupt disciple of Antonin Scalia (being on the Supreme Court places me above ethics, you contemptible fucks), the billionaire-funded husband of Ginni, a powerful far-right player in Trump’s insurrection.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was watching the influential, super-secretive right wing non-profit Committee for National Policy right up to the time they selected Trump for the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. Ginni was intimately involved in brokering the deal between Trump and Evangelicals (which included appointing Federalist Society only to the Supreme Court), and remained a regular visitor to Trump’s White House throughout. See also

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the unethical, unimpeachable Clarence fucking Thomas, the well-paid swing vote in the decision that holds every member of Congress who participated in the plans to overturn the election on January 6, 2021 (as well as the rioters themselves, should they seek federal office) immune from any consequences under the Constitution, unless the Congress Trump currently controls makes a new law to enforce an amendment that never needed a law to enforce it before. Mazel tov, Nazis and Klansman, you have a lot to celebrate today.

example of random MAGA projection porn

Exactly how the Koch network drew it up

If your ideas are unpopular, because they represent only one percent of the population’s interests, you cannot count on democracy to implement these ideas. You have to think outside of the democratic box. You propagandize through supposedly non-partisan “think tanks” that you fund, support extremist candidates,  create an extremist judicial fraternity and stack the courts with well-trained judges steeped in your unpopular worldview. Then it is simply a matter of having these courts impose your values on everybody, as long as these courts have the final word on what is law and what is justice.

Heather Cox Richardson, as usual, nails it:

Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”

Heather

Another unappealable John Roberts special

As he did in striking down enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act simply by ignoring inconvenient facts, like many sessions of vigorous debate in Congress, thousands of pages of data considered, ongoing attempts by states with a history of racist laws to disenfranchise voters and suppress the vote, the unanimous Senate vote to re-authorize the Act, the near unanimous vote in the House, and the Republican president’s warm public embrace of the Act as he signed it into continued law, Roberts made the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment a matter of Federalist Society opinion about whether an insurrectionist is eligible for federal office, absent a specific, constitutionally sound law passed by Congress.

In the Voting Rights Act case the holding was 5-4: the Voting Rights Act worked beautifully to eliminate racially discriminatory voter suppression and no longer needs enforcement.  In this Colorado decision to disqualify an insurrectionist, textualists and liberals apparently agree that Colorado had no right to remove Trump from their ballot, no matter what their factual findings may have been, and therefore that no state may remove Donald Trump, or any candidate for federal office, from the ballot, absent Congress passing a new law to enforce section three of the 14th Amendment. 

Leave out a few key facts, ignore the central one (Trump planned, advertised, aided and gave comfort to participants in a riot that shut down the government in a violent attempt to keep him in power), reframe the narrow issue that you are looking at, et voilà, you can pull any politically expedient holding you would like out of your corporate “balls and strikes umpire” ass.  You can even broker a deal to make it a unanimous 9-0, including the spouse
of a powerful participant in the attempt to overthrow the election of 2020.

The Court declines to intervene in many cases because of their Political Question Doctrine and professes, under federalism, to defer to states on abortion, criminal law, family and business law, voting rules and procedures and many other matters, but reaches the conclusion, without touching the finding that the candidate in question, at minimum, aided and abetted insurrection, or Colorado’s evidence-based finding that he did, that this political question is one they can unanimously decide, bindingly, on behalf of all fifty states. The plain text of their sacred originalist Constitution, and the expressed, well-documented intent of the framers, be damned.

What I don’t understand is how this dog shit decision was 9-0. This time nobody on the Court has a word to say about the stench?

Here is Jesse Wegman’s right on analysis from today’s NY Times.

”Liberal media” hedging its bets

As long as the only value in your culture is corporate profit-driven wealth, you are going to get this kind of dog shit front page “reporting” from even the most reliable of profit-driven corporate media.  

1) Only Biden “superfans”, presumably isolated intellectuals and dreamers, think that tens of millions of under-educated voters supporting an insane, vindictive, racist, misogynistic fraudulent populist autocrat is crazy.

2) Polls, which are so frequently wrong as to be dismissible just by virtue of being political polls, show that many non-Biden Superfans believe Trump policies (ban Muslims, separate migrant children from families, no Covid restrictions, overturning women’s right to bodily autonomy, huge tax breaks for top 1%, etc.) are better than Biden’s (none of which they can identify).

Other breaking New York Times stories:

Biden old; Trump beating him in polls; Biden stutters; Trump makes hilarious joke of own dramatic cognitive decline, polls find; Biden appears feeble, hypochondriacal; Trump’s inexhaustible rage and love for fast food is contagious; Biden trails Trump, another poll finds, Superfans mystified.

Trump Riddle for a Saturday afternoon

Here’s one I really don’t get. Trump claims to be a mega-successful billionaire business genius. We know that’s a lie by how many millions of dollars he lost every year (take for example the $916 million in business losses he wrote off on his 1995 taxes), how virtually all of his ventures failed and/or were shut down for fraud, and how many times he declared bankruptcy. We all know he’s the most “transactional” president of all-time. He claims to be worth many billions.

He took cartons full of valuable classified documents down to his gaudy Florida resort after being dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. Putin would have gladly paid a billion for a pile of military secrets, so would Muhammed Bin Salman, or Trump’s North Korean BFF, or, for that matter, Hitler, if he was still alive. Trump would have had no hesitation to make deals with any of them, since everything is simply a transaction with him.

What happened to the money?

If he made the lucrative business deals anyone would assume he would have by selling the valuable government secrets, he wouldn’t be scrambling to put up bond for the over one half billion he owes as the result of recent court verdicts against him. He’d peel off that money from a fat billfold, announce confidently that he was going to win on appeal, and tell everybody to fuck off.

Leading to the obvious question: what happened to the money, Trumpie?

A Moment of Trumpenfreude 

A great one by Paul Krugman. We can talk about yesterday’s vote by at least four unaccountable, craven, fake Christian, extremist judicial fraternity member lockstep fascists later, this one is much more fun to consider.

OK, I have to admit it: I’m enjoying the spectacle of Donald Trump begging for a delay in the $454 million fine he’s required to pay for fraudulently inflating his net worth, for two reasons.

First, his inability to come up with the cash basically confirms the charges: He isn’t as rich as he claims to be. Second, his evident inability to get anyone to lend him the money is poetic justice for a man who has a history of bilking gullible investors.

One small addition to the Trumpenfreude: A GoFundMe set up to help Trump pay his bills has so far managed to raise about a third of 1 percent of the amount he owes.

You do have to wonder about how this will affect his psychological state. Trump’s speeches have become increasingly incoherent lately — a trend that has attracted sufficient attention that a few days ago he felt compelled to respond, telling an audience: “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”

I think I’ll just leave that there.

A Moment of Trumpenfreude