Category Archives: current events

Criminally insane idiots & incoherence

Adam Serwer wrote a book during MAGA’s first term in the White House entitled The Cruelty is the Point. Very true. Millions of those who are devoted to Trump love his cruelty, which they believe is not a sign of painful weakness by one of strength. Killing over 100 unarmed men in small boats on the ocean, and almost that many during an illegal FBI/military incursion into Venezuela to render its president to a US court, is heedlessly, idiotically cruel. His people love that he does this kind of shit.

Trump accuses Venezuelans of smuggling fentanyl into the US and has Hegseth kill them a thousand miles from our shores, blowing up and sinking their small boats and then killing survivors. When the corpses wash up on land, along with pieces of their boats, not a trace of fentanyl is found. Smuggling drugs is not a capital offense, even if proved with a mountain of seized fentanyl. Even if you are a strongman dictator like Rodrigo Duterte, currently cooling his jets in a prison at the International Criminal Court in the Hague for his extrajudicial executions of suspected drug dealers. Still, the cruelty of this random, impossible to justify mass murder, and the unappealable violence of it, excite the grievance-drunk lynch mob that is Trump’s electoral base.

The cruelty is certainly the point, but equally essential to fascism is incoherence. If your explanation for your illegal, murderous actions is completely incoherent, self-contradicting, ridiculous, stupid, senseless, plainly false, a series of constantly changing brazen lies — well, congratulations you have escaped the trap of Reason. No argument can succeed against relentlessly asserted incoherence. Incoherence embraced by the faithful, unchallenged by trusted mass media, equals absolute control.

Ask the Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Diet Coke bringer Little Marco Rubio [1] what the legal authority for a bloody extraction of a foreign leader is. That this violent, murderous attack on a sovereign nation violates the UN Charter the US signed is beyond question. It is an act of war to kill 80 more people, including civilians, to seize and render the head of a foreign country, and his wife, to “face the wrath of the American justice system” as cruel idiot Pam Bondi styled it. The Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Ethics Advisor/cheerleader will mumble and fumble and give no hint of any legal authority for the mass killing in Venezuela, or the kidnapping, except to speak of leverage and whatever evasive drivel happens to seep out. He will blandly deny the assertions of his commander-in-chief while dodging questions and becoming increasingly indignant. Corporate media will not embarrass him too many follow ups, particularly once the guy gets testy and defensive. And so it goes.

The cruelty is the point, it frightens the opposition and thrills millions of sadists whose only real pleasure is the deliberately inflicted pain of others. The incoherence is also the point. There is no argument with a willful tyrant who wields incoherence as his final rationale. Ask Mr. Hitler.

As usual, a complete and coherent account of the illegal invasion of Venezuela comes from Heather Cox Richardson.

Epstein at Trump’s second, or third, wedding.

From The Onion, America’s finest news source.

[1] Little Marco’s actual titles: Secretary of state. Acting administrator of the (dismantled, defunded) U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration. And now interim national security adviser to President Trump.

Whatever they say, whatever proof they claim to have, it never happened, none of it!!!

“[Trump], in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”

If this testimony had been aired live, two days before the law required all of the Epstein files be made public, imagine the shit show, even on Bari Weiss’s CBS. That’s why it happened behind closed doors, why Trump’s puppets waited until New Year’s Eve to release it. Jim Jordan, a belligerent cretin whose claim to fame is that as a college wrestler he was impossible to pin (like when he was assistant coach watching college wrestlers being sexually abused by his boss, and since) was completely overmatched by Jack Smith. Smith made the clear case against Trump for conspiring to overthrow election results after losing the election in 2020. There is no doubt that the events were set in motion for the benefit of one man, Donald, and the amoral billionaires who are his chief benefactors/beneficiaries. To wit:

Meritocracy

Here are the two slam dunk federal cases against Trump, in a nutshell. He violated the Espionage Act by illegally taking classified documents with him when he left the White House. He “negotiated” with the Department of Justice and the National Archives for a year about retaining the documents, lied about having classified documents, claimed he could declassify them with his mind, had his lawyer lie in a false affidavit that he’d already returned them all. There was probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant. The FBI found file boxes full of illegally retained government documents, including classified ones. There is not anything alleged about any of this. His obstruction of justice, his lies, his lawyers’ lies, his illegal retention of the documents, all matters of public record. Only Clarence Thomas, in a note to Venezuelan-American judge, lame duck Trump lifetime appointee Aileen Cannon, got Trump off the hook for this one, by declaring Jack Smith illegally appointed (spoiler alert, he wasn’t, he was only appointed too late to do his job).

The Washington D.C. case is equally straightforward. Trump knew he’d lost the election, he was told several times by his closest advisors, as they later testified under oath. He continued to lie about iihht (and $50,000,000 was dumped into an ad campaign to promote this lie). He worked with fake electors from several states in a scheme to throw the election to the GOP majority (by state) House. He called election officials to twist arms in states he lost. He had operatives accessing voting systems, bringing frivolous lawsuits, spreading knowingly false information. He called for a crowd to assemble in Washington D.C. for the morning of the certification of Biden’s win. He whipped up the crowd for an hour and urged them to parade (without a permit, which would have mobilized DC police to supervise it) to the Capitol to “peacefully” fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore. As the riot unfolded, and before his allies fled for their lives, e called his allies in Congress urging them to execute the plan to illegally keep him in office. He watched the riot live on TV for hours. It was with great reluctance that he finally made a video telling the rioters to go home (none were arrested), that he loved them, that America would never forget this day of love.

Just to prove his great fuck you to democracy had been perfectly righteous, on his first day back in the Oval Office he pardoned all of the rioters who were found guilty of violent assaults on January 6th. A Day of Love. 2020 was a stolen election, ask any current GOP member, they all wriggle away from answering that Biden won. “Well, Biden was the president…” they will say. Yep, he was.

Meantime, a robust 1% of the Epstein files have been made public (with massive redactions) by the most transparent administration in US history under (and in defiant contempt of) the Epstein Files Transparency Act Trump himself signed into law. Do not compare the murderous, compulsively lying Mr. Trump to Mr. Hitler! How dare you?!! By all means, dude, illegally invade a South American country and render the leader and his wife to … CECOT? What could go wrong?

The most transparent administration in US history

In a twisted way, this statement, a mantra of loyalist Karoline Leavitt, is absolutely true of Trump “No guardrails, wheeeee!!!!” 2.0. They are transparent in their unified contempt for the law, the government and in their open corruption. The administration is completely consistent in this, even violating a law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, that Trump himself urged his party to vote for and then signed into law with a Sharpie. They are consistent in lying, about election fraud, “stolen elections”, the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”, the grocery prices hoax, the Democrat [sic] health insurance hoax , the ongoing murders in the Caribbean hoax, the Democrat [sic] hoax about Epstein and Maxwell, prosecuted by Biden’s weaponized DOJ (brought by devout communist AG Bill Barr) and virtually everything else, including too many witch hunts to count.

The other day “the most transparent administration in history” apparently released the records of the “assassination” attempt on Trump during a campaign speech in Butler, Pennsylvania, right before the Republican convention in 2024 (though I could find nothing about it online…perhaps I was informed of it by someone who was uninformed). One person behind Trump on stage was actually murdered, proving real bullets were shot toward Trump and the hand of God Himself spared MAGA’s Chosen One.

The ear torn by a bullet, treated at a local hospital, bandaged as Trump gave his campaign speech at the convention, MAGA all wearing sanitary napkins on their ears in solidarity, magically healed, without a trace of a scar, a few days later. Medically impossible, but a modern day miracle showing, to the credulously faithful, the favor and grace Christ has bestowed on one particular flawed vessel.

The hospital records of Trump’s visit? Top secret, like his grades, his test scores, recent MRI, the subjects of countless non-disclosure agreements, any Epstein files involving Mr. Trump. The mass media to this day treats the highly suspicious events of that day as an unquestioned assassination attempt, carried out with exquisite political timing by a young man who was killed within seconds of firing the shots and cremated virtually immediately. Nothing to see here!

This may well be the most transparent administration in US history, taken by its actions. It is quite clear to anyone outside of the rightwing cult what they are trying to do, what they’re in the process of doing. They make no bones about dismantling the hated “administrative state”. They are open about setting up a network of lucrative, privately owned concentration camps, reserving the absolute right to detain anyone they please, rough them up, send them anywhere in the world, shoot them if necessary. They are transparent about their hatred of their deranged enemies and their love of fossil fuel. They are transparent about their desire to increase suffering and torment on the bulk of the population until heads start to explode, violence erupts and they can start carrying out the long-cherished plans of the evil billionaires who have been funding them, and exploiting a bent version of militant, white Christianity to their own, very unChristlike ends.

If quaint abstractions like “contempt of court”, “obstruction of justice” and “abuse of power” are Libtard Queer Trans Muslim Jew Mexican Colored hoaxes, then the rest makes perfect sense. And they are absolutely transparent about that. Down to the masks worn by their unidentified “law enforcement” goon squads collecting detainees for the for-profit detention centers and their shareholders.

You and I may have a different idea of what transparency really is, but nobody is asking us. And besides, Jim Jordan just released the entire recent eight hour behind closed doors grilling of Trump persecutor Jack Smith. Who’s the transparent one now, cucks?

This is why wealthy fascists paid Bari $150,000,000 to run a former flagship news service

“Anti-woke” influencer Bari Weiss was chosen to run CBS news by billionaire Trump donors/CBS buyers Ellison, father and son, because they like the cut of her jib. She can look woke cucks in the face and own them. The Ellisons paid her $150,000,000 for her blog when they hired her as Editor-in-Chief of CBS. Here’s an email Weiss wrote to CBS news staff after killing the story of hundreds of humans rendered, without any legal process at all, to an El Salvadorian torture prison for indefinite detention and abuse.

Our mission?   Media monopoly, owned by oligarchs, promoting curated “news” supportive of the regime’s policy goals to implement permanent one party, totalitarian rule?   Hmmm, I guess that tracks.  It may indeed seem radical, on a slow news week when nothing of great national consequence is happening, to kill a carefully vetted story damaging to the fulfillment of their mission.   

Slow news week.   The DOJ violating a law the president signed, withholding 99% of files in a brazen, lawless attempt to protect an actual cabal of powerful, untouchable pedophiles, likely also including their boss, an adjudicated rapist  — slow news.  The chaotic serial dumps of thousands of compromising documents relating to notorious pedophile, teenaged girl trafficker and blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, including numerous mentions of his fellow “playboy” the president, and the sudden “discovery” of a million new files … a very, very slow news week, you dig.  

At least Rupert “Fair and Balanced” Murdoch’s FOX news can straighten this CBS kerfuffle out. CBS may have indeed have had a reasonable, even if dubious, or possibly spurious, rationale for killing the story:

Psychopaths will be psychopaths

Yawn, very slow news week.  Merry Christmas to those who celebrate.

The cover-up is shameless, the crimes, much worse

Those who exploit underage children for sexual gratification are probably the most universally despised group of men in the world.  I’ll leave the reporting of Trump defying a law he himself urged Congress to vote for, and signed with his customary Sharpie, to the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson who gives a complete account of the scope of the Trump DOJ’s brazen crime.    Here’s Trump criminal attorney, now number two in the DOJ (and smells like it, too) Todd Blanche, incoherently channeling his inner Roy Cohn. “The absurdity of us pulling down a single photo because Trump is in it is laughable.” Well-said, asshole, no argument here:

Heather gives every detail you need to know about the dick-fingered coverup of Donald’s bestie Jeffery Epstein’s pedophilia club for rich white men.  One thing she didn’t mention is that the Department of Justice [sic] has 300 GB of Epstein files in their possession and has released a hefty 3 GB, on the very last day to “comply”.  

American media treats this, in virtually every account, as the release of a fraction of the records, but, let’s be fucking clear, that “fraction” is 1/100th. Coincidentally 1%, just like the wealthy, powerful child rapists being protected by our criminally inclined DOJ. Heather continues:

Officials in the Trump administration have been treating members of Congress with contempt since Trump took office, deliberately flouting the 1974 Impoundment Act that prohibits presidents from unilaterally deciding to withhold funds Congress has appropriated, for example, and ignoring the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional approval for military actioyns that last more than 60 days.

What Heather doesn’t go into in this piece is that Trump, illegally creating an “agency” to let Musk slash agencies that were investigating the businesses of the richest man on earth, not only violated the 1974 Impoundment Act, it also resulted, directly, in the deaths, so far, of at least half a million poor people, many of them children. It’s hard to get the numbers, and nobody’s paying much attention to them in the media, with the Orange Polyp performing his stinking shit show around the clock, but the footnote gives you some idea of the scope of the mass deaths from his violation of the Impoundment Act and his recission of the budget that was allocated to prevent these deaths. [1] Here’s the skinny from an extremely dry, bureaucratic account of this mass death:

Relative to FY2024, declining obligations to global health implies the potential for 1.1 million lives lost per year if these trends continue.

Similarly, the 1973 War Powers Act which requires a president intent on waging war with the US military to get consent from Congress, once the unauthorized killing and military escalations have gone on for more than 60 days. All of those estimated 100 men killed in the Caribbean, their boats blown to shit because “narco-terrorists” equal “enemy combatants” and, according to a lawless regime, may be killed without evidence or any coherent rationale, were murdered in acts of state-sponsored piracy on the high seas.

[1]

For humanitarian and food aid [alone], the decline suggests the potential for [an additional] 490,000 lives lost per year, bringing the total lives at risk from aid cuts to 1.6 million lives lost per year if obligations do not revive. Compared to FY2023, this falls to around 670,000 [additional] lives lost per year.

source

CECOT? There’s no such thing as El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, says Bari Weiss, anti-woke news czar of CBS

60 Minutes, the famous hour-long weekly CBS news digest, was set to air a piece about the brutal conditions in El Salvador’s infamous torture prison, CECOT. This is the prison Kilmar Abrego Garcia and about two hundred other men were illegally rendered to, under the direction of Trump’s repugnant henchmen, Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller and puppy killer Kristi Noem (she, in defiance of a federal court order).

Under our law a person must have a chance to defend himself against illegal detention (this right is called habeas corpus) before he can be sent to prison, particularly in another country, particularly one known for torturing its prisoners. 60 Minutes did a fairly harrowing piece on the prison, including several interviews with people sent to CECOT by Trump.

These men, all non-criminals, were illegally imprisoned, for a sadistic indefinite sentence and brutalized on video in the El Salvadoran dictators, notorious torture complex. The piece on CECOT passed all legal vetting and editorial standards meetings at CBS. It was scheduled to air last night. Bari Weiss killed the story. Robert Reich covers the horror of it beautifully here. This is the letter the segment’s producer wrote to her news team:

News Team,

Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.

I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.

Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.

We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient.

If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.

These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.

CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.

We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.

I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.

Sharyn

No good dictator will tolerate truthful reporting on their abuses — like the hundreds illegally rendered to CECOT torture prison in El Salvador last Spring. Here’s the story Bari Weiss killed, on behalf of the guy with the “alcoholic’s personality” (and the 1% on whose behalf he acts), the increasingly demented Orange Polyp, on behalf of billionaire Trump donors/media monopoly entrepreneurs Larry Ellison the elder and Ellison the younger. Ellison the younger is the basic Jared Kushner, though with less access to the president, so far.

The piece was actually on YouTube for a little over an hour today, before the billionaire son of a billionaire, Ellison the younger, made sure his legal team was striking this video (shot off a  screen, aired in Canada, if I recall) for copyright violation. 

For the moment, at least, you can see the entire segment here

USA! USA!!!!

This was put up earlier today by Senator Cory Booker. I saw it at 2 pm, I was about number 200,000. Early the next morning 1,100,000 people had seen it. Give it a like!

Editors do not have the right to edit, only Trump does

Trump Files $10 Billion Suit Against BBC Over Documentary

The New York Times reports on another sickening MAGA attempt to intimidate media that reports unflatteringly on the historic ugliness of their dictatorial leader.

Trump, after shaking down ABC for $16,000,000 with a frivolous lawsuit over an on-air comment that Trump had been found civilly liable for rape (the judge in that case said as much, it is only an idiosyncrasy of New York State law, he explained, that differentiates “sexual assault” — no penis in vagina proved — and “rape”) and CBS for the same amount for doing what every TV station does — editing an interview, has also sued the NY Times and, the other day, the BBC.

The faltering, insanely litigious president ridiculously claimed, through his army of low rent Roy Cohns, that the BBC unfairly and viciously edited segments of his infamous January 6th speech to a crowd that stormed the Capitol moments later to make it falsely look like he had urged them to storm the Capitol.

Here are the highlights of his long harangue to the rioters on January 6th. You be the judge if there is a way to edit this incendiary speech where he is not telling the crowd he’s riled up for over an hour, with detailed lies about a “stolen election” he knew he had lost, to hit the Capitol, he promised he was going down there with them, “and we fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore.”

You have to love the generally spineless NY Times’ last line in its report on this Hitlerian move on the part of Putin’s pliable puppet, Donald J. Trump, now suing the British Broadcasting Corporation, an outfit almost as despicable in his squinty eyes as our own Public Broadcasting Service. Here’s the Times, at its best:

The president also has a defamation lawsuit pending against The New York Times, which accuses the news organization of trying to undercut his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation. The Times says the lawsuit has no merit.

Trump kills

As a comedian, less so than as the president of the United States. He is a killer though, his psychopath father made sure of that. He has exhibited a taste for killing people, whenever he has the power to do so. He didn’t blink when told that the shuttering of USAID would kill 2,000 poor people a day, most of them little brown children, he probably made one of his famous wisecracks.

As his first term was ending Trump was enraged and anxious to execute federal death row prisoners after his loss in the “rigged election“. That his hyper religious Christian AG Bill Barr went into overdrive to support Trump’s killing rampage tells you all you need to know about far right Christianity. It was important for these angry, punitive men to kill these federal prisoners before Trump lost the unchallengeable power to do so. They rushed to kill several men of color and a woman, Lisa Montgomery [1], so crazy it’s hard to understand why she wasn’t locked in a mental institution for life.

Of course, once he was unfairly snubbed and deprived of the recent Nobel Peace Prize he so richly deserved, he began to refocus on an emergency war on drugs against the “narco-terrorist” government of Venezuela (as well as stepping up violent ICE  attacks on his own civilian population).  In addition to the documented torture of illegally detained non-criminals at his private detention centers, now holding close to 70,000 people in cruel conditions, he has killed at least 87 South Americans in strikes on small boats after accusing the crews of acts of war against the USA.

The rage to prevail has always animated our current president, the “Winner”, and killing is the ultimate assertion of an extreme notion of power, I suppose. Trump argues that he is free to kill anyone he designates a deadly enemy under IEEPA – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Oh, wait, that’s his fig leaf for his illegally imposed tariffs. He is allowed to murder suspected drug dealers anywhere, he claims, because of another emergency war power someone told him about, possibly the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798, plus he has “an Article II” and, most convincingly of all, the people he is killing — “narco-terrorists” — are totally evil.

Oddly enough, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is in detention at the International Criminal Court at the Hague for the identical crime, executing suspected drug dealers without arresting, charging and trying them first.  Although Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the International Criminal Court in 2019, much of the wholesale murder he committed took place before that date and so he’s still under the court’s jurisdiction and locked up.

Last month, judges decided to keep Duterte in custody, finding that he was likely to refuse to return for trial and could use his freedom to intimidate witnesses.

According to court filings, Duterte instructed and authorized “violent acts including murder to be committed against alleged criminals, including alleged drug dealers and users.” The charges against him date from Nov. 1, 2011, when he was still mayor of the southern city of Davao, to March 16, 2019, when the country withdrew from the court. He was president from 2016-22.

Estimates of the death toll during Duterte’s presidential term vary. National police put the figure at more than 6,000, while human rights groups claim up to 30,000. Families of victims hailed Duterte’s arrest in March.

Of course, Donald Trump’s body count somehow doesn’t include the more than 600,000 who have died so far as a result of Trump’s largest campaign donor, failed humanoid Elon Musk, being tasked with shutting down USAID, with Donald’s, and Charles Koch’s and the Heritage Foundation’s, blessing.  That alarming number of innocent dead, the poorest people in the world and their children, is expected to reach a million very soon, and more than 14 million over the next few years.

What are you going to do? Not everybody in the world is a winner… “and if you’re a winner, you get to kill whoever you want, they let you do it. Ask the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, they’ll tell you, just like they did when they declared me the winner of Trump v. United States.”

[1]

The Department of Justice has scheduled three federal executions during the administration’s lame-duck period: Orlando Hall on November 19, Lisa Montgomery on December 8, and Brandon Bernard on December 10. The last time the U.S. government carried out an execution between a presidential election and the inauguration of the new president for a federal crime was nearly 132 years ago, on January 25, 1889, when the outgoing administration of Grover Cleveland executed Richard Smith, a Choctaw Indian, for a murder on tribal land in Arkansas. source

Montgomery was the 11th prisoner to be killed by lethal injection since Donald Trump resumed federal executions last July after a 17-year hiatus. The president is an ardent supporter of capital punishment. source

Of course he is.