Rather than fanning the vague and hateful lie that there is widespread voting fraud, on all sides, and here’s another example of it, reports should always mention that voter fraud in the US is fleetingly, statistically insignificantly rare, except for the Stop the Steal crowd.
Here’s what is missing from the report on the previous post, and, no, it is not members of both parties who are warned by judges not to intimidate witnesses at their trials, that’s a MAGA/Mafia/Nazi thing. Buried toward the end of the article published in the Times Union, dateline Troy, NY:
Crist is a former news reporter and longtime GOP political operative in Rensselaer County who has wielded enormous influence in local politics and for many years has been McLaughlin’s political confidant. Wallace is a former Republican legislative aide in the state Assembly and Senate who also has a private political consulting business. Gordon is a former Troy mayoral candidate and a member of the North Greenbush Town Board.
The charges include allegations that the trio conspired to use their official positions to violate the constitutional rights of subordinate county employees to intimidate them into requesting and filing absentee ballots, according to federal prosecutors.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Or to those looking up the text of the sacred Second amendment on the internet, the first thing you will read is the interpretation of the “Originalist” Supreme Court who decided 5 to 4 what it actually means in the original intent of the holy, infallible framers
Unconnected to service in a militia, obviously, because if they’d meant the government shall not restrict the ownership of guns for members of a well regulated militia, they would have so stated, obviously, duh!
And it’s worth remembering, Antonin Scalia was a genius.
A great demonstration of why a free press is vital to an informed electorate and a functioning democracy. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse with episode 21 of his important series The Scheme, how far right billionaires captured the Supreme Court, as part of their long quest to capture American democracy. Clarence Thomas edition, the details are damning. A clear, brilliant presentation, well worth checking out.
Mueller was unable to find sufficient evidence of the Trump campaign’s criminal conspiracy with Putin, just 140 instances of coordination, along with numerous instances of obstruction of justice.
He’s currently coordinating with Jordan, Comer and others in Congress to obstruct the first criminal indictment of him, or at least poison the jury pool — lying about being arrested on a certain Tuesday and having three MAGA chairmen make wild legal threats to the local DA on the Monday before.
Trumpie worked in coordination with Bill Barr and his postmaster general to spread disinformation about massive mail-in voting fraud and to disable the mail service in heavily Democratic areas in the lead up to the 2020 election. Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Flynn, Eastman, Miller, Bannon, Ginni Thomas, Meadows, My Pillow, Jolly RogerStone, FOX and others coordinated efforts to keep Trumpie in power after he lost. Trumpie himself met with and coordinated with new MAGA members of Congress, like Greene and Boebert, along with loyalists like Jordan, Gaetz, and Brooks, after he lost in 2020. These were the people he was counting on, along with Cruz, Hawley, Rand Paul, et al, to take the lie about the stolen election and run with it to stop the certfication of Biden’s victory, if only the DOJ would send a letter to every swing state falsely claiming it was investigating massive election fraud.
On January 6th he coordinated with his political appointees to minimize police presence along the route of his unpermitted march on the Capitol and planned storming of the joint session of Congress.
The DOJ is now investigating what appears to be a massive, coordinated, very successful ($250,000,000 and counting) campaign of wire fraud in relation to Trump/RNC fundraising on a lie.
If you listen to the corporate talking heads, the hard part of pinning this squirming specimen down in a criminal trial is proving his intent was corrupt. Seriously?
Jim Jordan and the weaponization of government select committee have made a big deal about the supposed Twitter files, an even more explosive story than Hillary Clinton’s emails or her clear guilt in the death of four Americans at the embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Their claim is that Biden and the extreme left have used government power to coerce Twitter into censoring and suppressing the truth, including intervening toprevent posting of pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis. Just like the liberal corporate media!The Twitter files controversy may well be complete bullshit, but it’s something to get mad about!
When one of the world’s richest men, with unknown wealthy autocratic funders like Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, the ghost of Benito Mussolini, bought the public square that is Twitter, he immediately fired most of the content moderation folks and limited access to any view that did not agree with his right wing worldview. At the same time new CEO Musk gave unfettered access to right wing extremists, restoring accounts that had been banned, including the account of the architect and chief propagandist of the insurrection to overturn the “stolen election” of 2020.
In the interest of proving the vast Communist conspiracy against all wealthy people, Elon Musk turned over certain files to be exploited by the MAGA/America First weaponization of government select committee. Musk got once respected Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi to look at selected Twitter files to make the case that Twitter had previously been a partisan arm of the cucktard libtard deep state that has such hateful bias toward The Make America Great Again crowd. Taibbi and Jordan didn’t make much of a case, but here is an egregious example of some of the extreme anti-Trump prejudice of Twitter before it was purchased by Musk.
Trumpie tweeted this during the J6 riot, right before a crowd he’d whipped up with an hour of detailed, inflammatory lies about a stolen election, a crowd who’d already erected a gallows, began chanting “hang Mike Pence!” Note the provocative, unfair anti-Trump nature of the warning aboutthe tweet:
This claim about election fraud is disputed
Taibbi once did greatinvestigative journalism and wrote some excellent books, including a deep dive into the killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island by police, for the crime of being a big black serial committer of misdemeanors.In recent times Taibbi seems to have gone full MAGA. He doesn’t do too well defending his point of view against Medhi Hassan, coming off like a petty, defensive twerp. He gets mad when questioned about thanking Jim Jordan for the honor of testifying to the weaponization committee, and his praise of Lyin’ Ted Cruz.It is always great to watch Mehdi at work.
On April 8, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant was having a hard night.
His army had been harrying Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s for days, and Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. The people in the Virginia countryside were starving, and Lee’s army was melting away. Just that morning a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant’s mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee still insisted his men could fight on.
So, on the night of April 8, Grant retired to bed in a Virginia farmhouse, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine. He spent the night “bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.” It didn’t work. When morning came, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.
As he rode, an escort arrived with a note from Lee requesting an interview for the purpose of surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”
The two men met in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee had dressed grandly for the occasion in a brand new general’s uniform carrying a dress sword; Grant wore simply the “rough garb” of a private with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant general.
But the images of the wealthy, noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” he responded, before asking how many men needed food. He took Lee’s answer—”about twenty-five thousand”—in stride, telling the general that “he could have…all the provisions wanted.”
By spring 1865, the Confederates who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that their wealthy aristocrats would beat the North’s moneygrubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while, backed by a booming industrial economy, the Union army could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment’s notice.
The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by men like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier’s uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work.
In light of recent revelations that Clarence and Ginni Thomas took many undisclosed lavish paid vacations (including a half million dollar luxury cruise in Indonesia) with, and recieved obscenely expensive gifts from, a right-wing billionaire and funder of the Federalist Society and other right wing causes, a far right real estate mogul named Crow who inherited great wealth from his father, the New York Times closes their short piece about the scandal with a quote from a former government official who also clerked for Clarence Thomas.
Coincidentally the former official was an author of the fucking torture memo, that secret legal fig leaf that made it “legal” for US contractors to violate international law and treaties that the US had signed, in order to go to the dark side fighting the “War on Terror.” Here’s fucking John Yoo with the last word on the latest unfair attack on Thomas in the “liberal” NYT’s short account:
John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who clerked for Justice Thomas and served in President George W. Bush’s administration, said he did not believe that vacations or gifts would play any role in the decisions he issued. The criticism of the justice’s ties to Mr. Crow, he added, reflected a broader campaign.
“This is part of this attack on him that goes back to ever since he joined the court,” Mr. Yoo said. “That somehow he couldn’t hold these views from his own free thoughts.”
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