Category Archives: current events

FOX & friends

from Julia Claire & Crooked Media—

Kevin McCarthy fascism update!! House Speaker McCarthy has granted Fox News host Tucker Carlson exclusive access to all of the Capitol security footage from the January 6 insurrection. This is…uhhh…a highly unusual (and unethical) move. (Imagine Nancy Pelosi bypassing House committees and the public to show oversight materials exclusively to, say, her daughter’s documentary-production company, so it could be turned into Democratic Party propaganda, and you’ll see the issue.) But it’s also a crystal-clear statement from McCarthy about where the GOP comes down on the Big Lie and the insurrection. Just last week, Dominion Voting Systems exposed Carlson’s efforts within Fox News to suppress accurate reporting about the 2020 election and intentionally feed the network’s audience lies. McCarthy’s here to say, Republicans love it! Carlson’s still their guy, systemic lying about the 2020 election is still their jam, and the insurrection is still all cool with them. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he was not consulted on the release of the footage, and another source says neither was the rest of the GOP leadership. Just a big ole’ “Fuck you!” to us all from McCarthy. Meanwhile, his special pal Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was really On One™ this weekend (even more so than usual), committing low-key sedition by calling for a “national divorce” between Republican and Democratic states, apparently angling to be a modern-day John C. Calhoun without bothering to update his talking points. Even Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) denounced this rhetoric as, “destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil.” Couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

Ari Melber puts it pretty well in this report:

People who are hurt hurt people

  • What is hateful to you, do not unto others. 

If I need to be heard, and when you need to talk I cover my ears and hum loudly, what am I?

Certainly no better than Marjorie Taylor Greene, the day her divorce from Perry Greene was finalized last December, absent from Congress, voting by proxy, after introducing a bill to ban proxy voting.

Hurt people hurt people.  

Marjorie, in a muscular fundraising tweet, is now calling for the Trump states to secede, a national divorce, presumably with generous alimony from the “blue states” that subsidize the former Confederacy.   If you ask her she’ll probably tell you that the Northern War of Aggression was never actually won by the bellicose Union, that the victorious Confederacy was stabbed in the back by traitorous you know whats, like the victorious German army was at the end of the World War.   No conflict is ever settled in a hurt heart.

I can write all the impossible letters I want.  The more persuasive, the more impossible.  Heck of a job, Brownie.

Still, if we do to others what we hate done to us, we are wrong.  Simple enough for even a Q-Anon believer to grasp, no?

Nothing is simple to a hurt heart that can’t find peace, except by hurting others.   After he lost the 2020 election Trumpie mashed the accelerator to make sure his killing spree of federal death row inmates went full speed ahead.  Barr was right there with him, executing more federal prisoners than the previous ten administrations combined, until he was among the first rabid rats to jump the sinking ship.  Now MAGA-man is promising to execute everyone he possibly can in his next term as president.  Why not kill them by firing squad, by public hanging?  Why stop there, the Elizabethans drew out the spectacle by eviscerating, hanging, but not until dead, reviving, dismembering, hanging again, and so on.  The master showman of MAGA knows how electrifying this kind of chilling spectacle, even just the titillating promise of it, is to people smarting from their own agonizing pain.  Plus, it’s great for fundraising!

Is everybody who loves this kind of thing stupid?  No, sad to say.   Is everybody who loves this kind of thing filled with hurt, fear and rage?   I don’t know, but I’d bet most of them are.    How much easier is it to get a legal assault weapon and take it out on a bunch of strangers than to sit with unbearable pain in your heart?   Apparently much easier for all mass shooters.  I love the mass media’s eternal search for the “gunman’s” motive.   So American.

In the corporate media there are two sides to every story, as long as there’s monetary profit in the conflict.  One side might be barking mad, but, now that the quaint “Fairness Doctrine” is a footnote in our history, both sides are given the same weight in public discussion by biased media companies catering to their “base”.  In one set of reports Anthony Fauci did everything possible to help curb deadly Covid-19 in a country that set world records for infections and deaths per capita.  To millions of others, who will never watch that kind of lying crap, Fauci is a fucking liar who deserves crucifixion, this Easter, nobody in the US died of the China flu!  Both sides make a legitimate point, you know, here in the land where fairness and justice reign, alongside equally compelling, always maddening, unfairness and injustice.  Get over it, asshole.

It is all in the way the story is told.  I can convince you, if you are inclined to believe me, that I’ve been the innocent victim of people who brutally hurt me every time I tried to make peace.  I can’t convince you, if you are inclined to believe others, who say that they are the innocent victims of my brutality and unforgiving heartlessness as I constantly spin the real facts like a scripture quoting Beelzebub.  

Hurt people hurt people, and the only way out of the cycle of hurt is through a certain kind of honesty and courage, which can also be construed as despicable dishonesty and cowardice, depending on who’s telling the story. 

To say that love is the only solution to conflict is a bit simplistic.  There are many versions of love and endless variations on each version, with a hundred conditions.  Hate, on the other hand, we know at once what we hate.  How much easier it is not to inflict hateful things on others than to be like Jesus, constantly turning the other cheek whenever struck, repaying scorn and cruelty with love and compassion?  I know what I hate, I try not to do it to other people.  Pretty straightforward, no?

Oh, well.  Time to get back to writing some more impossible letters. 

American Exceptionalism: Health care for seniors, episode 71

Medicare for all, baby.  

Just spent 45 minutes on the phone with a very nice receptionist at Medicare who reviewed my last few payments.  I’d made all of them, had not missed one.  I was calling to find out why they had threatened to cancel my Medicare health insurance with a delinquent premium notice and why I’d been billed an additional $510 (that I promptly paid, just to be safe) when the record showed I had paid it already, three months ago.   

The woman was very nice, but helpless.  She confirmed that I hadn’t missed a payment and that I shouldn’t have been sent a delinquent account notice, but, after placing me on hold several times, was unable to verify that the delinquent account notice had been sent in error, though from what she and I could tell, based on my payment record, it certainly had been.  Mistakes happen.  In 7-10 business days I’ll hear back from Medicare, if not, I should call again, and have a very nice day.

Need a colonoscopy, old man?    The Medicare.gov website tells you everything you need to know, or need to find out, or need ask your doctor, or research with a competent financial advisor who is schooled in the intricacies of the gold standard of American health insurance (not healthcare, that’s for godless commies and people in less exceptional nations) for old people who don’t have better health insurance.  Here you go, from Medicare.gov:

Medicare covers screening colonoscopies once every 24 months if you’re at high risk for colorectal cancer. If you aren’t at high risk, Medicare covers the test once every 120 months, or 48 months after a previous flexible sigmoidoscopy. There’s a minimum age requirement of 45.  (note, Medicare does not cover anyone under 65, does it?)

If your doctor or other qualified health care provider accepts assignment, you pay nothing for this test. However, if your doctor finds and removes a polyp or other tissue during the colonoscopy, you pay 15% of the Medicare-Approved Amount for your doctors’ services. In a hospital outpatient setting, you also pay the hospital a 15% coinsurance. The Part B deductible doesn’t apply. If you initially have a non-invasive stool-based screening test (fecal occult blood tests or multi-target stool DNA test) and receive a positive result, Medicare also covers a follow-up colonoscopy as a screening test

Note: To find out how much your test, item, or service will cost, talk to your doctor or health care provider. The specific amount you’ll owe may depend on several things, like:

Other insurance you may have

How much your doctor charges

If your doctor accepts assignment

The type of facility where you get your test, item, or service

Note: Your doctor or other health care provider may recommend you get services more often than Medicare covers. Or, they may recommend services that Medicare doesn’t cover. If this happens, you may have to pay some or all of the costs.

Ask questions so you understand why your doctor is recommending certain services and if, or how much, Medicare will pay for them.

Sociopathic transgression # 397

We all know that a desperate person with no scruples, feeling cornered and about to lose something they need, is capable of atrocious behavior. Even if the person has some scruples, when badly wounded and in great pain they may become capable of terrible acts.

Donald Trump’s brain, politically speaking, is an apparently very disturbed man named Steve Bannon. Sloppy Steve fancies himself a modern day strategist of international nationalism (which rings like National Socialism), right-wing oligarchic authoritarianism. He speaks of Vladimir Lenin’s “fire hose of mendacity”, the idea of flooding the marketplace of ideas with a constant high-powered flood of incendiary lies, like spraying diarrhea out of a high pressure nozzle. People get so overwhemed, so worn out, so sickened, that they turn away, while many others, less capable critical thinkers, are convinced by the constant stream of verifiable horseshit that comes too fast to fact check.

The transactional Trump was arguably the most corrupt, and one of the most insane, presidents who ever won the Electoral College. He was said to constantly push against the guardrails, as the New York Times styled it “bending and sometimes breaking them“. Most of the time he would just take a greasy shit on them, “here are your fucking norms, asshole.“

By design, according to Bannon’s Leninist strategy and Trump’s own penchant for chaos, it would take hours to list all of the destructive, corrupt and despicable acts committed by this administration (ask any of the remaining 900+ of the almost 4,000 children seized from asylum seekers who will never see their parents again).

Here’s a disgusting one that just jumped out at me, nicely encapsulating the destructive psychopathy of the GOP’s leader and the moral tone of its lynch mob caucus. I was reminded of it when I saw a photo of the supremely spineless Mike Pence wearing his special Vice President of the United States Covid mask.

Trump tested positive for Covid a day or two before the first 2020 presidential debate, and lied about it, claiming his retest was negative. It would have been a political disaster for him to admit that he was so weak and mortal that he got Covid, the hoax virus that Biden invented to defeat him in a rigged election. So the usually punctual president showed up late for the debate, too late to take the Covid test he’d agreed to take, and immediately took the stage with no mask barking at Biden from close range. Biden was, fortunately, wearing a mask.

Trump mocked Biden’s mask and within a day or two was medevacced to one of the greatest hospitals in the world to have every one of the new million dollar Covid treatments available.

Trump demanded an early release from the hospital and forced his secret service detail to drive around with him in a closed car so he could wave to his fans while his agents contracted Covid from him during his strongman photo op right out of his boyfriend Kim jong-un’s playbook. Then he immediately bragged about how easy it was to defeat Covid, that it was mind over matter, that if you were strong you had nothing to fear from this so-called pandemic.

Then the insane, highly infectious prick skirts the agreement he made to be tested before he took the debate stage. On the honor system the infamous and prolific liar lyingly told the corrupt, sick, dangerous, biased libtard cucks who were running the unfair debate that he had tested negative for Covid. His fucking family sat in the first row hissing and coughing throughout the debate with no masks on. Biden, fortunately, was wearing a mask. Which is probably what saved his life, or at least saved the senior citizen a bad case of a deadly pandemic.

Hard to even untangle the many strands of that transgression. He’d been lying for months about Covid, first claiming it would go away in a few weeks, saying it was the Kung Flu, blaming Hunter Biden, China and corrupt Ukraine for Covid-19, then appointing his imbecile son-in-law to be the czar of Covid, because Jared had done such a wonderful job fixing the opioid crisis and had also successfully brought peace to the Middle East (not including the Palestinians who he called ungrateful idiots).

Now if Biden had died of Covid that he contracted from Trump at that debate, could Trump go to prison for manslaughter based on his demonstrable depraved indifference to human life?

LOL!!!

Reality vs. Angering Spin

You can argue, as authoritarians like Ron DeSantis do, that teaching current events in light of the actual past stigmatizes innocent young white children with the sins of their grandfathers, but that is only a transactional argument in the service of increasing your side’s power.

It is harder to argue persuasively about a simple fact like this:

Which is why wealthy fascists will always focus on the terrible burden to the “job creators” a living wage for unskilled workers would impose on the wealthy. They focus on why we must pity the poor super wealthy, who grace us all with their generosity and create a beautiful and just society for us all.

Believe that, you know, the myth of the generous, selfless billionaire philanthropist — or stay focused on the so-called grotesque injustice of one person having more than 10 million others, while children starve in the wealthiest country in human history.

And, of course, people like me completely ignore the fact that people who inherit a mountain of money deserve every penny of it, free of DEATH TAX, while poor people, even if willing to work very hard, only deserve a minimum beyond the bare legal minimum. Period.

Bill Barr on the Mueller investigation

17 seconds of Donald Trump’s former gunsel, Bagpiper Bill Barr, describing “one of the greatest travesties in American history” as he appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the oringes of Trump’s confident insistence that he never fucking did anything wrong in his life, in spite of all the sick, dangerous haters who blame him for everything.

Barr is the same corrupt pile of shit who insisted that mail-in voting obviously was an invitation to massive election fraud (during the lead up to the 2020 election). He testified that there was good reason to believe that Obama had spied on Trump during his campaign. He told a law enforcement crowd that Black Americans had better start respecting the police if they expected the protection of the completely non-racist American police force.

So not only a corruptly lying sack of shit, but a racist corruptly lying sack of shit.

A short summary of Barr’s career as the MAGA Attorney General.

Durham and Barr — totally unweaponized

The New York Times, as it sometimes does, broke an important investigative report detailing a stunning bit of MAGA ethics under Attorney General Bill Barr, who appointed, and worked closely with, a Special Counsel to investigate the investigators who had found 140 incidents of coordination between the Trump campaign and Putin, as well as ample evidence of Trump’s actions to obstruct that investigation.

Barr set out to prove that the oringes of Mueller’s investigation were corrupt, a “deep state” conspiracy of career DOJ employees hatched out of the fever dreams of contemptible libtard cucks. He used the full weight of Trump’s DOJ to create an ongoing propaganda coup that could be amplified nightly on Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart, Facebook, Twitter, Der Stürmer, etc, in the lead up to the 2020 election.

Remember the first order of business in the MAGA House of Representatives after their recent Red Wave mandate, a nine vote majority in a 435 member body — cut funding to the Office of Congressional Ethics. Then a quick rules change to get a couple of the Democratic members off the bipartisan committee and make it harder to have a quorum to conduct any business in the office of ethics. So far so good.

Then leave it to the Communist, Marxist, Socialist, fascist New York Times to uncover how Bill Barr and his fellow deeply conservative, Catholic, 72 year-old culture warrior, John Durham, worked closely to leave no stone unturned in trying to vindicate Donald Trump’s total victimhood in the baseless, partisan Mueller probe.

How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled

WASHINGTON — It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald J. Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.

Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

source