Ari Melber nails a terrible truth about our selectively blind justice system

As we led the world in Covid deaths with MAGA’s staunch, idiotic insistence on personal freedom for infectious assholes, we also lead the world in incarceration. Pretrial incarceration, which is spared our wealthiest citizens charged with felonies, is a violent, brutal, punishing, sometimes deadly world for poor people presumed innocent, locked up in hellish, overcrowded conditions prior to their trial, conviction and sentence. This torture is reserved for the poor and racial and ethnic minorities. Or as Bill Barr, our former culture warrior Attorney General, warned Blacks and Hispanics, in front of a law enfrorcement audience, you’d better obey law enforcement and respect them or they ain’t going to protect you, and shut up, there’s no such thing as systemic racism here you fucking whiners.

Ari Melber with a devastating report on the reality of Riker’s Island and our grotesquely unjust two tiered system of justice in exceptional America.

“Biden rethinking relationship with Saudi Arabia”

I don’t know what the most sickening aspect of this Washington Post headline is.

That the psychopathic young acting monarch of this medieval theocracy, a ruthless billionaire who murdered a critical journalist and had him dismembered, is cutting the oil supply to help his suck up friend Jared Kushner’s father-in-law claw his way back to power to avoid prosecution for multiple felonies?

That our great, exceptional country, a beacon of democracy and freedom to other countries, is hostage to a family of torturing medieval billionaire sheikhs who seem to have a chokehold on the world’s oil supply and can dictate prices at will? We’re beginning to reexamine our relationship with the House of Saud? Beginning?

Well, better late than never, I suppose.

If you read the article you’ll notice that only Democrats seem to be critical of dictatorial crown pronce MBS, the Reformer, and his current plan to drive up prices at the American oil pumps to help American right wing extremists and his embattled buddy Vladimir Putin, who never helped Trump in any way, I mean, why would he, I mean, why wouldn’t he? Now support for beleagured, innocent Putin is a touchstone for Republicans.

Only Democrats seem to give a damn about this axis of theocracy, repression and evil. Talk about a marriage of convenience made in hell… I can picture these implacable religious fanatics meeting again in the new Crusade, and they won’t be smiling at each other, or handing each other two billion dollar checks…

https://wapo.st/3rO5XDC

MAGA = Nazi

Friends have long chided me for saying the rabid, lying, authoritarian fact-deniers of the current Republican party are Nazis.  “Everything reminds you of Hitler!  Everyone’s a Nazi to you,” they often say.   Well, not everything.   But every lying sociopath who mobilizes the visceral hatreds of millions for his own self-serving ends, and is indifferent to mass suffering and countless deaths, tends to remind me of old Herr Hitler.  Every faithful follower of a lying sociopath, while also a victim of that leader, is a fucking Nazi.

I know a lot about Nazis, their motivations, techniques and ultimate aims, having studied them for years in class and in my reading.  Many of the top Nazis were very much like our Kevin McCarthy, Mitch, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Perjury Taylor Green, Clarence and Ginni Thomas, people without any real core beliefs about anything but power.  Power is an end to itself to ambitious people and as Robert Caro pointed out in his excellent essay on power (sadly available only through Bezos’s paid service…) you can judge what a person believed the whole time they were climbing to power (Caro says “cloiming” in his  wonderful NY accent) by what they do once they have it.   

Like, in the case of our radicalized, lockstep Republicans, shutting down a government they controlled to pressure the country into submitting to something the vast majority didn’t want.   Like repeating angry, divisive lies disproved over and over again to mobilize the rage of their aggrieved base.  Like pointing a loaded gun at the Capitol and pulling the trigger to prevent the peaceful transition of power.   Like many ugly things they have shown no hesitation whatsoever to do.  Amid the silence of the Republican “moderates”, as afraid to speak the truth as the many in government who are already hounded by literal lynch mobs, who live in fear of stochastic, lone wolf terrorism from people goaded to deadly violence by insane lies spread by our own home grown white nationalist reality TV avatar of totalitarianism and those who march behind him.

Let’s just recap the latest united stand these Nazi motherfuckers continue to take behind anything that will hurt the Democrats chances, based on their actual successes, of keeping the House and gaining an actual, useable majority in the Senate.  As Jared’s pal MBS in Saudi Arabia squeezes the world oil supply to drive up inflation and hurt that communist dupe Biden and his radical socialist party in the approaching election.

Fucking F POTUS has, not surprisingly, continued to lie about the documents he stole from the government when he was dragged kicking and sulking from the White House.   He lied over and over, as he did to Mueller, about cooperating with the government.  Recall that his new AG Bagpiper Barr emphasized on live TV that his boy had cooperated fully with Mueller’s investigation, although Trump did not cooperate with the fake witch hunt at all, in fact, only obstructed it.  As to that obstruction, Mueller wrote that while he could not charge Trumpie while in office, he also could not exonerate him for obstructing his investigation.  It was, according to Eagle Scout Mueller, a matter for Congress, the DOJ and the courts, once POTUS was F POTUS.  About those stolen documents:

We were cooperating fully.  We didn’t lie, we never lied, we never lie.  The DOJ lies, to help Biden. We turned over everything.  They planted shit.  I declassified the shit before they could plant it.  I’m the rubber you’re the glue, scumbag.  We did nothing wrong.  We own those papers, and even if we don’t, we still do.  No backsies.  Finders keepers, losers weepers.  Executive Privilege, Attorney/Client Privilege, White Wealth Delay Tactic Privilege, Fuck your Mother Privilege.  Muhammed Bin Salman, one of the best people, a reformer, a visionary, gave Jared two billion as a small downpayment on what some of my documents are worth to him.   Putin, fine man, also, great customer.  What, am I not supposed to make money?  Jared and Ivanka made over $600,000,000 while public servants on the government payroll.  What am I, chopped liver?  I get to make money, too.   I’ve got mad bills to pay.

Anyone who thinks F POTUS would not sell top secret documents, has not already monetized those valuable papers he stole going on two years ago, probably also believes there are two parties who both do good things and bad things, who are roughly equivalent and equally corrupted by the big money donors.  Leaving the corrupting big money donors aside (and the legal unlimited use of dark money was a GOP initiative and great game-changing achievement that gave us MAGA), one party is trying its best to serve the needs of the vast majority of Americans.  The other is, I’m sad to say, the Nazi party, its only platform regaining unchallengeable power, behind an infallible, though often irrational, leaderIt is that stark, boys and girls.

The argument against the increasingly clear MAGA = Nazi argument:  Trump built not one single death camp!  Only one person that we know of was executed by federal agents who shot him on sight and claimed they were there to arrest him and that he resisted (that one unarmed antifa guy outside of Portland)!   Trump and Barr only executed one severely mentally ill prisoner on federal death row, and the bitch deserved it, no matter how extensive her daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs!  His government passed no law directly against the fucking so-called minorities, unless you consider the many new, restrictive voting laws in states where MAGA controls the legislatures.  There is no plan to invalidate future elections, unless you consider all the purity-tested MAGA election deniers who are campaigning on the promise to invalidate, as fraudulent, any election won by a non MAGA candidate.  Unless you consider the 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court poised to rule on a carefully constructed case designed to give a fig leaf of “originalism” to the pulled-out-of-somebody’s-ass “theory” of the Independent State Legislature, the most powerful sovereign bodies in America, whose actions are unreviewable by any court anywhere once SCOTUS bangs its 6-3 gavel.

Hitler had more time to make his mark on history.  It took him over a year in power before The Night of the Long Knives when he executed untrusted allies and hated enemies all over Germany.  It took five years before Kristalnacht, the Nazis’ first organized nationwide pogrom against Jews.  It was only after that he began secretly gassing “useless eaters” whose “lives were unworthy of life” in mental hospitals.  Six, almost seven years before he began the war of national self-defense the Jews forced him to wage to rescue the Aryans from destruction.   He hired violent criminals to oversee his war against partisans and Jews in countries he overran, and they did atrocious things, but it was eight long years before he started the mechanized mass murder machine in earnest and initiated that crowning Nazi achievement — historically efficient genocide.

So, F POTUS simply has not had time, in just one term, to make this country into Charles Koch’s wet dream (Koch’s dad built the oil refinery that produced the high octane fuel for the Nazi luftwaffe).   A country where the super rich can do whatever they want, in the name of liberty and freedom from majoritarian tyranny and government coercion, while everyone else is forced to do whatever they can to stay alive, subject to the whims of the best among us, guys like Koch, Murdoch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, et al.   Not all Nazis, perhaps, but the next best thing — the biggest beneficiaries of a Nazi social structure.  In that society, if you are not one of the condemned classes, you go along to get along, privileges protected as long as you play ball, take your windfall profits and stay quiet on “social issues”.  It’s been that way since the first tough guy imposed his will on a tribe of half apes thousands of years ago.  It was that way during all twelve years of the Thousand Year Reich.

Vote like your democracy depends on it, because it does.   I’m writing postcards to “swing voters” in Pennsylvania.  Contact tinicumtogether@gmail.com to get some postcards and a succinct script to write on ’em.  Take action, no matter how small it may seem, elections can turn on very few votes in a given precinct or district.   Any good history of the Nazi era will convince you that we are way, way too close to it happening here to fall into enervated depression about it.  Take action, friends.   Otherwise, see you at one of the MAGA camps, coming soon to an anarchist jurisdiction near you, if the Nazis take over.

Ron DeathSantis– cool dude

Heather Cox Richardson on strongman wannabe Ron DeathSantis:

This destructive storm highlights the distance between reality and the ideology that calls for getting rid of the federal government.

As a newly elected congress member in 2013, now-governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against a $9.7 billion federal flood insurance assistance package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Now, with Florida on the ropes, DeSantis asked President Joe Biden for an emergency declaration to free up federal money and federal help even before the storm hit, and said Tuesday, “We all need to work together, regardless of party lines.” 

Heather then describes the hugely successful Republican push since Reagan to move wealth increasingly toward the already very wealthy and away from the average American

There is a direct correlation between growing economic inequality and the growing popularity of authoritarianism. Scholars of authoritarian systems note that a population that feels economically, religiously, or culturally dispossessed is an easy target for an authoritarian who promises to bring back a mythological world in which its members were powerful.

But, having lifted strongmen into power, they learn that they were only tools to put in place someone whose decisions are absolute and who is no longer bound by the law.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-28-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Got to work hard to get out the vote and make sure this Trump wannabe DeathSantis, overruling the will of Florida voters regarding former felons voting, with his armed “election integrity” goons intimidating voters, still loses reelection as Florida gauleiter [1]  by a million votes.

[1]  A Gauleiter was a regional leader of the Nazi Party who served as the head of a Gau or Reichsgau. Gauleiter was the third-highest rank in the Nazi political leadership, subordinate only to Reichsleiter and to the Führer himself. The position was effectively abolished with the fall of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945.

MAGA= fight to the death

In order to ensure that the greatest former and future president in history has the final say, no matter what, loyal MAGA officials will do whatever he tells them to do, espouse anything he tells them to believe in.   It was a small shock at first to see a “principled” “moderate” “true conservative” like Mitt Romney (who once famously, if belatedly, took a stand and voted guilty on one article of impeachment against Trump after MAGA-man literally unleashed a lynch mob to try to overturn the 2020 election) vote with the rest of his party for united rejection of everything Biden looked for a bipartisan coalition to pass.   It’s just normal now.  If we can call it that.  Usual is a better word, or expected.

So F POTUS, who shut down his own government at one point, to get his way (very presidential, sir!) and who had the debt ceiling raised three times to pay for things he wanted government to pay for, has stamped his cloven hoof and told his MAGA followers in Congress that they better not piss him off by caving in to the partisan, sick, dangerous Radical Left Democrats who are destroying the nation he’s still working so hard to make great again.   

Here’s Heather Cox Richardson with the story about the looming fight to the death about raising the debt ceiling (and the alternative is the US defaulting on its debts, massive unemployment and a major recession) and the demand of the psychopathic god of the godless party of religious fanaticism.  The rest of her Letter from an American gives the historical parallel with the same scorched earth tactics used by the former Confederacy in 1879 — and how it came back to bite them in the 1880 election:

And yet, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, said, “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will…help Democrats…resume ramming through partisan socialism.” His stand was in part because it was not clear he had the votes he needed to support an increase, even though establishment Republicans like McConnell were quite aware of the damage a default would create.

Driving the Republican stance was former president Trump, who pushed MAGA Republicans to use the threat of default to get what they want. “The way I look at it,” he wrote, “what the Democrats are proposing, on so many different levels, will destroy our country. Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede all of the horror they are trying to inflict upon the future of the United States.” Trump was not happy when McConnell backed down. He issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding” and added, “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-29-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

The logic is so clear, so classic.  They hurt me.  Kill them all.  It was the final stand of one of F POTUS’s great heroes, Mr. Hitler, another master of five dimensional chess: if Germany lost the war they all deserve to die, for letting me, God’s chosen instrument, suffer an undeserved defeat because they are weak, unworthy of a leader like me and deserve to all die defending my corpse.  And so it was for many German boys, slaughtered at their posts as the Red Army and the Allied armies took Berlin the day Hitler shot his beloved dog, poisoned his wife and killed himself.  Insane fuckers fight to the death and beyond.

Bagpiper blows bad breath

Blustering, bagpipe blowing, bullying buffoon Bill Barr barges belligerently between talking heads to blow some bad faith bad breath toward the viewers.  Barr weighs in on the detailed claims of NY AG Latisha James’s civil fraud lawsuit against his corrupt benefactor, the CEO of the Trump Organization:  

“What ultimately persuades me that this is a political hit job is, she grossly overreaches when she tries to drag the children into this.  Yes, they had roles in the business, but this was his personal financial statement and the children aren’t going to know the details of that, and be able, nor are they expected, in the real world, to do their own due diligence and have it reviewed independently.” 

A man who knows a thing or two about political hit jobs.  And it’s not like his Special Prosecutor John Durham, hired to expose the corrupt motives of those rabid partisans who’d investigated and documented Trump’s many ties to his role model Vladimir Putin, and his obstruction of that investigation, came up with bupkis to document the Radical Left’s purely political hit job on the innocent Trump and associates, after a much longer investigation than Meuller’s.

Joyce Vance points out that one of those “children” (ages 44-38) was the senior advisor to the president of the United States, while the other two ran Trump Inc. while their father was busy making America Great Again.   

I wish, and keep wishing, that people like Barr, Bolton, Mulvaney, Christie, et al would just keep their poisonous, Nazi adjacent opinions to themselves.  Granted, opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, but these guys never wash their asses, ever. Sheesh.

Justice, justice ye shall pursue

I started to write that you can’t claim a search warrant was unfair after the search finds the evidence that the warrant enabled law enforcement to look for, but, of course you can. You simply lie. There’s no law against lying, as long as you don’t do it under oath.

That’s the reason no sworn statements were included in F POTUS’s belated emergency application to his handpicked judge Aileen Cannon, in Donald J. Trump b United States of America. Even though every such application must be supported by sworn statements, with the bullshit they had to work with it would have been perjury had Trump’s lawyers submitted a sworn statement. So Cannon spared them that risk by waving away their failure to plead anything under the penalties of perjury.

I’m thinking about judge-for-life Aileen Cannon, clearly abusing her discretion by taking jurisdiction over a case there was no legal grounds for her to hear and then acting as an attorney and advocate for F POTUS. Her baseless ruling temporarily blocked law enforcement from investigating F POTUS’s criminal retention of documents he illegally possessed.

Accessory to obstruction of justice? I think so.

Trump’s proposed Special Counsel for Election Fraud

Or perhaps it was Attorney General. At any rate, she’s now expected to testify before the Fulton County criminal grand jury investigating interference in the election in Georgia by F POTUS and Rudy, among others.

Whoopsie! She failed to appear today. Now she is subject to arrest, oh dear!

She may be crazy, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say she’s no more nuts than her good friend and comrade in arms Ginni Thomas, who has finally agreed to come in, informally, and stonewall the libtard cucks of the J6 committee.