Members of the angry, frightened mass that become supporters of facist leaders love a totally “in control” guy who shows complete contempt for all of his detractors, and deadly scorn for his enemies. They love that he never backs down, takes no shit and gets terrible, public revenge againstanyone who crosses him. Theyrelate tobeing able to rip off a hated enemy’s head and shit down his neck.
The crowd that becomes followers of a fascist have always been with us, throughout history. They worship what they think of as strength and they admire a person who can take what they want, who is subject to no law but his will. They are, by personality andbreeding, defiantauthoritarians,filled with contempt for “weakness” and “perversion,” obedient only to the leader’s will. The most violent among themaremembers of the lynch mob, murderously enragedhaters.
A charismatic fascist leader convinces the desperate crowd that he’s one of them. He may be very wealthy, obscenely privileged, enormously powerful, but in his heart, they know in their hearts, he’s one of them. He’s the man! He’s completely relatable, he’s just like us! As F POTUS, channeling Everyman, told the lackey he was about to send an angry mob to lynch “but wouldn’t it be cool to actually have that power?“
The tragedy, of course, is that each of these people who passionately believe in their violent leader, who faithfully hate whoever the leader hates, also loves their family and friends, and many would run into traffic, or dive into a river, to save a toddler, any toddler of any kind, who found herself in deadlyperil.
It turns out, according to a legal expert on Fox Entertainment, that Merrick Garland is the one who has been caught making more than one (two!) inaccurate and misleading false statements! Judge Cannon, on the other hand, has crafted an exceedingly fair (and balanced) way of dealing with these lying fucks at the DOJand FBI.
The brilliant, well-informed, cheerfulAlisonGill has several very popular podcasts. I listen to the Daily Beans everyday, as essential as Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, in my opinion. Allison cuts to the chase, and is never afraid to call b*******, or use the word bullshit, or sometimes fuckingbullshit (the Daily Beans is drily billed as “news with swearing”).
Allison does another podcast weekly, Cleanup on Aisle 45, with attorney Andrew Torrez. Torrez does not f****** swear, but he’s very fucking articulate and cut from the same cloth as Allison Gill. They recently analyzed lifetime federal judge Aileen Cannon’s ballsy but batshit crazy decision in Trump v Deep State Cucks. Allison called the episode “Loose Cannon”. You can hear the whole discussion at the link below, it’s fantastic.
I’ll give you the gist of it from notes I took while relistening just now.
Cannon argues in her ruling that even though the Trump defense team did not assert any grounds for the court’s jurisdiction or submit any evidence or sworn statements by anybody, she was asserting equitable jurisdiction over this oddly amateurish, one-off motion, brought specifically toher courtroom in Fort Pierce. Without jurisdictiona judge may not hear a case.
Equitable jurisdiction can only be found where there is some kind of inequity or unfairness that the law cannot otherwise address. The argument for equitable jurisdiction was not made by Trump’s lawyers, Cannon found it based solely on attorney argument at the hearing. This reticence to say anything under oath by lead attorney Jim Trusty, Torrez pointed out, was a clever move (in a corrupt judge’s courtroom) by F POTUS’s lawyers. Since attorney argument during hearings is not subject to the penalties of perjury (as an untruthful sworn court filing would be, and motions for equitable relief always depend on convincingsworn statements.) they left themselves free to throw things against the wall and see what the judge would make stick.
Cannon (who refused amicus briefs from conservatives opposing F POTUS’s motion, unheard of behavior from a judge) makes arguments in her ruling that Trump’s lawyers never raised in their idiosyncratic, frivolous filing. She applies the four Richey factors from a 1975 case where Mr. and Mrs. Richey sued the IRS to get back papers taken in a search. The appeals court in that case sets out what a moving party must show to get equitable relief in federalcourt in a pre-indictment case against the government.
The first and most important factor the moving party (movant) must show is that the government “displayed a callous disregard for the movant’s constitutional rights” (such as by deliberately not obtaining a legal search warrant prior to the search). Cannon admits this was not the case in the legal FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
But she then decided that factor number two weighed heavily in F POTUS’s favor, thathe hada compelling interest in and need for the personal property seized.
Kind of counterfactual when it comes to all of the executive branch documents he was illegally hoarding.It was, of course, not his property.
The third factor is a showing of irreparable injury to the moving party, something else Trump’s lawyers did not allege in their dodgy papers. Allison reads some testimony from his lawyer Jim Trusty, a long time criminal defense attorney from a white shoeWashington DC boutique white collar criminal defense law firm,in response to this question from Cannon. Trusty mumbles and mutters and eventually comes up with a vague, and irrelevant, claim of “institutional harm”. Cannon takes this and runs with it, the harm is to Donald Trump’s reputation and good name, presumably as an honest man, great party leader, past and future presidentand a lucrative brand.
Lawyers for George W. Bush argued a better, though also asinine, irreparable harm to their client in Bush v Gore — if the recount wasn’t stopped and all the Florida votes were counted their client would sufferthe irreparable injury of losing the 2000 presidential election. If you have unethical members of your legal fraternity deciding the case, you have a shot at that kind of bullshitflying. It worked like yer proverbial charm for Dubya and Cheney, with conflicted but unrecused Scalia and Thomas casting the deciding votesin the 5-4one off ruling.
The fourth factor is whether or not there’s an adequate remedy at law for the grievance, like a regular appeal. In this case, ordinarily Trump would be able to raise Fourth Amendment defenses about the government search only once he was a defendant in a criminal trial. Here judge Cannon isallowing Donald Trump to delay the investigation of the evidence of a likely crime (and how many of these documents he’s already sold to Saudis, his friend in Moscow, and all the highest bidders all around the world is inpossible to guess) as he did in every previous investigation, baseless witch hunts all. He is, as we all know, a serial and habitual obstructer of justice. So Judge Cannon just tried to help him out here a little bit. And who could blame her?
In weighing the equitable interests on both sides, Cannon decided that F POTUS’s squishy irreparable reputational injury claim (made by her in the absence of any irreparable injury asserted by the guy’s experienced white shoe lawyer) outweighed the two interests of the executive branch argued by the DOJ 1)– that the seized papers are needed to conduct an ongoing criminal investigation, and, 2) that they are needed for an urgent National Security harm/threat assessment.
Cannon dismissed the DOJ’s argument that the papers have all already been reviewed by a taint team and that the few attorney/client and personal ones have already been set aside and would never be seen by investigators. She noted in her ruling that the FBI and DOJ are “not always perceived to be impartial” (deep state cucks) and that there is a “perception” that they are both biased against fucking F POTUS.
This argument has the same stink as Lyin’ Ted Cruz’s sneered January 5th claims, citing the perceptions of millions who honestly believed in the rigged, stolen election as the reason that an independent committee had to be appointed to investigate the voter fraud that could notbeproved in dozens of federal lawsuits. The perception you understand, the perception, you fucking fuck!
For good measure Cannon also opined that the movant was likely to succeed on the merits of the case — that the goverment illegally took his property. The likelihood of sucess is a heavy factor in the granting of injunctive relief (a legal time out to avoid irreparable harm), even if manifestly, ridiculously untrue in this case (he’d have to prove he was the actual owner of all those government documents owned by the executive branch) but good enough for a Federalist Society lifetime appointee just showing loyalty and gratitude to her unblemished benefactor. Love you, boss!
Excellent discussion of how DOJ schooled the passionately loyal but unjudicial MAGA judge, at the end of an untenable legal limb with her incoherent andlawless order. Nicely done, by DOJ and by O’Donnell.
If you believe in a democratic society, one where the government works for the people who elected it, not the people who paid to rig it, but the people who consented to be governed by it and cast their votes, you take the job of governing more seriouslythen a minority party that insists on its right to rule everything.
If your goal is to destroy the administrative state, when you come to power you leave entire agencies defunded and understaffed, run by idiot loyalists, the stupidest in-laws of your most idiotic donor hangers-on get jobs running vast bureaucracies they have no experience with. It’s like those 25-year-old preppy assholes Dubya and Cheney put in charge of Iraq after they destroyed the civil society of Iraq. If your goal is to prove that government is the enemy, it’s very easy to make the government you control a despicable fucking enemy.
Take the IRS for example. For the tax year of 2016 I was told by my accountant that I owed zero tax but that I still technically had to file. A few years later I was forced to pay about $2,500 including two large fines of about $400 each, plus interest that was constantly being compounded. The accountant explained later that when the IRS calculates your tax they are not obliged to give you the standard deduction, and suddenly you owe some tax on an inflated income, which is then subject to penalties and interest.
My long calls to the IRS were unable to resolve this, in part, I learned after an eternity on hold and then on the phone and then on hold again, because the matter had been turned over to a private third party collection company, and, I was told, the IRS no longer had my fucking file. They gave me an 800 number for this private third party collection outfit, I repeated the number back to make sure I had it written down correctly, as was my habit during the years I worked as a lawyer. I called the number for the collection agency. It was a recording at a used car lot. Then I got a bill with another $400 fine on top of it and I finally went online fucking paid $2,500 more than I owed just to be done with these evil toxic incompetent assholes. There was of course no appeals process available.
Then there is a functioning government, where the IRS has its budget restored and comptent administrators in charge. I get a bill supposedly for hundreds in penalties unpaid in a previous year, I think it was 2017. The IRS waited a few years to send me any notice of this so-called debt, all penalties and interest, the tax had been paid in full. I was slow to pay the goddamn thing. In my recent mail I had a check from the IRS, it was a refund from 2019. The check was for $23. I thought that was pretty goddamned paltry, then I opened another letter from the IRS which told me that $443 owed had been deducted from my refund.
How much simpler, more efficient, sensible and humane is that? That’s how the government is supposed to work in a goddamned democracy, you don’t farm things out to fucking corrupt for-profit assholes to do the job badly and more expensively than the government which is designed to do these exact kinds of administrative jobs.
Vote Democrat. These Nazis are not a political party in a democracy anymore. They are, quite distinctly, Nazis. Don’t forget the Nazis didn’t start mass murdering until many years in. They first had to establish a fascist state that would make it possible. Don’t vote for Nazis, ever.
Forum shopping is the process of looking for the courtroom where the judge (and jury, if needed) will be most hospitable to your claims. Lawyers who represent the rare policeman facing criminal or civil trial for killing an unarmed Black kid try to avoid urban courts, particularly in the area of the killing; those juries tend to be skeptical of police arguments for why the unfortunate death had been inevitable and legally justifiable.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon, Federalist Society member and federal judge for life, was appointed by F POTUS (“Individual One”) after being confirmed nine days after the election was brutally stolen from him by a vast conspiracy of radical left billionaires and a cabal of international socialists, communists and cannibal pedophiles. There is a federal courthouse in the Southern District of Florida quite close to Mar-a-Lago. There is one about 70 miles north, in Fort Pierce, and in that courthouse there is one federal judge: Aileen Cannon. Why roll the dice in West Palm Beach, where you might go before a George W. Bush appointed judge, when you can take the highway up to a courthouse where, it turns out (who knew?), there is only one federal judge in residence, loyal Aileen M. Cannon?
Cannon has done her damnedest for her benefactor, completing her legally dodgy 24 page order on a national holiday, to protect F POTUS against “reputational harm” and make sure every day of unwarranted delay his lawyers have demanded, in two fairly incoherent sets of legal papers, will be provided — in the interests of mindfulness. She wrote her decision “mindful of the need to ensure at least the appearance of fairness and integrity under the extraordinary circumstances presented.”
Also mindful, of course, of putting herself at the center of national news and her name at the top of Leonard Leo’s list of future Supreme Court justices, as Lawrence O’Donnell points out:
So saith Rupert Murdoch, a reactionary billionairewhoought to know.
That’s what fascists do, as everybody knows, you lock up your enemies on baseless charges, like innocently stealing classified government documents you have every right to keep in your desk drawer.
In other news, a Federalist Society judge, out of concern for reputational damage to F POTUS, (apparently his reputation for never being held accountable for anything), wrote this great howler in her labored legal decision on Labor Day.
Because, truly for historically great white men, very wealthy and powerful ones, you never know if a search warrant based on probable cause was legal or not under such extraordinary circumstances. The appearance of propriety you understand sometimes requires impropriety, like foregoing all ordinary legal procedures — such as waiting until you’re prosecuted to raise sketchy Fourth Amendment defenses. Federalist Society 101, baby.Smash your fucking enemies right in the fuckingmouth.
Biden is the fascist who is criminalizing dissent, and his buddy Obama was a fascist and communist both. You figure it out, asshole.
As federal lifetime appointee, Aileen Cannon, confirmation pushed by McConnell post-election loss, was getting learned legal advice on how to rule in the bizzarrely convoluted manner of Noemi Rao on theDC Circuit Court of Appeals(in re Flynn, reversed 8-2 on appeal),with utter fealty to her celebrity benefactor, F POTUS addressed a campaign rally in the Keystone State and delivered thesestrong words.
Translated directly from the original German, no doubt. F POTUS had a book of the Führer’s speeches next to his bed when he was married to the woman he buried on his New Jersey golf course for a tax write-off. One suspects it must have been his favorite book, aside from, of course, the Art of the Deal.
Biden was wrong to qualify the word fascist when referring to F POTUS, his lockstep 50+ voting bloc in the Senate and the people roaring at Trumpie’s rally,there’snothing semi about them.These guys and gals are proud to be following a guy who’s proud to be as strong and beloved as the Führer himself on his bestday.
Except for the ones like Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Mark Meadows, brave Mike Pence and their ilk, shamelessly desperate for power, but also fearful of the kompromat F POTUS is apparently holding over some of them. Schadenfreude aside, I’d hate to picture the videos F POTUS has of Lindsey.
Right before the early 2021 (January 5th, for those keeping score at home) runoff in Georgia for two US senate seats, I came across a great group of women called Tinicum Together, out of Pennsylvania, who organize nationwide targeted postcard writing campaigns to increase turnout in important elections.
I sent 100 postcards to registered Democrats in key districts in Georgia, urging them to vote for Warnock and Ossoff. It felt great to roll up my sleeves and finally be doing something that could bring a few more voters out to vote in that key election.
Send them an email at Tinicumtogether@gmail.com and they will send you a packet containing stamped. ready to mail postcards, the names and addresses of swing voters, and, this year, in the crucial case of Pennsylvania, an excellentconcisescript.
gratuitousblahg 