Category Archives: current events

Trumpie sent a lynch mob after his enemies, real and imagined

We heard testimony on Thursday from Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, two election workers from Georgia, vilified by the former president of the United States. Their personal information was “doxxed” by Trumpists, and a threatening lynch mob arrived at their doors. One angry “patriot” told the daughter “you’re lucky this is 2020 and and not 1920…”. The FBI then advised the two to move to undisclosed locations to avoid mob violence.

The mob was sent to their houses by Donald Trump, who spread the lie that these two “professional scammers” had corruptly rigged the election results in Fulton County, Georgia to the tune of tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots, counted three times each.

My phone, very smart, began playing Trump’s call with Brad Raffensberger in my pocket last night. It was fascinating to listen to in light of all we now know about Trump’s coordinated plan to stay in power no matter what.

After listening to the detailed story of what the two defamed Fulton County poll workers (coincidentally both female, and Black) were subjected to, after they were singled out by Trump, by name, as professional fraudsters, I heard Trump, in his own inimitable voice, cite the fact that many online were asking “where’s Ruby?” as proof that his lie about Ruby being a crook had legs. “Brad, come on, my lie has fucking legs, don’t be a fucking hump.” As for the possibility he could have lost Georgia, it was beyond dispute that he’d won Georgia, his immense anti-mask, anti-vax MAGA rallies dwarfing Biden’s tiny, weak live gatherings were indisputable proof he’d won the state.

I think this recorded phone call, claiming that Ruby Freeman “stuffed the ballot box” with 18,000 to 56,000 fake Biden votes, is all the proof needed for a nice defamation settlement for Ruby Freeman and her daughter, the two defamed former Fulton County election workers forced out of their jobs, and their homes, by a desperately lying sore loser and the menacing mob he pointed at them and unleashed. Here’s a pertinent slice, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the Artist of the Deal incarnate:

Fossil Fuel dark money beats America, 6-3

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) with the next installment of his fast-paced seminar on exactly how Ginni Thomas’s dark money network has come to rule the Supreme Court, 6-3, every time.

Turns out, who’d have guessed, that most of those secret tax deductible billions in dark influence money (to staff the federal judiciary while securing massive tax breaks for billionaires) is fossil-fuel money. Can you say Koch, Exxon and Halliburton?

Pro-person vs. pro-fetus

The genius of the conversion of the religious right to the Republican party was harnessing a widespread religious belief to a party platform. Vote for us and Jesus will stop weeping at the mass murder of embryos and fetuses, hallelujah! Say what you will about the cynical motives of the GOP, that maneuver brought them a gigantic block of faithful voters.

Then you bring in the branding and mass marketing people. Being anti-abortion is not a negative position, it is pro-life. The life it protects is not the victim of rape, not the woman whose pregnancy endangers her life, not the family with children who cannot afford to raise another child at that time. The only sacred life in the equation is the fertilized egg, on its way to becoming a fetus. We know this because GOD said so!!!

Hard to argue with motherfuckers who actually believe that God commanded them to do whatever the hell they’re doing, to save the immortal souls of the “unborn”. But in a democratic society where the establishment of a religion is prohibited by the First Amendment [1], we need to argue with them, by every legal means necessary. We need five more seats in the Senate and keep control of the House, for starters.

Here is one excellent argument:

I Was Raped by My Father. An Abortion Saved My Life.

My shame was never about the abortion. I will forever be grateful that my pregnancy was terminated. I am fortunate that my body was spared an additional trauma imposed by my father — one that today would be forced by some state legislatures and courts. No child should be pressured or expected to carry a pregnancy and give birth or to feel remorse, guilt, doubt or unease about an abortion under any circumstances, let alone rape or incest. . .

. . . Abortion bans represent more than isolated state lawmaking or states’ rights — they represent an attack on the fundamental principles of liberty, freedom and autonomy. As Justice Blackmun noted in a 1986 majority opinion that reaffirmed Roe, “few decisions are more personal and intimate, more properly private or more basic to individual dignity and autonomy” than the decision to terminate a pregnancy. Abortion bans that provide no exceptions for rape and incest are a particularly cruel and immoral type of lawmaking.

[1]

Establishment Clause. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.”. This clause not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another.

6-3 Federalist bloc removes federal right of privacy

This is what the Federalist Society was founded to do, march carefully curated Culture War-based cases into a Supreme Court with a majority Federalist Society membership to reshape American society back to the way it was in 1868. Of course, their preferred body of law stops in 1788 when the Original Constitution was adopted, before those pesky wartime amendments trying to guarantee so-called federal rights of citizenship to former slaves and everybody else in the country against the incursions of their sometimes repressive states.

But declaring state laws that remove basic privacy rights constitutional, laws that forbid the victims of rape from seeking medical abortions legally, requiring the rapist’s baby to be carried to term by the victim and born, that make no exceptions when the life of the mother is in danger, could these pious, unappealable, filibuster-proof 51-49 confirmed motherfuckers be any more audacious?

One looks in vain for a coherent “ideology” among these culture warriors. At the same time six religious fanatics overturn the federal right to privacy and bodily autonomy (under the rationale that states know best), we have States Rights, cited so often by right wingers, struck down when these states “infringe” an important principle recognized in 1788, in 1868, that under the Second Amendment Americans have the recently enumerated right to bear guns wherever they go, and any kind of damned gun they want. Black klansman Clarence Thomas made that clear in his recent striking down of New York State’s gun laws requiring special circumstances for a concealed carry permit for a deadly weapon.

Imagine if those demented patriots on January 6th had all been able to exercise their sacred Scalia-created federal right to carry concealed firearms wherever they chose to carry them. Pence and Pelosi would be dead, martial law declared by Trump and guys like me would be writing blahgs from the crowded trains to MAGA reeducation centers (best case scenario…).

Oh, yeah, suck on your alleged rights to a so-called Miranda warning, skels. You look guilty anyway!

If you had any doubt about the war that we are currently in, a war as implacably cold as any cold war in history, where one side, armed and angry, has the presumptive right to make the other side, the 70%, do what they say on fear of death, well, if 50 million more of us don’t get out and vote in 2022, and put a filibuster-proof majority (52 actual defenders of democracy) in the Senate, while maintaining the House, I’ll be seeing y’all in the camps.

That’s the most anodyne way I can say it, no point picturing guys like me swinging from ropes in front of righteously hopped up mobs. How depressing is that image in the land of the free and the home of the heavily armed?

Hate, rage and incoherence can’t win. Half of you who took no side in Trump v Biden, we’re counting on you. Democratic debate or simple hatred, democracy or allegiamce to a debunked autocratic lie, pick a goddamned side.

e.

American Eichmann’s home raided by feds

Breaking news, as we wait for hearing involving this same Trump co-conspirator

Federal Authorities Search Home of Trump Justice Dept. Official https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/politics/jeffrey-clark-trump-justice-dept.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkTlUZACbIRp8_qRmHmfnE2_s-i3HwNiWEDD1Gxv4WRpSa5kLVIKh-fMcy1DneSNJZLPkvWPl2hKd5DnBadjOJ8NGCiYhXZGI8s56yVWc7mM_GUOBooWPjK2flcL86meOy71ePYDLqRPHc0nNwIgdl88A0Ikq4miBdntezGe9z3Nh53fkjF8o6EW9GPH_WyqGuXxZuO9yGbQXe7R02WYxaXzLUlN2b79EQYVkYSAKGHD4kvzFKuJ4LM8gXPa3_MxclZMP75L0UAWBiJ4utbIYjD9jB-6oKTrv-nfpcuUmWzQ

History can break your fucking heart

After the Civil War, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, pardoned all former Confederate leaders and resisted Congressional efforts at Reconstruction, the intended remaking of the former Confederacy into a free labor society. This meant laborers would be free to work for the highest bidder, (though, of course, no labor unions — Socialism!). Not that the highest bidders’ bids were high, but the conditions and pay, and the promise of owning land, were infinitely better than slavery, particularly the especially vicious American variant.

Reconstruction lasted throughout the two terms of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency and real change was briefly accomplished. Three Constitutional amendments and several powerful laws, with federal enforcement, brought about a short period of freedom for Black Americans, who held majorities in more than one Southern state, voted in large numbers and elected Blacks to represent them in Congress.

Southern whites naturally decried the federal intervention to enforce the freedom amendments, including voting rights, as Bayonet Rule and continued to be outraged by the federal clamp down on the Ku Klux Klan, which had impeded southern style law enforcement for righteously terrified whites.

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As you might suspect, Reconstruction ended abruptly, and White Supremacy was restored, pursuant to a famous compromise to settle the contested election of 1876. Here’s Andrea Bernstein on the Hayes-Tilden Compromise:

The great-granddaughter of a Black congressman from South Carolina, voted out as soon as South Carolina whites regained control and Black voting disappeared for a century, continues, eloquently and poignantly. History can break your fucking heart.

source:

Will Be Wild: Pretty Damn Close | 8 https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/chrt.fm/track/9EE2G/pdst.fm/e/rss.art19.com/episodes/a015851c-2c49-4cb3-a37d-0153563b77b7.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIgxDYXN0Ym94BjoGRVQ%3D–57de03a73cd4de5147af658fc1123133617eb82b

Correction on US non-voter number?

I have been saying (and writing) that 110,000,000 eligible US voters sat out the 2020 presidential election. I was repeating unverified information from a trusted source (Mary Trump, I think). I prefer multiple sources to confirm facts.

The other day I did the math. Adding Trump’s 74,000,000, Biden’s 81,000,000 and 110,000,000 gives us 265,000,000, an unlikely number of 18 years plus in a nation of 334,776,423, (as of Trump’s 76th birthday last week.)

National Public Radio reported it was a mere 80,000,000 who took no side in Biden v Trump. I stand possibly corrected. Here’s their story, with the various rationales for abstaining from our democratic duty to hold our nose and vote every few years:

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/15/945031391/poll-despite-record-turnout-80-million-americans-didnt-vote-heres-why

My math, using the 110,000,000 number, gave me about 20% of the U.S. population under 18, which seemed very low.

Quick check with the US Census, and, yep, just over 20% under 18.

By comparison, the younger population under age 18 numbered 73.1 million, or 22.1% of the U.S. population in 2020, a 1.4% decrease from 74.2 million in 2010

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/united-states-adult-population-grew-faster-than-nations-total-population-from-2010-to-2020.html#:~:text=By%20comparison%2C%20the%20younger%20population,from%2074.2%20million%20in%202010

So the number of eligible voters who sat out Trump v. Biden was likely around 100,000,000 friends of democracy. God damn.

On the other hand 26,664,746 more votes were cast in 2020 (67% of eligible voters) than in 2016 (55%) meaning possibly 130,000,000 Americans sat out 2016. The 2020 increase broke 11.2 million more for Trumpie and 15.4 million more for his Democratic opponent. Hence the drive in every Republican state to nullify the votes of non-Republicans in the name of Election Integrity (and the hothouse grown Independent State Legislature Doctrine.)

Get out and vote, citizens.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no decency left?”

Chris Hayes with an excellent essay on the power of live, sworn testimony to topple corrupt, powerful bullies. A witness from the Army spoke the words above to lying, bullying demogogue Joe McCarthy on June 9, 1954, back in more innocent days when lies debunked were accepted as lies, and lying was still considered bad, wrong and disqualifying for an office of public trust.

Joseph Welch’s words to destructive Senator Joe McCarthy ended McCarthy’s reign, McCarthy was censured and finished drinking himself to death three years later. McCarthy’s unscrupulous, evil gunsel Roy Cohn begat ratfucker Roger Stone, forming a straight line from Nixon to Trump. I find the history fascinating.