It’s quite possible that people like Mitch McConnell are born corrupt, I don’t know. But how do you forcefully condemn an angry, corrupt president for being a sore loser mad enough to organize and unleash a violent mob to kill your enemies, after orchestrating his acquittal in a proceeding to make sure he never runs again, and then support his future candidacy? Mitch explains:
Category Archives: current events
Red Summer? More Lies!
If you are a history teacher in a state that has a right wing legislature and governor (and it has been a concerted project of the right to capture as many Independent State Legislatures as possible, along with the federal courts) your career may be in danger if you ask your students to google Red Summer. You see, having students click on a website that documents dozens of little known racist massacres of a hundred years ago will undoubtedly make innocent, white, Christian kids feel bad. History can be a very mean adolescent girl.
This largely forgotten season of racist violence and horror, painted red with the blood of its innocent victims (among them many Black WWI vets), does not even include bloody mayhem like the now infamous massacre and destruction of the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa (1921) or plenty of others we hear about, to our surprise, from time to time. The Atlanta race riot of 1906, for example. At exactly the moment the last Russian Czar was winking at massacres of Jews, called pogroms, white leaders here were acquitting everyone involved in our own anti-Black pogroms, while punishing any surviving Blacks who may have been seen fighting back.
After the Civil War the only southerners who faced any consequence for taking up arms to fight in the “Northern War of Aggression” (apart from the Confederate warden of the infamous Andersonville Prison camp, an early concentration camp where thousands died, who was executed for his war crimes) were the Black veterans of the Union army, routinely tortured and murdered for standing up for their constitutional rights. See, e.g. Colfax Massacre, Easter Sunday 1872.
Teach this sort of bloody history at your own risk, Florida history teachers. According to our own shamelessly pandering white nationalists in various state and federal offices, it is strictly up to the states to decide how American history will be taught to future generations, fucking anti-racist, anti-fascist freedom haters! That’s the lesson of the Civil War, Independent State Legislatures get to decide the intimate fates of their citizens, as well as the last word letting them vote and, more importantly, on counting their ballots! Independent State Legislature Doctrine, bitches.
Frankly, we did rig the election
When, on Election Night 2020, Donald Trump announced, as the votes were being counted, that he frankly did win a rigged election, it was just they they kept counting these late, fake votes, he was nodding to his plan, with PostMaster General/Trump megadonor Louie DeJoy, to delay millions of mail-in ballots until they arrived too late to be counted.
Trump and DeJoy had done everything imaginable to make it harder to vote by mail: removed mailboxes in Democratic-leaning areas, dismantled high speed mail sorting machines in several Democratic voting cities, announced slowdowns in mail delivery, suspended overtime pay customarily paid to ensure prompt delivery.
Hans von Spakovsky, insane far right conspiracy-monger and keeper of the Voter Fraud Database at Heritage Foundation (documenting the steady infinitesimal fraction of fraudulent votes, a hundredth of a tenth of a percent — 0.001% — fraud since the 1980s), met secretly with the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA, MAGA, RAGA!) prior to the 2020 election to limit drop boxes in large Democratic counties and engage in other chicanery that would advantage the bloated Orange faux populist in an election he was in grave danger of losing.
Trump and his people brought hundreds of extremely feeble court cases, prior to the election, based on unfounded theories of massive Democratic election fraud, trying to limit absentee voting in all forms during the deadliest phase of the Trump pandemic. None of these Hail Mary cases had the desired results, though Boof Kavanaugh and co. tried their best with a couple that reached the top court.
Frankly, we did win, in an historic landslide, he still insists, frankly. Frankly, this election was rigged, by us, but not well enough apparently, to stop the counting of votes at 10 pm Election night when I was still leading in all the tallies, though fading fast because of a fake flood of massive Democrat [sic] fraud in a rigged election that brought many more Republicans to power than expected but, on the same ballots, fraudulently fucked the rightful president.
We learned recently (unless you get your news from FOX, OANN, Newsmax, Breitbart or Der Sturmer) that two days after the election, before the final count was certified, and showed that Trump lost to Biden by a healthy margin, the defeated president’s oldest boy was already at work (this was treacherously revealed by the traitorous Liz Cheney and her friends on the fake January 6 Committee) texting the White House chief of staff, hatching the mad, multi-pronged plan to keep his father in power, using all the leverage at the president’s disposal.
Once this shit-show stolen election nonsense and the riot that stopped the certification of Biden’s victory for several hours were officially over (they’ll never be over to a good 30% of the very best Americans!), it was time for norms and democracy to reassert themselves. Or so it appeared to many Americans.
Talk of doing away with the elitist Electoral College that put Trump and the aptly named Dick Cheney in office over the will of the voters? No, not any more, we’re too divided, too many other pressing problems, like stopping the next insurrection/tourist visit/legitimate violent political discourse. Talk of adding five justices to the Supreme Court? No, it sounds too partisan when we already have a partisan 6-3 Trump majority poised to invalidate much of the constitutional order. Talk of ending the filibuster for Voting Rights, as it was ended to put three Federalist Society vetted extremists on the Supreme Court, each one appointed by a slim, sub-filibuster majority? Well, there was some talk, but talk is cheap. So is Trump, the Republican National Committee is picking up the tab for his dozens of ongoing and past lawsuits. To be determined, will they pay his legal bills when Merrick Garland finally follows the facts and the law and… whoa! they directly lead to… unbelievable, the former president . . . the DOJ finally prosecutes the Notorious Orange Polyp for a few of his many crimes against democracy?
Frankly, we should find that out before very much longer, or my name isn’t Robert Mueller the Third!
What is repugnant to the Constitution?
It depends entirely on how extreme the right wing majority of the Supreme Court is at any given time.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, Eisenhower appointee and bitter disappointment to lovers of the status quo (the Koch Brothers’s loveless father Fred was a charter member of the “Impeach Earl Warren” John Birch Society, which arose after Brown v. Board ruled in 1954 that segregation in schools was unconstitutional) wrote the 9-0 opinion that struck down laws like Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Here’s the Republican chief justice starting off the unanimous opinion in Loving v. Virginia, one of the cases Trump’s base courting followers are prepared to revisit with an eye to overturning, returning the power to violate post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution in the name of illimitable States’ Rights and “federalism”:
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.
This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.[n1] For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.
In June, 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court[p3] of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge, and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
source
How could any God-fearing, authoritarian personality having white person, in the throes of racial pride, dispute this common sense 1959 opinion of a totally non-racist Virginia judge?
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
Malay?
Originalists, or textualists, harken back to the “original intent” of the Framers of the Constitution in 1789, gleaned from the centuries old writings they left, which are, according to them, as sacred and inviolable as the other articles of their deep religious faith, as indisputable as the fact that God dictated much of the Old and New Testaments. Originalism, by going back to 1789, removes focus from the evolution of the document, the evolution of our democracy, and the freedom and equality-expanding amendments starting right after the Civil War and continuing through a woman’s right to vote, more than a half century later, and, eventually, starting in 1965, the actual federal enforcement of most of these rights.
Here are the two Virginia statutes that were violated by this illegal interracial couple, pursuant to the totally non-racist Racial Integrity (Election Integrity?) Act of 1924:
The two statutes under which appellants were convicted and sentenced are part of a comprehensive statutory scheme aimed at prohibiting and punishing interracial marriages. The Lovings were convicted of violating § 258 of the Virginia Code:
Leaving State to evade law. — If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in § 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage.
Section 259, which defines the penalty for miscegenation, provides:
Punishment for marriage. — If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.
Other central provisions in the Virginia statutory scheme are § 20-57, which automatically voids all marriages between “a white person and a colored person” without any judicial proceeding,[n3] and §§ 20-54 and 1-14 which,[p5] respectively, define “white persons” and “colored persons and Indians” for purposes of the statutory prohibitions.
Virginia is now one of 16 States which prohibit and punish marriages on the basis of racial classifications.[n5] Penalties for miscegenation arose as an incident to slavery, and have been common in Virginia since the colonial period.[n6] The present statutory scheme dates from the adoption of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, passed during the period of extreme nativism which followed the end of the First World War. The central features of this Act, and current Virginia law, are the absolute prohibition of a “white person” marrying other than another “white person,”[n7] a prohibition against issuing marriage licenses until the issuing official is satisfied that[p7] the applicants’ statements as to their race are correct,[n8] certificates of “racial composition” to be kept by both local and state registrars,[n9] and the carrying forward of earlier prohibitions against racial intermarriage.[n10]
source
Here is the state of Virginia’s argument, summarized by Warren:
Thus, the State contends that, because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race. The second argument advanced by the State assumes the validity of its equal application theory. The argument is that, if the Equal Protection Clause does not outlaw miscegenation statutes because of their reliance on racial classifications, the question of constitutionality would thus become whether there was any rational basis for a State to treat interracial marriages differently from other marriages. On this question, the State argues, the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt and, consequently, this Court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature in adopting its policy of discouraging interracial marriages.
source
Here’s an abstracted bit of the Court’s reasoning:
The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, in its opinion, stated that the legitimate purpose of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law was to “preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” and to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride.” Accordingly, the reason for Virginia’s law rests solely racial discrimination.
Racial classifications must be subjected to the most rigid scrutiny. Here, Virginia’s law serves no purpose other than to further invidious racial discrimination. As such, the law clearly violates equal protection. The State’s argument that the law is “applied” equally to whites and African-Americans must be rejected because same-race couples are not punished criminally.
source
Oral arguments in the Loving case were heard fifty-five years ago today.
The 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling unanimously overturned the Supreme Court’s previous unappealable last word on the subject, the definitive, unanimous 1883 ruling in Pace v. Alabama, where this Alabama law was upheld as perfectly constitutional in the United States of America:
If any white person and any negro, or the descendant of any negro to the third generation, inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation was a white person, intermarry or live in adultery or fornication with each other, each of them must, on conviction, be imprisoned in the penitentiary or sentenced to hard labor for the county for not less than two nor more than seven years.
The question presented in 1883 was:
Since the state law of Alabama had a different set of statutes covering adultery and fornication between a white couple and a Black couple than that between an interracial couple, did the two year imprisonment of the interracial couple Tony Pace and Mary J. Cox violate their equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment?
source
9-0 the Pace court replied — nah! The unappealable law of the land for over eighty years, and the facts of Pace were arguably even “worse” than the facts in Loving, in that case the husband, Tony Pace, a Negro, had tried to marry a WHITE WOMAN!
Best friends and lovers
Their marriage would have been illegal in the state of Virginia and all across the former Confederacy had it not been for the unanimous 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia [1]. An example of “judicial activism” that is on the table for these Federalist Society Six to overrule at last.
What harm could come from giving states back the authority to imprision citizens for race crimes, as the Framers arguably intended?
[1]
The case involved Mildred Loving, a woman of color,[note 1] and her white husband Richard Loving, who in 1958 were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as “white” and people classified as “colored“. The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.
On June 12, 1967, the Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings’ favor and overturned their convictions. Its decision struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law and ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Virginia had argued that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender’s race, and thus it “equally burdened” both whites and non-whites.[4]
Supreme Court confirmation in the Age of Koch
As appalling as the behavior of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Cruz, Cotton, Hawley, Blackburn, et al was as they attacked and tried to provoke the supremely qualified Ketanji Brown Jackson, having no substantive criticsm they focused on their populist talking points, Critical Race Theory, children’s books about racism, violent crime, particularly sexual crime, rape and pedophilia, with a few snide asides about defending Nazis and the questions about transsexuals, the failure of Democrats on the committee to call out this harassment was equally despicable.
The final party-line vote (three nays from the coatroom from three of the GOP’s biggest assholes) and the Republican en masse walkout during applause for Ketanji Brown Jackson when her confirmation was announced could not have been more like a choreographed Klan rally if the party of Trump had actually worn pointy white hoods while pulling their racist, misogynistic stunts. Such is politics in the age of Koch/Trump, good people on both sides, on both sides.
Compare the confirmation numbers of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Trump’s second appointee Brett “Boof” Kavanaugh, a man who demonstrated his lack of judicial temperament when he snarled, hissed, snorted and whined about a secret cabal of powerful left-wing dark money-fueled hitmen and liars determined to destroy his life as revenge for his decades of work as a right wing partisan. Recall that the Trump Administration and Don McGahn made sure to classify thousands of pages of Kavanagh’s partisan writings that would have brought the Federalist Society star’s judicial impartiality into serious question. McGahn also personally took care of the 4,000 FBI tips that came in during a rigorous six day FBI investigation into allegations arising from Kavanaugh’s prep school days.
Ginsburg was more forthright in discussing her views on topics about which she had previously written. The United States Senate confirmed her by a 96–3 vote on August 3, 1993. She received her commission on August 5, 1993 and took her judicial oath on August 10, 1993.
Boof, 50-48, lifetime tenure, second straight party-line Supreme Court justice vote after McConnell abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. Yeah, it was a bipartisan confirmation, I know, pile of shit and living monument to lucrative corruption, Joe Manchin, voted with Trump’s team. In fact, you could say it was Manchin’s vote that put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
After a contentious confirmation process that became focused on allegations of sexual assault, the final vote was far less dramatic, with every senator previously indicating how he or she would vote. The final two hold outs, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), both decided to support Kavanaugh.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/brett-kavanaugh-senate-confirmation-vote-count/
USA! USA!!! etc.
More from Truth Social
In fact, Trump said he deserved more credit for drawing such a large crowd to the Ellipse — and that he pressed to march on the Capitol with his supporters but was stopped by his security detail. “Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute,” he said.
source below
Sure they stopped him, just like when he tried to leave the hospital, infectious with a life threatening case of Covid, against all medical advice, to drive around D.C. in a sealed car for a strongman photo op, forcibly infecting his Secret Service detail.
Also, you know. that’s why Stop the Steal event organizers never applied for a permit to march — expensive, plus, tons of extra DC cops along the route! Secret Service never would have allowed that!
You know, just like the Speaker of the House is responsible for single handedly stopping the mob the defeated president unleashed on the Capitol. What can the president do if a mob of his most diehard supporters is intent on “legitimate political discourse” that includes possible lynching? That’s the Speaker’s, the Mayor of DC’s problem!
Then, a flash of the former POTUS’s political genius, on the subject of Mo Brooks’s claim that Trump asked him to rescind Biden’s election victory:
“I didn’t ask him to do it. He’s in no position to do it. I certainly didn’t ask him to do it. But I believe when you see massive election fraud, I can’t imagine that somebody who won the election based on fraud, that something doesn’t happen? How has it not happened? If you are a bank robber, or you’re a jewelry store robber, and you go into Tiffany’s and you steal their diamonds and get caught, you have to give the diamonds back,” he said.
And he’s still a big international player!
Earlier this week, Trump claimed, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, called him to thank him for endorsing him and to credit Trump with the win. “After I endorsed him, he went up like a rocket ship,” Trump claimed of his unusual endorsement.
The best people, the best people!
Trump surprisingly doubles down
This from an interview with the Washington Post, under the headline: Trump deflects blame for Jan. 6 silence, says he wanted to march to Capitol
By Josh Dawsey
April 07 at 7:19 AM ET
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former president Donald Trump voiced regret Wednesday over not marching to the U.S. Capitol the day his supporters stormed the building, and he defended his long silence during the attack by claiming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others were responsible for ending the deadly violence.
“I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” Trump said of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in a 45-minute interview with The Washington Post. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”
Ten dimensional chess, yo, terrifying to even contemplate the next move…
Heather knocks one out of the park
Not that facts and coherent argument matter that much to the truly faithful, here’s Heather Cox Richardson:
The Republicans explicitly backed former president Trump and insisted that the investigation of the January 6 insurrection was simply a way to try to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024 and to distract from scandals potentially involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter (who holds no government office).
link below
The question the mass media is now regularly asking is why did nobody on the left pay attention to Rudy Giuliani’s and Trump’s repeated allegations about dirty Hunter Biden (the ones Zelensky refused to announce an investigation into before Trump’s first impeachment). Is it simply because Hunter Biden (still under investigation by the DOJ for possible tax evasion) never had a government job, none of the sleazy deals he made are alleged to have happened while his father was in office, and the wild allegations were launched amidst a barrage of unhinged lunatic lies, many ongoing though long ago debunked, from the same people, could that be why? Just asking.
But, particularly if you are in the middle of an ever more revealed criminal conspiracy to overturn legitimate election results in the 2020 presidential election, you have to have a strong point to counter-attack so Jeff Bezos and the Grey Lady will both run articles about how hypocritical Democrats are not talking about the theoretically not impossible Hunter Biden laptop scandal right now instead of completing the work of the belatedly formed the January 6th Select Committee (witch hunt!), which should have been strangled in its cradle, after a proper birth and baptism in Christ, of course.
Heather nails some big essential truths, as she so often does. Highly reccommended.
Fervent rage at 2020 election and the vaccine!
Like feelings themselves, the religious faith of the faithful Is not subject to debate. It is a question of faith and if you have true faith, so-called facts take a backseat to your deeply held belief. Hucksters, scammers and con men may often abuse the trust of people of deep faith, but that is not a concern to the faithful.
The New York Times, with a chilling description of the religious fervor animating the faith-based army of Trump believers. Heaven help us.
Rituals of Christian worship have become embedded in conservative rallies, as praise music and prayer blend with political anger over vaccines and the 2020 election.
The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’
gratuitousblahg 