I had a girlfriend many years ago, very cute and much younger than me, I was 30 and she was 20. I was the first boyfriend she had who wasn’t a boy and she responded very well to all of my attentions.We had as harmonious a relationship as I could manage at the time.
When she was getting divorced many years later, and needed to be cheered up, encouraged as a desirable woman I suppose, she said to me “if I come to New York will you fuck me?”
My hesitation surely gave away too much, then I told her that I was in a long-term monogamous relationship, sadly, and for some reason my hand wrote on a piece of paper “if I come to New York will you fuckme?”
I folded the paper and put it in my pants pocket and forgot about it. Until weeks later, when it inexplicably showed up on the floor on my side of the bed. Sekhnet picks it up, unfolds it and reads to me“if I come to New York will you fuck me?”I give her a short, sheepish, truthful account of the call. Years later I had dinner with my still very cute younger ex and her very smart, good looking 16-year-old daughter. That was the only time I’ve seen her in all those years that I can recall, except one other time, about fifteen years earlier.
I mentioned to my friend today that there’d been flooding in her area recently and I’d thought of calling her to make sure she was okay. My friend said “and if shesaid ‘if I come to New York will you fuck me?’“
The lawyers Trump is still able to hire filed a unique motion in federal court the other day related to his right to retain government papers after leaving office. The judge gave them a few days to fix their filing, since shewas legitimately confused about what they are seeking and why they are seeking it in her federal courtroom.
The 27-page filing is replete with Trump’s typical political bombast, including boasts about the power of the former president’s 2022 campaign endorsements and about the Mar-a-Lago estate itself. But it also confirmed aspects of the timeline related to the Mar-a-Lago search, including the fact that the Justice Department issued two subpoenas prior to the search — one for documents on May 11 and another for security camera footage in late June. . .
. . .“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump declared.
Rupert Murdoch’sNew York Post clarified that Trump didn’t have his lawyers include that strong paragraph in his motion for a special master:
“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified,” Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform soon after the motion was filed.. .
. . .Three days after the raid, on Aug. 11, the former president’s attorneys attempted to convey a message to Attorney General Merrick Garland from Trump during a conversation with Bratt. That message, according to the filing, was:
“President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry.’ The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.”
You know, as you do when you want to make sure the guy knows it’s a nice little democracy he’s got here and it would be a shame if something happened to it.
Right-wing demagogues are making the same point that the Confederates made back when they were defending their constitutional right to hold other people as property and do with them as they pleased. It’s like the goddamn Civil War was never fought, or won by the forces of the Federal Union. Swastikas and Confederate flags, free speech protected under the First and Second Amendments, States Rights, home rule, local sovereignty! Here’s a beautiful short summary of the basic idiocy of the “States’ Rights” position.
New reporting, Trumpie reached out to Merrick Garland to inform him that the country is on fire and wanting to know what he could do to turn down the heat — outside of turning over evidence, being truthful, not doxxing traitors online, or calling on the most violent of his followers to stop threatening violence against Trump’s ever-expanding group.of enemies, thethe ones whose home addresses, names of spouses and children and where the kids go to school has been posted on Trump’s Truth Socialnetwork.
Trumpie’s larger point is that he controls 90% of the country’s most volatile, unreasonable, violent assholes, and 100% of our enraged racists, and the other side may well have 90% of the more reasonable, less violent citizens, but we can all agree that it would be a shame if anything happened to this great divided burning country,Merrick, my friend.You know what I’m sayin’, Merrick? Merrick?
When the former president leaked his copy of the search warrant to Breitbart, he left in the names of the two FBI agents who signed and served it and the name of the judge who signed the search warrant, after finding probable cause, based on DOJ’s detailed affidavit setting forth all of the reasons why evidence of a crime was probably at Mar-a-Lago. He fingered these three, and their families, for terrifying, physical retribution, as he does (don’t ask Mike Pence, the question, understanably, gives him indigestion).
The next thing I heard was that there was a huge spike in anti-Semitic chatter in White Christian Nationalist world. Turns out not only is Merrick Garland a Jew, but so, apparently is the judge who signed the search warrant to unleash the lying FBI intent on planting and lying about evidence stolen from Trump’s Palm Beach home and resort. As is universally despised dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
So I did a quick search to confirm that the judge was indeed a Semite, and here are the top search returns. It turns out the judge’s name is Bruce Reinhart (no relation to Django) and the first few hits that come up are “Synagogue of Jewish judge who signed off on FBI search …” (yahoo news), Murdoch’s New York Post headline is next “Trump lawyer calls out judge who approved Mar-a-Lago search warrant for…” then Murdoch’s New York Post connects a few more nefarious dots “Judge who approved raid onMar-a-Lago once linked to Jeffrey Epstein” (oh God, another Jewish pedophile!) we learned from that blurb that Reinhart had also donated to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Something called JTA’s headline “the judge who signed FBI’sMar-a-Lago warrant is facing violent…” then we get Fox News, moving in for the kill “Florida judge who signed the search warrant allowing the FBI to raid President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was once linked to Jeffrey Epstein, according to a report.”
Several things become immediately clear when you do this quick Google search. One: the judge is indeed Jewish and there seems to be some concern at the synagogue he belongs to about unhinged men with guns or some other hateful plan arriving for Shabbat services. Two: Trumpworld is on full offense, already setting out (and searching out) the infuriating story of this biased fuck who not only … well, you know! Three, as we all know now, the guy was linked by reportsto notorious pedophile, sick, evil bastard and Jew,Jeffrey Epstein.
And, with that, you know, based on reports, the People rest, and let’s make it a completely fair and balanced pogromthis time, shall we? Haha!
Great reporting, headlined: Trump Lawyer Told Justice Dept. That Classified Material Had Been Returned, with a sub-headline only the NY Times is capable of:
Raising questions, indeed, about precisely how forthcoming Trump’s lawyer signing a false sworn statement was!
If Trump is proven to have mishandled classified documents, he could be guilty of a felony. In 2018, then-President Trump signed a bill upgrading the crime from a misdemeanor to a felony, while increasing punishments for those who mishandle classified information.
The Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee held a news conference to challenge the Department of Justice for its decision to use “the most extreme measures” to recover evidence of what a federal judge was convinced is probably related to a federal crime. The committee members, speaking in measured tones, are outraged that the DOJ has not given them an urgent National Security reason for the search and is not immediately releasing the search warrant and inventory, (two items already in Trumpie’s hands and that he could have released at any time, but petty to mention [1]) as well as everything else related to the FBI search. They are united in their measured outrage over this outrageous attack on a man who, they say, has willingly and fully cooperated with every illegal partisan witch hunt against him. They are also troubled by the presence of a possible informant, one they say they areentitled to know the identity of.
Fox News has largely swung their influential allegiance in the 2024 presidential election toward Florida strongman Ron DeathSantis (as he’s called by half of the population of Florida) and away from besieged, compromised, damaged Teflon Don Trump. However, Rupert Murdoch is deeply committed to his far-right worldview, fascism is far preferable to majoritarian tyranny disguised as democracy to a billionaire with Murdoch’s extreme beliefs.
So here’s Fox’s live coverage of the Republican membership of the House Intelligence Committee demanding answers from Merrick Garland and the politicized, highly partisan DOJ. Other Congressional Republicans have already made it clear that when they take control of the House Garland’s going to be on the hot seat along with Biden, Harris, Schiff, Nadler, Schumer, Pelosi, Hillary and all the rest of the scoundrels they oppose for not letting them make America great again. Those Benghazi hearings, and the calls to lock her up related to Hillary Clinton’s emails, they’re promising, are going to look like yer proverbial child’s play compared to what they’re threatening against so-called elected Democrats if they take control ofCongress in 2023.
In this news conference they demand answers- – why not a subpoena, why this extreme step? What is the specific urgent National Security reason that could legally justify this extreme step? DOJ, part of the (Unitary) Executive branch is riding roughshod over Congressional oversight by a co-equal branch, WTF? They want the identity of the informant, the spy, (the Rat, in Trump- speak) and they are very serious in demanding all of these answers. Serious as a heart attack.
I made it through the first six minutes, noting the obvious reason for no subpoena, that a subpoena for these exact items has already been defied by the former president, months ago, after many months of negotiation with his lawyers. He is the former president who instructed his loyalists to defy all subpoenas and fight them in court. His third AG, Barr, insisted to Congress that it was reasonable to believe Obama had “spies” in place during the transition, which helps explain why Mike Flynn’s lies to Pence and the FBI about illegal contacts with Russia, and his undisclosed paid work for the Turkish strongman, were “immaterial”. Barr also whipped up baseless fears of massive voting fraud in the 2020 election, before things at the White House finally went off the rails and he had to get the hell out of there to avoid facing criminal charges himself.
The long list of GOP grievances and demands presented today in relation to the FBI search is a tissue of the same stuff, nonetheless interesting to hear them set it out with a straight face, and the great moral indignation which is their hallmark. Their presentation will no doubt be very convincing to millions of “low information voters” who are already upset about what appears to be the brutal, baseless crucifixion of their charismatic, persecutedleader, a man of the people millions of Fox viewers faithfully love.
[1] Garland held a rare press conference yesterday during which he called bullshit on Trump. He announced that DOJ has gone to court seeking judicial permission to release copies of the search warrant and property inventory that Trump already has and is already legally free to release to the public. The federal judge in that case has given Mr Trump until 3:00 p.m. today to either oppose the DOJ or agree to it and allow those two documents to be released to the public, by DOJ.
Sekhnet cracked me up the other day, it was really the best laugh I’ve had in a long time. She told me she didn’t know what is wrong with her increasingly right-wing friend who was getting weirder and weirder. She told me she’d sent him something and got a very weird response. This is what she sent him.
Cohen makes an excellent point about the right demanding that everybody obey their morality because they are right and those who disagree are evil. Fair enough, the Supreme Court did it to a disgusting extent this term (with more big bombs in waiting for next term), extremists always do this when they have the power.
But Megan McArdle, writing in the Washington Post, makes an even better point. Before the anonymizing anger megaphone of “social media”, a worked up ignorant asshole could be tolerated by his or her family, who would quietly roll their eyes to each other and let hateful views slip by without a fight. On social media every one of these trolls now has a giant megaphone. Get a few thousand of them worked up about something, and it immediately looks like civil war is afoot. In this case, a small army of isolated, angry assholes on Twitter make it seem like there is a nationwide “right-wing boycott” of a restaurant chain for adding an item to its menu that they somehow find offensive, which it clearly is not.
Read McArdle’s great take, “Cracker Barrel leaders understand an often-forgotten truth of the internet.”I found it smart and reassuring.
gratuitousblahg 