There’s a real reason that Trump and people like him consider journalists the enemy of the people. Everything we know about the planning, funding and execution of the Stop the Steal riot at the Capitol comes from journalists. You can stonewall Congress without consequence because the courts can be used that way in this country by wealthy, powerful people. But the fucking press … the lying media… der lugenpresse! … enemy of the people!
In a new tape recording of an interview with Trump, released by journalist Johnathan Karl, the mad former president says it’s “common sense” that people who believe there was massive election fraud and Pence refused to do anything about it would rightfully want to lynch the motherfucker.
Shades of Christian Dominionist provocateur William Pelham “Bagpiper Bill” Barr with his sneering “it’s obvious!” when asked for proof that mail-in voting would lead to massive electoral fraud by antifa, enraged colored people and others who unaccountably hate authoritarianism.
What is truly common sense is that when dealing with a bully who has always backed down whenever confronted with a real counterthreat (elevating Jeffrey Clark to AG, quitting GOP, etc.), to not confront him is to empower a sadist without boundaries to take a shit in your mouth and tell you to swallow.
[The House January 6 Select Committee] also subpoenaed John McEntee, a young Trump loyalist who had been the former president’s baggage handler before Trump installed him as the White House personnel director, in charge of hiring for the executive branch. McEntee was reportedly present for many of the key conversations around trying to overturn the 2020 election.
An article today in The Atlantic by Jonathan D. Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, calls “Johnny” McEntee “the man who made January 6 possible.” McEntee purged the administration of anyone he did not consider sufficiently—that is to say, totally—loyal to Trump.
John McEntee, I’ve been waiting for more news about this promising young man.He had MAGA greatness written all over him, think of Matt Gaetz with athletic ability.
I was sitting in the Fresh Meadows public library one afternoon, this was probably almost fifty years ago, turning the pages of a book by Russian writer Maxim Gorky. I recall reading a very short piece, maybe half a page long, where a shell-shocked soldier sees the blown up body of one of his comrades, hanging from the dark branches of a dead tree.
The corpse’s glistening organs have spilled out, festooning the branches, and the first birds were arriving. The light catches the entrails as the soft breeze makes them sway. The shell-shocked soldier, who narrates the anecdote, takes this in and immediately bursts out in uncontrollable laughter, he laughs until he can’t stand, throws himself on the ground and continues laughing his ass off.
I mention this beautifully drawn anecdote by Maxim Gorky, which I read many years ago, to illustrate that the most beautiful writing may be used to evoke the most terrible horrors. In fact, the more beautifully you can describe an atrocity, the more forcefully the and poignantly yhe horror ofit hits you.
Beautiful writing at the moment, it seems to me almost every day, needs to be marshaled to illuminate and clarify the horrors we are up against. To mobilize readers to get involved in standing against atrocity, and the enraged irrationality that always accompanies and justifies atrocities.
The Department of Defense, years back now, did a study that concluded the disruption of populations as a result of global warming making areas uninhabitable was the biggest defense threat we face as a nation. Around the equator it would soon become so hot and water starved that people living on the land would have to migrate north. Island nations and coastal areas, including many of our largest cities, would be under water, former inhabitants of these places on the move by the tens of millions.
Picture any zombie movie you’ve ever seen and then imagine tens of millions of real life homeless refugees, climate refugees, moving en masse in search of food. It would not take long for cannibalism to take hold among these hungry hoards. Then the wealthy nations would have to “cleanse” the world of these cannibals, for the sake of the rest of the delicious population.
That scenario, by itself, should be enough to get every person of conscience on the earth to join an energetic search for solutions. Sadly, we are not that kind of wise ape, homo sapiens.
We read the most beautifully written accounts of the greatest joys we can imagine, and that is a good thing from time to time, to reconnect with the miraculous side of being alive. On the other side of the scale, the ticking time bomb of the earth’s greediest, sacrificing millions of lives, daily, for the sake of greater acquisition and perpetual hoarding by the few, the entitled, ain’t no unlikely hypothetical employed by right-wing defenders of torture. It’s as real as the soldier’s guts, swaying gently, and hilariously, from those branches as the birds get ready for a goodmeal.
They came to Washington D.C. in the days before January 6 to fight like hell against a stolen election. Trump and his dark money allies had spent $50,000,000 on ad buys hammering home the infuriating message that, like the lying Black guy before him, Biden was an illegitimate lying bastard fake presidential cuck. Trump himself tweeted this invitation:
On the morning that a Black pastor and a Jewish journalist replaced two die-hard Trumpist senators from Georgia, giving the illegitimate Sleepy Joe a razor thin majority in both houses of Congress, Trump’s most passionate people were there, fired up and ready to be wild and Stop the Steal.
What most in that large MAGA crowd did not know was that Trump had been meeting with a group of elected GOP representatives and senators, working the phones to state officials, threatening and cajoling state election board members, including a few he summoned to be his guests at the Trump Hotel.
They also probably had no idea he’d been working tirelessly to convince the DOJ to release a statement indicating widespread voter fraud, even though none was found, had considered replacing the acting AG with an American Eichmann-type, an ambitious weasel named Jeffery Bossert Clark willing to do whatever it takes, had wildly right-wing lawyer (John Eastman) writing a literal script for Pence to nullify Biden’s victory under bizarre, even absurd, constitutional claims.
They didn’t know Trump’s inner circle, Steve Bannon, Rudy, felon Bernie Kerick, John Eastman and others were in a war room at the Willard Hotel, paid for by the Trump Pence 2020 campaign, providing tactical support while the Stop the Steal rally and the MAGA riot were taking place.
They knew Mike Flynn, Rudy and Sidney Powell were in and out of the Oval Office, along with the MyPillow guy, in the days leading up to the Capitol riot, that Trump was capable of any lie that could possibly benefit him. Many in Trump’s crowd may even have known there was no evidence to establish any detail of Trump’s lie about a stolen election, a conspiracy in which Democrats and treasonous Republicans, including Federalist Society judges he had appointed for lifetime tenures on the federal bench, had worked together to victimize Trump.
If they had known all that, it would have made no difference to people eager to fight for the higher truth. Trump may be a compulsive liar, but he also knows exactly what his audience wants to hear to fire ’em up.
On the Opposition side, the Democratic party, we have incomprehensibly spineless leadership. The party’s hand-wringing leaders have been in deadly embrace with corporate titans and their legions of lobbyists, in spite of almost half of its shaky House majority Progressive Caucus members. This collective lack of spine and corporate dependence was accelerated by Bill Clinton, a people pleaser and the greatest Republican president of the twentieth century, under whom the corporate donor grip on the party was cemented. Clinton and the DNC were handsomely rewarded for the party’s unapologetic move to the political right, in terms of corporate generosity. Obama opted out of public financing of his first presidential campaign since he had out raised McCain by a good margin, largely from the financial sector.
In the swamp that is Washington D.C., where a coal lobbyist like Joe Manchin III, as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, freely casts the deciding vote on whether to mitigate looming, easily observable Climate Catastrophe, the Democratic party has had the same corporately beholden leadership for decades. Leadership that, while making sure corporate donors are never alienated, has allowed the GOP to exercise almost total control over framing public debate, legislation, judicial appointments, war making and every other function of government, whichever party is in power.
Do the Democrats have a problem with messaging? They certainly do, with the excuse that their message, like their policies, is nuanced, takes complicated realities into consideration. Do Americans understand that we are the only wealthy nation that provides no paid family leave to new parents? Do Americans know that we pay the highest rates in the world for prescription drugs made by our own pharmaceutical companies? Do Americans know that the world is on the edge of literal destruction, mass extinctions and the destabilizing dislocation of millions made homeless by rising sea levels caused by global warming? That our billionaires, required to pay less tax than their counterparts elsewhere, can easily evade most tax on their income and wealth? The some of our largest corporations not only pay no tax, but receive generous government handouts, funded by tax dollars?
On the GOP side you have the dozens of well-funded academic and policy initiatives by the Koch network amplified through Rupert Murdoch’s relentless media blitzkrieg, using simple, enraging arguments, often based only on strong opinions, to convince half the country that the Democrat [sic] party is a bunch of radical Communist puppets who work for, as Florida senator Marco Rubio accused them the other day, Marxist corporations here in the USA. Last week Little Marco told a conservative group:
“They are the product of decades of anti-American indoctrination at our elite universities and they feel no obligation to America or its national interest,” the Florida senator said of America’s corporate leaders. “I’m not here to tell you big business is the enemy. But I’m here to tell you big business is not our ally in the fight against socialism.” . . .
. . . “The real fight isn’t about the tax rate on billionaires,” Rubio said. “The real fight is about a small, radical, but incredibly powerful minority that wants to… erase our culture and traditions, throw away our values, and walk away from a free enterprise economy that is still the envy of the world.”
Seeing it from their point of view, American Nazis are right to fear both federal government coercion/law enforcement and majoritarian tyranny/democracy. Their party has only one idea, outside of loyalty to a dangerous maniac they fear: cripple the government, take it over, bend democracy to the needs of the few, the entitled, and fuck the rest of these “entitlementmentality” putos.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most effective anti-racism, democracy protecting law in our history. It cured much of the abuse it was enacted to fix. It enjoyed broad support under Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and, under Bush II it was reauthorized in the Senate 98-0, just a few years before Dubya’s appointee John Roberts took a sharp gut hook to it, pulled it hard and gave the Voting Rights Act a nice, thorough evisceration[1].
Checkout the numbersthe Voting Rights Act kept getting reauthorized by in Congress:
(that Senate tally for 1982 doesn’t look right)
Here is what is included in the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that Republicans unanimously (minus one) filibustered forthe 3rd time the other day
Here’s a good, short video tour
Heather Cox Richardson:
Republicans are holding tight to the idea of pre–Civil War Democrats that our system of democracy gives to the states alone the power to determine how people within those states live, and who in those states gets to vote to determine those rules. After that idea led to the Civil War, Republicans overturned it with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which give the federal government the power to protect equality within the states.
Since World War II, the federal government has taken that charge seriously, protecting minority voting in the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and, most thoroughly, in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since the passage of that measure, Congress repeatedly reauthorized it by large, bipartisan majorities, most recently in 2006, when the Senate voted unanimously in favor of it. But then in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted that law, and now, only 8 years later, Republican senators claim federal protection of voting rights is an assault on states’ rights.
A guided tour through the benign seeming, bloodlessly vicious Roberts decision, and highlights of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliant dissent are athttps://wp.me/p2DHRV-j6q
If emotion is the only reliable indicator of what we should believe, incoherence is no longer a valid critique of anything.Facts are not only inconvenient in political debate, they are irrelevant to millions of Americans.Listen to any of Joe Manchin III’s recent statements for a potent example of willful blindness and easily demonstrable, bombastic, self-righteous incoherence.
With the fire hose of false fecal matter constantly streaming from the Trump machine it is easy to lose track of single details. In fact, that’s by design of the fire hose of diarrhea, it just keeps coming, it’s revolting, maddening, and the latest burst instantly covers the disgusting stuff already on the ground. It’s exhausting to be exposed to this kind of unyielding onslaught and in the end enough good, reasonable people tune out that it becomes easy for evil plans to flourish.
On New Year’s Eve 2021, a few days before Trump and his enablers made their final push to pressure Pence to resteal the Stolen Election, with the outlandish Eastman memo, days before the storming of the Capitol, the Washington Post ran an article with the curious title of
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Trump’s bid to overturn the election by one of the most openly idiotic members of Congress, Trump die-hard Looey Gohmert of the great state of Texas. Gohmert’s suit sued Pence to make him give Pence the power to overturn the election.
You get the theory of the lawsuit? Gohmert sued Mike Pence, as Vice President, to force him to give himself the power to overturn the election on January 6th, leaving it up to a willing House to vote Trump into office for another four years.
The Washington Post explains what was unusual about Gohmert’s moronic, frivolous lawsuit.
To win a lawsuit, a plaintiff must convince a judge that the interests of the person they are suing are opposed to their own — there must be some controversy or conflict between them that could be resolved through the litigation.
This baseless hail Mary lawsuit, which Pence and the DOJ urged the court to dismiss, did not present a genuine controversy that a court could decide. Pence was the wrong guy to sue to make Pence the final arbiter of who won the 2020 election.
Aside from John Eastman’s insane (but audacious) six point plan for how Pence could brazen it out on January 6th to keep himself and his boss in power, nobody has ever tried to argue that the VP effectively decides if he and his running mate lost the election that has just been certified.The notion that the loser could legally declare himself the winner of a democratic vote is classically incoherent. The DOJ, in urging the court to dismiss the frivolous lawsuit, was more circumspect than I can be.
“The Vice President is not the proper defendant to this lawsuit,” wrote Deputy Assistant Attorney General John V. Coghlan.
“The Vice President — the only defendant in this case — is ironically the very person whose power they seek to promote,” he added. “A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction.”
Pence followed the law, a crime for which a lynch mob was sent to administer justice. In the days after the riot, Pence and the rest of the GOP had their come to Jesus moment when they closed ranks behind the insane former president and amplified his Big Lie about Trump’s massive landslide victory snatched from him by bipartisan conspirators who upheld the validity of the Stolen Election.
Looking for the conspirators in the Seditious Conspiracy prosecution that should have begun months ago? Here is a partial list: Louie Gohmert, Jefferey Clark, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Donald John Trump, Texas AG Ken Paxton, Lyin’ Ted, Madison Cawthorne, Mo Brooks, Rudy, Mike Flynn. The proof of their criminal conspiracy to overturn an election result they hated is already in the public record, Merrick.
As Lyin’ Ted forced Merrick Garland to admit yestetday, giving the Nazi salute is as American as goddamned apple pie, and protected by the Firstand Second Amendments.Cuck.
gratuitousblahg 