Category Archives: History and Politics

Stolen Elections, 2026 edition

The flailing president, sinking to a historic low in the polls and recently “betrayed” by members of a partisan judicial fraternity that he appointed, is railing against — among many other things — mail-in voting. He wants to ban it, has threatened to do so with a stroke of the Sharpie at the bottom of a royal decree. He claims, without evidence, that mail-in voting is ripe for cheating, as the corrupt Bill Barr also insisted, on national TV, in the lead-up to the election his boss would insist was stolen from him (Barr later said under oath that he told Trump the election fraud claim was “bullshit”). The entire idea of widespread voter fraud, of any kind, is definitively debunked by the far right Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database.

I was super concerned, in the lead up to the 2024 election, that Trump megadonor, pugnacious Postmaster Louis DeJoy, had the motive and the means, the lack of scruples and the demonstrated track record of slowing mail delivery, to not deliver ballots from selected zip codes. Aided by, as far as I could tell, the unprincipled “independent” Kyrsten Sinema, the Postal Board of Governor nominees that could have removed DeJoy were permanently stuck in committee as the swing vote, Sinema, kept the status quo in place. There was no reporting on this deadlock.

There was also virtually no reporting that DeJoy had refused the Postal Inspector General’s recommendation that USPS postmark ballots the day they arrived and segregate ballots from the rest of the mail to make tracing and counting ballots easier. DeJoy, to my knowledge, refused both of these conditions, at least when the IG made the recommendations and he refused those two specifically, from a list of ten.

I read somewhere recently that mail in voting in Fulton County decreased from 29% of votes cast in 2020 to 5% in 2024. This would support my theory that MAGA man was on the job in Fulton County, Georgia, and other key counties nationwide, for his corrupt buddy in 2024, the guy who never met Jeffrey Epstein, the guy who told Florida officials, after Epstein’s arrest, that Ghislaine Maxwell was evil.

I did a search for percentage of votes by mail in Fulton County, 2020 vs. 2024. Elon Musk/Peter Thiel/Mark Zuckerberg/Jeff Bezos’s AI belched out this non-answer, the first search result that always comes up, a dubious one at best. You can type -AI at the end of your search term and sometimes avoid this Artificial Idiocy bullshit with its disclaimer that it might be totally false.

Auto-generated, may contain inaccuracies, or outright falsehoods. Bots programmed by those who work for psychopathic oligarchs do not necessarily reflect the views of the transactional oligarchs who had them programmed. Tried doing ten or twenty more searches, for potentially better results.

Georgiavotes.com has this number for early voting in 2020, but nothing for 2024:

Early Voters (Fulton County)

318,565 (71.4%) of 2024 general election early voters voted early in the 2020 general

It has been virtually impossible to compare mail-in ballots from 2020 and 2024. I haven’t been able to verify the drop from 29% to 5% mail-in ballots in Fulton County with numerous searches. Google directs me to a string of articles alleging (without evidence) massive voter fraud, many involving a purported 315,000 votes, in Fulton County in 2020 and other claims related to Trump’s ongoing propaganda war against mail-in and Black, and female, voting. There were also numerous hits, totally unrelated to my search, about the seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, based on an affidavit that did not make out probable cause for a search and seizure.

After a frustrating amount of dead end searches, these, from Georgiavotes.com, seem to confirm the steep decline in mail-in voting from 2020 to 2024. I have to think pugnacious weasel DeJoy played his part, as did RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The numbers, in each case, seem to have been posted during the election. But note that almost three times as many people (451,520) requested ballots in 2024 as in 2020 (166,603), if the very specific numbers on Georgiavotes.com are to be believed. Note also, the 451,000 early ballots requested in 2024 doesn’t specify how many were mail-in. It’s not like I’ve been able to verify any of this anywhere else. Here is Louis DeJoy’s public relations press release, why would he lie?

The determined squids of the right have spread ink, mud and shit in the water, nothing to see here! Frustrating that straightforward searches no longer yield relevant search results. Place AI in charge of internet searches and you can cook the information people get to see. AI, of course, can be programmed to do whatever its masters need. The horror. Here’s another piece of random data I was able to glean somewhere:

If you have any questions about the United States Postal Service’s commitment to the timely delivery of every mail-in ballot, this should reassure you.

Meanwhile, call your senators, especially if they are Republicans, and tell them to vote no on the SAVE MAGA Act. The Senate switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.

CEO of “the most transparent administration” in US history

Why Heather Cox Richardson is the best at what she does

And why Donald J. Trump is the biggest psycho grifter ever to hold our experiment in democracy hostage. Heather begins:

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”

Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

In October, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, saying he wanted “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would release the funds if Schumer would agree to name Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and New York City’s Penn Station after him.

source

Russell Vought, the Koch Brother’s own Project 2025 Nazi state architect and unelected Czar of the US budget (apart from his party-line confirmation in the Senate), the constitutional scholar/genius who declared Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs unconstitutional and grounds for denying funding already approved by Congress, quietly diverted $15,000,000 in appropriated USAID funds (cut by nongovernment employee/new government agency head Elon Musk’s nongovernment DOGE) to pay for his security detail. Better, for him, that his super important life be protected from every possible threat, by a $15,000,000 private army, than to have two or three hundred thousand insignificant brown children die preventable deaths formerly prevented by USAID.

Happy belated Presidents Day to these Nazi motherfuckers. Don’t forget to give generously to the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy, a wonderful new charity that, since an IRS ruling in September, 2025, can accept tax-free donations. USA! USA!!!!

The SAVE MAGA Act, in 60 seconds

Liz Oyer, the former DOJ Pardon Attorney (until Trump 2.0 began and all pardons became purely transactional) lays out the real intent of the SAVE Act. Not only is it designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote, its real purpose is to create complete chaos ahead of the midterm elections. Liz does an excellent job laying out the method and desired effects of this heavy handed Nazi attempt to fully Nazify our United States in the midterm elections. This proposed law (which does not yet have support in the senate to become law) will be particularly important in the disobedient, so-called Blue States, the places Bill Barr dubbed “Anarchist Jurisdictions” under Trump’s first wild spin as president. They can’t afford another Minneapolis!

Generally a sweeping nationwide change in laws takes a year or more to efficiently roll out, but efficiency is clearly not the goal here. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (and Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.) don’t have that long, they’ve got to get this done chop chop, with the zeal of billionaire “disrupters” who break the thing into too many parts to ever put back together before asking permission, or getting sued and stopped by courts enforcing the law.

The business model of disrupters is also the business model of MAGA. Break things you hate, smash them to smithereens, like Trump Postmaster Louis DeJoy did by disassembling gigantic mail sorting machines in “Blue” cities, delaying mail delivery and so on, and let your accursed enemies try to stop you in court. Let them keep trying this defensive tactic after you’ve ramped up to targeting them, killing them (when needed) and shoving them into concentration camps a thousand miles from their homes.

Not losing in 2026 is a TOP priority for the VERY STABLE GENIUS and his united billionaire benefactors/beneficiaries, if there is going to be a country anymore! So much the better if they are able to bring on the chaos in time to disrupt the 2026 elections, eh, Susan Collins (an announced “yay” for the SAVE MAGA Act in the Senate)?

The SAVE MAGA Act

There is only one purpose to this proposed legislation which will make it harder for tens of millions to vote in the upcoming midterm elections — to save MAGA.  The Senate would have to change the filibuster rules to pass this Jim Crow 2.0 bill with 54 votes. If we want to preserve our experiment in democracy, we have to keep Democratic senators honest, and a few set to retire Republican senators, (and good luck with some of these mf’s).

For future reference (when Congress returns from yet another break during yet another Trump shutdown — this time only TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and a few other agencies within DHS will lose funding, ICE and CBP are fully funded through the Big, Gorgeous, Junior High School Girl Bill)

The U.S. Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.  Ask to be connected to your senators’ offices.  

Update:

The Capitol emptied out on Thursday, a full day before the midnight Friday deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers who were deadlocked over new restrictions on immigration officers jetted off to Munich for a security conference or headed home for a weeklong recess, seemingly unconcerned with the looming closure. It was a jarring change from the past, when lawmakers were reluctant to seem like they were giving up for even a moment before time ran out for a deal.

“We are not even going to pretend that we are trying to figure it out,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, one of those bound for Germany. “It doesn’t look great.”

The blasé attitude reflected a conviction on the part of both parties that they were in the stronger political position in this round of the shutdown wars. (source, NY Times)

Brian continues on the fake fraud behind the latest, and perhaps most brazen, Republican voter suppression effort:

Levitt’s study found exactly no instances of a noncitizen knowingly or purposefully voting illegally. And why would they? The penalty is deportation.

Trump’s own investigation into illegal voting by migrants turned up not one shred of evidence of widespread fraud.

Out of 49.5 million voter registrations checked, 0.02% of the names were investigated as possible registered noncitizens. There was no evidence that any of those people had actually voted. A serious blow to Trump’s unfounded hysteria over droves of illegal voters sandbagging elections in favor of Democrats.

for more details on Jim Crow 2.0, a federal voter suppression law that will target women, young people, college students, people of color, people with various accents, people with physical disabilities, (while allowing Trump’s administration to access a national database voter information more powerful than what his then campaign manager Paul Manafort gave Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 “Russia Hoax”) here’s Brian Tyler Cohen’s full report on this desperate fascist move

Script for ICE/CBP reforms

It is imperative to call and email our senators (and members of Congress) as they negotiate conditions for funding ICE and CBP.   You can reach them at (202) 224-3121. 

Have a short script ready.  This will be mine, starting with thanking my otherwise weak-willed senators for taking principled action in severing ICE/CBP funding from the rest of the government appropriations bill in order to rein in their unchecked abuses.

Thanks for taking a stand for democracy, your votes are crucial and I greatly appreciate you holding the line in negotiations over reforms of ICE and CBP. 

ICE and CBP have been deployed to cities under a false national emergency in an attempt to violently provoke a violent response from citizens.   They should not be armed for anti-riot duty as though facing an insurgency in Fallujah — they have faced zero violence, in spite of their constant violent provocations including cold blooded murder.  

At minimum, they must not be allowed to conceal their identities and must be placed under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement.  They must not be armed with assault rifles, tear gas, pepper spray and green gas — a chemical weapon illegal under international law.   Do everything possible to restrict the ability of these armed goons to gas children, smash car windows, break into homes, schools and churches,  and murder law abiding civilians with impunity.

Stand strong against this brazen, lawless assault on our democracy!

And for my follow-up email:

A federal judge had to order this the other day, after massive ICE gassing (the plume of chemical irritant was visible from a mile away) of a peaceful crowd in Portland:

“In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated. In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads,” he wrote.

Federal agents are restricted under the order from using chemical or projectile munitions unless the target of such weapons “poses an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Agents are not allowed to deploy munitions at the head, neck, or torso of any person, “unless the officer is legally justified in using deadly force against that person.” And agents are restricted from deploying munitions if doing so would “endanger any other individual who does not pose an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Source

For help understanding the stakes and preparing your message, read this from Indivisible.

When psychopathy is normalized

The psychopath is motivated only by self-interest. Incapable of empathy, due, in large part, to a genetic anomaly making them impervious to the effects of humanizing hormones like oxytocin [1], the psychopath is also immune from regret. When they acquire political power over others the results are always the same — ruthlessly inhuman rule by violence.

Under this rule transparently false government lies are tirelessly promoted as the final truth. What we can observe with our own eyes, they insist, are the actual lies, all witnesses liars. A psychopathic government has every right to send heavily armed, untrained, largely uneducated bigots into cities, under a clearly fake “national emergency”, to smash car windows, tear gas, bear spray and pepper spray civilians at will, for any reason or for no reason, throw flash bang grenades, break down doors in violation of the fourth amendment, arrest toddlers, throw old people on the ground, beat people, zip tie them, pin them to the ground, shoot them ten times in the back, or, in the case of someone they find particularly bitchy, in the face. These objectively cold-blooded murders will be called self-defense, because those carrying out the will of powerful psychopaths can never be wrong and fault must always be the full weight of the murdered or abused person. They can also send anyone to concentration camps 1,000 miles from where they were illegally detained, and ignore any court that intervenes on the side of law, because, of course they can.

This is clearly the federal government we have now. A psychopathic president recognizes no restraint, so if the highest court in the land rules that a criminally inclined national CEO may not be held criminally accountable if he can claim he was only doing his job, the result is predictable. Mr. Trump’s government is preparing for a federal pogrom in Springfield, Ohio in the coming days, to celebrate, Black History Month in the sardonic Nazi manner popular on right wing social media. The targets of this pogrom are people from Haiti who are currently working in Springfield under Temporary Protected Status because conditions in Haiti are so dangerous that the State Department advises Americans not to go there. It’s fine for violent, criminal, disease carrying sub-humans who eat family pets, according to our currently fully Nazified federal government. Happy Black History Month, bitches, from JD Vance, Stephen Miller and President Thank You For Your Attention to this Matter.

Timothy Snyder, historian and scholar of twentieth century genocide by European fascist governments, who grew up in Ohio, not far from Springfield, wrote a powerful piece about the planned pogrom. He describes the steps by which Nazi agitation, literally by an American Nazi group, an essential part of The Base (al Q’aeda in Arabic [2]) and deliberate lies by JD Vance laid the groundwork for this ethnic cleansing. It chilled me to my heart to read, as it will chill you. I urge you to read it, and to take action before the deployment of the worst of the worst to another American city to make real the fake American carnage that Trump debuted in his first State of the Union speech, a speech written by American Jewish Nazi psychopath Stephen Miller. Miller is Trump’s brain, a morally stunted brain boiling with hatred and seeking violent revenge on anyone who has ever opposed its will.

two from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

[1] “in humans it plays roles in behavior that include social bonding, love, reproduction, childbirth, and the period after childbirth” (Wikipedia)

[2] From the Arabic word al-qa’ida, literally, the base source

Criminally insane

Rachel Maddow makes a good point here, why would the Republicans invite Jack Smith to testify publicly when all he would say is what he said? 

Trump was the chief propagator of  the big lie (stolen 2020 election), the fake electors, the coercion of state officials,  the frivolous, evidence-free, court challenges, the plot to have Mike Pence announce Trump had won the election, the Green Bay Sweep,  and the bloody riot at the Capitol with the gallows outside to hang Mike Pence.  There was only one leader, one beneficiary, of this desperate many armed criminals octopus, Donald Trump.

Fascist enterprise graphically laid out by the Grey Lady

In fairness to our demented president, the Federalist Society Six on the Supreme Court declared him the victor in 2004’s Trump v. United States. They ruled that he couldn’t be prosecuted for anything he could argue was part of his official job. So we have to forgive him for taking it so literally, he was never a man to see nuance, even before his steep cognitive decline. If he could, theoretically, order Seal Team Six to murder his political opponents, if done in consultation with his cabinet (official core duty) — and pardon the hit men with no restrictions — then why should he not believe he can fire all Inspectors General without cause, purge the civil service without cause, rescind Congressional budget allocations he hated, shake down right wing law firms, TV networks, universities, weaponize the DOJ for retribution against his enemies, and so on? Many of those acts are not even arguably criminal, at best they are violations of civil law, or norms, or whatever.

The New York Times published an exhaustive, if politely phrased, catalogue of Trump’s mafia don presidency. Check it out.

The link to the article again — the details are many, and impressive in their thoroughness. Dictator on day one or bust, courtesy of the tireless work of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Antonin Scalia Law School, The Council for National Policy, The Institute for Humane Studies and so on. It is worth bearing in mind, in the face of this onslaught of Nazi contempt for law and democracy, that many of their policies, political theories and practical plans are as ridiculous and legally untenable as the asinine theories of now disbarred far-right wing constitutional crackpot John Eastman and longtime Trump buddy (predictably abandoned by his old friend once things went south for him) Rudy “Trial by Combat” Giuliani.

Third Reich stuff

If you want motive for the cold-blooded killing of a woman with a breezy attitude by an ICE agent with a violent attitude, listen to the last couple of seconds of this video. You can hear Jonathan Ross, or one of his fellow ICE agents, say “fucking bitch” after the third shot to her face, as the dead woman’s car lurches forward 100 ft to crash, kind of says it all.

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left, who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe, against our law enforcement officers.

VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE: The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. The idea that Tim Walz and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy’s life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous. source

From the White House podium Thursday, Vice President JD Vance characterized the victim of the shooting — a 37-year-old mother of three identified as Renee Nicole Good — as a member of “a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”

“This is classic terrorism,” Vance said. “We’re not going to give into terrorism on this.”

Wednesday afternoon, Trump went on the attack.

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” he wrote on Truth Social. 

Trump said it was “hard to believe” the ICE officer was alive — despite video showing he remained on his feet throughout the incident and was filmed walking around after the shooting.

source

Back to the soulless JD Vance: 

“The gaslighting is off the charts and I’m having none of it. This guy was doing his job. She tried to stop him from doing his job. When he approached her car, she tried to hit him.

A tragedy? Absolutely. But a tragedy that falls on this woman and all of the radicals who teach people that immigration is the one type of law that rioters are allowed to interfere with.”

Today, in a press conference on the shooting, Vice President J.D. Vance made even more extreme statements, claiming—all evidence to the contrary—that the woman shot in Minneapolis was part of a “left wing network” and that “nobody debates” that she “aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator.” In fact, among those who “debate” Vance’s version of events are the journalists at the New York Times, who today published a slow-motion analysis that demonstrated conclusively that the vehicle was turning away from the officer when he opened fire. source

I salute the Grey Lady for posting this video report of the shooting

Or as Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post spun the shooting of Renee Good, when enraged ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot her three times in the face, as … you be the judge.