Category Archives: History and Politics

You don’t need information!

It is better simply to believe that those who run things know best and will tell you everything you need to know.   Once Donald Trump manages to get the WALL built, in spite of the obstruction of even people in his own party, the problems we face here in divided America will all be over.   That and locking up Hillary Clinton, and Ilhan Omar, and several other very nasty and divisive women and their “male” enablers.  Done and done, everyone will be happy, except, of course, for the haters, who are NEVER happy no matter what. 

Seriously, every oppressor, (every overbearing asshole, for that matter)  in history has first controlled the conversation by removing any “inconvenient truth” from it. This is the very first lesson in Authoritarian 101, remove anything harmful to authority from the conversation.  Look, if you can eliminate fact-based “dissent” that takes care of most of the problem.   Simple.  Just make them shut up, criminalize them, lock ’em up.   Don’t allow books like Dark Money, Democracy in Chains, Dirty Wars, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, How Fascism Works, A People’s History of the United States, to be published.   If they already exist, take them off the shelves and burn them, quietly, secretly, just get them out of circulation.  Make examples of a few of the leaders, the more grotesque the example the better, and the rest will fall into line.  Most people are not heroes.

I once read sections of Frederick Douglass’ autobiography (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave) to my class of third graders in Harlem.   They were shocked, had never heard any of this shit.  Couldn’t believe blacks allowed themselves to be treated that way.   They were outraged.  One tough kid, speaking for everyone, said if he’d been there in Africa he would have killed the slave kidnappers.   The class agreed.  I had him and the five other toughest kids stand up and come to the front of the room to play the Africans.  I then chose two of the smallest, most timid kids in the class and cast them as the Europeans intent on collecting slaves.   The class was relishing the confrontation that would set history straight. 

As they were about to begin I said, as if in afterthought, “oh, wait, you’ll need these,” and handed each of the frightened Europeans a rolled up piece of paper. “Those are your guns,” I told the class.   The two slavers smiled.   The Africans wanted their guns but I told them in those days Africans didn’t have guns.   Then they stood fifteen feet apart and began acting.  The hideous truth became clear as soon as the first African stepped up to tell the slavers to fuck off.   The room got very quiet as a supremely disquieting light went on overhead.

Without this obvious detail of gun vs. strength and courage alone you can build a whole story about the docility and inferiority of a people who “allow” themselves to be enslaved.  And killed, literally by the millions, during the long, cramped, stinking voyage from the life you knew to a life as a piece of property in the service of some god-fearing “white” person’s limitless wealth.   The Middle Passage, as the infamous trans-Atlantic voyage is called.

The suppression of important factual detail is essential for any narrative that justifies brutal inequality, persecution, tyranny.   In your personal life, notice how anyone who has ever sought to exploit you will always pressure you not to reveal the shameful details to anybody.  If you tell somebody, you’re some kind of rat, unmanly, a cowardly weasel who can’t simply be sodomized and take it like a choir boy.   My brother-in-law reminded me of this several times over the years.

In our neoliberal order only monetary profit has real value, increasing personal wealth is the only overarching goal.   As our recent liberal presidents have all done, you can support the civil rights of homosexuals, the rights of all minorities to be free from discrimination, the right of a woman or girl to seek an abortion if she needs one,  the right of every child to have a free, quality public education and also the right to live in a nontoxic environment and work at a safe workplace, the right not to be randomly mowed down by a maniac with a military assault rifle.   All these things are generally considered “liberal” positions and things that most Democratic (or “Democrat”) politicians support.  At the same time, as a neoliberal, you back policies and laws that make things easier for the wealthiest, and for those powerful, eternal, real-life vampires, corporations, to do what they do best: “create wealth”.

The only fly in this otherwise soothing ointment is that horrific systemic inequality flows from these practices.   If a small group owns almost everything, there is a gigantic group that will have to make do with almost nothing.    Call it the “free market” if you like, and forget the whiners who complain that those who pay the biggest price have nothing to say about the quality of the freedom they receive.    

There was a worldwide effort, started around the year 2000, the Millennial Development Goals, for the wealthy countries to greatly reduce poverty and hunger in the “underdeveloped world” by 2020 (if memory serves).   It turns out that all of the aid the wealthiest countries provide to the “Third World” (the global south) amounts to a tiny percentage of what is extracted from their governments every year just to pay the interest on the debt owed to the wealthy creditor nations for “development” loans.   Everybody wins under this global system, except for the one or two, or three, billion worldwide who live short, miserable, insecure lives of want, including unbearable hunger. 

The numbers did not look good for greatly reducing the metrics of poverty by the specified date.   So really smart people began tweaking the metrics (as American lawyers tortuously tweaked the definition of “torture” a few years back).  It turns out hunger numbers can be reduced by an impressive margin, with the stroke of a pen, if you define hunger as “severe and persistent malnutrition, less than 1,200 calories a day, that persists for more than a year.”   Heh, you see what we did?   If you get a good meal every ten or eleven months, problem solved.  We have now lifted a billion people out of hunger!  Have a blessed day and please continue your charitable giving.

The devilish details of this worldwide anti-poverty program are set out in an early chapter of a troubling book (sent to me by a friend)  called The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, by Jason Hickel.   I don’t have the book with me at the moment, so that quote about hunger, although true in essence, was pulled out of the memory hole.   The caloric number may be off, but the money shot is that hunger, as defined by these do-gooders and for purposes of creating a more uplifting narrative of success, must be persistent and last for at least a year to make the cut as something wealthier people need to feel any urgency to do anything about.  

Hickel states that the amount of food discarded daily in wealthy countries would, if somehow put into the hands of the starving, immediately solve the world hunger problem.   World food scarcity is not the result of actual scarcity, but of institutionalized not really giving a fuck about literally billions of starving people you will never see.   Go figure.

I am constantly reminded of this suppression of information needed to make informed, moral decisions, having grown up in a family where certain truths were never mentioned.   Thirteen years before I was born, in the region the family came from, everyone was murdered.  Our entire family, outside of five or six who came to the United States before the restrictive immigration law of 1924, slaughtered.   Not something that could ever be discussed because… oh, just shut up!   A father who was always angry, it turns out, had good reason to be disturbed, he’d been despised and whipped in the face since infancy by the violent little mother who called him “Sonny”.    He should have sought help, but he didn’t need to whine to some shrink like he predicted his children would.  End of fucking story.

Do you want to live in a world where you’re not allowed to know any unsettling background on anything that ever happened, anything that is happening now, anything that will happen in the future?   If you do, rejoice, there is nothing to think about!

 

   

FOX News Nails Rabid Anti-Trump Hatred

We’ve been watching The Loudest Voice, the Showtime series about Roger Ailes and top-rated Fox News.   You will recall that Ailes finally had to step down as head of Fox, after doing everything in his considerable power to help elect Donald J. Trump president.  Ailes had to leave because Gretchen Carlson got millions of dollars in settlement/hush money over sexual harassment from Fox when it came out that Roger had been molesting many women at Fox and Roger, apparently,  kept demanding things like short dresses and blowjobs from other women at the station.   I wasn’t there, of course, and this could be the same kind of liberal hit job that brought down Bill O’Reilly, Bill Cosby, Bill Shine [1] threatened poor Boof Kavanaugh’s entire life and even ended the career of liberal lion Al Franken.  [2]

So anyway, Fox had a bombshell today.   They had a Republic(an) Member of the House Judiciary Committee spill the goods on Trump-hater Jerrald Nadler.   Nadler, we learn, began an impeachment inquiry even before Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election (“widespread and sweeping” though “insufficient evidence of criminal conspiracy, due in part to perjury and destruction of evidence”) and obstruction of the investigation into Russian interference (“we can’t say he didn’t obstruct it, in at least ten different ways”) was released!   

Fox reports, under the banner DEMOCRATIC COURT FILING SUGGESTS TRUMP IMPEACHMENT PROBE BEGAN BEFORE MUELLER EVEN SUBMITTED REPORT,  that Nadler’s committee apparently initiated an inquiry on March 4, 2019 into

‘threats to the rule of law’ encompassing alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates and members of his Administration, one critical purpose of the Committee’s investigation is to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment against the president.

(per court filing yesterday)   

source

Of course, a nitpicker might point out that public corruption (including profiting from his hotel in Washington DC while president, regular publicly funded trips to his resorts, with full staff (armed with Mar-a-Largo credit cards), appointing unqualified family members to high government positions) and other abuses of power (declaring a state of emergency to overrule Congress and build his wall, ignoring court order to stop separating migrant children from their parents, telling subordinates to create false evidence and disobey all subpoenas, dangling pardons, bypassing security clearance screening for his son-in-law and others) were not within the scope of Mueller’s investigation.   

And a Trump supporter might say, as the President himself does, that this is all bullshit.  For example, anyone who had the power to do so would address a meeting of world leaders and pitch holding the next conference at his luxury resort in Miami.    Plenty of parking, huge beautiful accommodations, everything first class, the best, and in Miami– enjoy it before it’s underwater, folks.

Yes, there are partisan issues at stake here, as always.   Trump diverts over $155,000,000 from FEMA disaster relief funds, at the start of hurricane season, to shore up his operations at the southern border where the crisis (a hoard of rapists, if you must know) rages out of control.  The money will pay for additional detention spaces and new expedited courts to get more migrants lawfully deported.   Trump decides Planned Parenthood gets no money under Title X if it continues to counsel women about the option of abortion.   Trump continues to appoint lifetime judges off the Federalist Society’s list as his own team of lawyers fights disclosure of anything that could shed light on his suspected shady financial operations with entities like Deutsche Bank — even as he is the victim of history’s longest tax audit. 

There is also the sobering fact that we live in a country that has, under Trump, virtual state TV, the sole source of fair and balanced news for tens of millions of a carefully cultivated demographic.  On Fox, criticism of the president diverting a dump truck full of money from FEMA to stop a manufactured (“fake”) existential threat at the southern border is laughed away as typical liberal propaganda.   

As Fox tells us:  the Dems are pathetic, pretending to wait for the Mueller report while rushing to irrationally accuse the president of everything under the sun even before the report was even partially released.   Bill Barr said Trump was completely innocent, and right to feel that he was the victim of a witch hunt and fully justified in shutting down the investigation – which was totally within his legal prerogatives as POTUS–  into his totally innocent behavior.  Bill Barr, ladies and gentlemen [3].   The People rest.

 

[1]  Bill Shine (born on the Fourth of July), you may recall, was hired by the President as White House Communications director after Shine was fired from Fox for his longtime role in covering up sexual harassment (and worse) at Fox News.   

from Shine’s Wikipedia page:

In particular, those objecting [to Shine’s appointment as Trump’s Communications Director]  cited Shine’s awareness at the time of the channel’s hiring private detectives to intimidate alleged victims of Roger Ailes.[32][33][34] Later it was reported that Shine’s compensation upon leaving Fox was in the neighborhood of $15 million dollars.[35]

On March 8, 2019, it was announced by the White House that Shine was resigning from his position to serve as an advisor to President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.[36] Shine said in a statement about his resignation that he is “looking forward to working on President Trump’s re-election campaign and spending more time with family.”[36]  In May 2019, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told Politico that he did not intend to replace Shine with a new communications director.[37]

 

[2]  while looking for names to add to this list I came across this:

Donald Trump (R), the 45th President of the United States, was accused of sexual assault by 13 women during the 2016 election and he denied the allegations.[166] The allegations arose after The Washington Post released a 2005 video of Trump, recorded on a hot microphone by Access Hollywood, in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women.[167][168][169]Trump himself renewed the controversy a year later by alleging that the video was fake,[170] to which Access Hollywood replied, “Let us make this perfectly clear — the tape is very real. Remember his excuse at the time was ‘locker-room talk.’ He said every one of those words.”[171][172] The first reports of an alleged 2006 affair between Donald Trump and adult film star Stormy Daniels were published in October 2011 by the blog The Dirty and the magazine Life & Style.[173][174]

compare and contrast:

Al Franken Senator (D-MN), was accused by radio newscaster Leeann Tweeden of forcibly kissing her as part of a skit and later being in a photo pretending to grope her without consent (there was no actual physical contact) during a U.S.O. tour in 2006. Tweeden produced photo evidence of the pretend grope, taken of Franken when Tweeden was asleep. Franken admitted to the allegations and apologized for his actions and then resigned.[175]

just for fun:   (left to right: Karen MacDougal, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Melania Trump)

Clinton_Trump_2000_08.jpg

 

[3] a hell of a bagpiper, I’ve heard.

Vigilance, now more than ever

Be strong, watch carefully, and do not look away.

An old friend, as dismayed as I was when powerful late supporters of a hate-mongering bully from reality TV engineered history’s narrowest margin of an Electoral College victory, told me somberly that it was time to be vigilant.   I agreed.

Vigilance got harder and harder as the president with the orangutan hair began furiously flinging his feces everywhere.   Most people I know can’t look at the man, I have a hard time myself.   They have mostly stopped watching the news– too depressing, this unfunny clown has made America what he claimed it was before he climbed on to the tweeting throne: a laughingstock.  Meanwhile, everything Mr. T has touched with those dirty hands of his needs to be power-washed.

All that’s needed for bad things to flourish is for good people to look away.   (There’s a famous cliché to that effect, check it out — #3).   The outrages with this scenery chewing amateur actor happen so furiously, continually, colorfully, that it’s hard to recall yesterday’s outrages, let alone those of a year ago, two years ago.   

This is one of the tragedies of history, as it tumultuously unfolds the pattern is hard to see, until, like the famous frog slowly boiled in the pot, temperature raised one degree at a time as the amphibian relaxes, then sweats, then is parboiled, we’re done.   

The road to totalitarianism is composed of thousands of tiny steps.   If this orange guy had his way he’d do an MBS on every journalist “enemy of the people” and he’s shown us enough deliberate cruelty to assure us all that this is exactly what’s in his heart of hearts.

The following illustration is but one tiny, faltering step on the road to fascism.  It deserves not to be forgotten.  For one thing, it’s a horrifically typical attempted lurch toward tyranny.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the Alabama senator, was a man too racist to be confirmed to the federal bench.   Picture how racist you have to be.   Then, as a senator, he was one of the more rabid anti-immigrant voices in Congress.   When Trump announced his candidacy, the immigrant-hating, racist Sessions was the first “mainstream” politician of any stature to embrace Trump’s then-outlandish candidacy.   The loyal Sessions was the first powerful Republican to appear on stage next to Trump, introduce him at rallies, advocate for him.

The reward for this loyalty was the Attorney General job coveted by Chris Christie (no way – he prosecuted Jared Kushner’s felonious father) and Rudy Giuliani (a notably incoherent dotard with wildly bulging eyes), among others.    Jeff Sessions would become the lawless new president’s chief law enforcement official, in charge of the Department of Justice and all federal prosecutions.   

Note for a moment the irony that the DOJ was formed after the Civil War to prosecute guys like Jeff Sessions, people who advocated keeping the former slaves in their goddamned places, by any means necessary.   

To everyone’s surprise, Sessions showed a glimmer of respect for the law by properly recusing himself when it emerged (under Al Franken’s questioning) that he was involved in discussions with Russians prior to the 2016 election and immediately afterwards.   This recusal infuriated Trump, who saw it as a personal betrayal, of course, because the whole idea of the Attorney General, in his simple view, is to act as the president’s ruthless Roy Cohn and do whatever is needed to allow the president to do whatever he deems henceforth necessary for himself and the nation.  (Especially for himself  — just sayin’.) 

After humiliating him publicly for a long time Trump replaced Sessions with a shameless, brazen, well-spoken lawyerly sycophant, a brutally handsome pile of  human excrement who, apparently, is an expert bagpiper.   Confirmed just in time to control the Mueller report threat, he lied repeatedly to confused and credulous Americans about the troubling findings of the Mueller Report which he falsely spun as a complete exoneration of his unfairly persecuted new boss.  He then waited a month to release Mueller’s own damning summary of his findings and the rest of the long report, in redacted form.

This is all well-known, but recall this small, easily forgotten, detail, reported in Jason Stanley’s excellent How Fascism Works,  (which I am ‘re-reading” as an audiobook).  The ugly incident really underscores what these creatures have been up to from day one.     

It was at the Sessions confirmation hearing, early in 2017.    One of his supporters, fellow Alabama senator Richard Shelby made a patently ridiculous statement in support of his colleague.  He claimed, with a pompous straight face,  that  Sessions’ “extensive record of treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.”

This occurred shortly after Trump’s historically well-attended inauguration, the crowd larger than any crowd ever seen anywhere on earth in the history of crowds.   It was a historically well-funded inauguration, anyway.   Donors lined up to hand over bags of cash, to curry favor and gain access to the new president.   No president ever had more money ponied up for a lavish inauguration celebration than the transactional Mr. Trump who openly told wealthy people that they could buy access to him at Mar-A-Largo and other luxurious Trump resorts.  Much of that money is still unaccounted for, of course, but that’s another story for another team of investigative “enemies of the people” to eventually uncover and tell.  [1]

A small group of comically attired protesters from the anti-war group Code Pink were at the Sessions confirmation hearing.   On hearing Shelby’s unintentionally hilarious statement about Sessions’ well-documented commitment to treating everyone fairly, one of them, Desiree Fairooz, burst out laughing.  source

If she’d been sipping milk when Shelby deadpanned his outlandish, whimsical remark, it would have shot out of her nose.   It was a spontaneous reaction to the “abzurd” statement, delivered so perfectly by the outraged gentleman from Alabama in defense of his fellow Alabaman.

It would take almost a year before the DOJ called off the hyperactive federal case it brought against Fairooz for the twin misdemeanors of “disrupting Congress” and “unlawful demonstration on Capitol grounds”.   They wanted to lock her up for the maximum one year, at least, and to extract the largest allowable fine.   The DOJ even got a conviction (which was overturned by a judge), before finally admitting defeat and withdrawing the case against her.   (The Trump administration apparently has an impressive 6% victory rate in cases in federal court — all other administrations average a mere 70% win rate in court challenges.)  [2]

As National Public Radio, notorious communist front group, reported on the judge overturning Fairooz’s conviction for laughing at Shelby’s unintended comedy:

Chief Judge Robert Morin decided that the government improperly argued that Fairooz’s laugh alone — not her reaction to being removed from the courtroom — would be enough to find her guilty. Reilly reports:

“Morin said it was ‘disconcerting’ that the government made the case in closing arguments that the laughter in and of itself was sufficient.

” ‘The court is concerned about the government’s theory,’ Morin said. He said the laughter ‘would not be sufficient’ to submit the case to the jury, and said the government hadn’t made clear before the trial that it intended to make that argument.”

source

No doubt, if, during the long prosecution of Fairooz,  Trump mentioned her horrible disrespect at one of his Nuremberg style rallies, the crowd would have erupted with a muscular, full-throated “Lock her up!  Lock her up!”   Anybody with that kind of sick, unAmerican sense of humor is clearly (if you wear the red, or white, baseball cap) a traitor, disloyal, deserving of the full weight of the law, and the most serious and heavy, literally, federal case, against her.

That’s what you use the law and the Department of Justice for, motherfuckers, not investigating a president’s active and ongoing campaign of obstruction– of justice and so-called common decency.  Ask the bagpiper!   He’s the top law enforcement official in the USA.  Nothing to see here, you lying sacks of shit.   USA!   USA!!!!

 

 

{1]  As this excellent podcast does, from their summary of the follow-up podcast about the inauguration:

Elsewhere in the podcast, we report that the inaugural committee was so eager to book space at Trump’s hotel in Washington that it encouraged hotel management to cancel another event — a prayer breakfast — so space would be clear for the inaugural celebration, according to a lawsuit against the committee filed by the reverend who organized the breakfast.

The hotel did briefly cancel the breakfast, invoking “force majeure,” or an act of god. In this case, they predicted civil unrest over the inauguration week.

source

[2]  Federal judge on sudden withdrawal of millions in funding related to teen pregnancy:

“This much is clear: A federal agency that changes course abruptly without a well-reasoned explanation for its decision or that acts contrary to its own regulations is subject to having a federal court vacate its action as ‘arbitrary [and] capricious,’ ” she said in her ruling, quoting the APA’s most recognizable incantation.

source

The Federalist Society and the 5-4 Supreme Court Majority

All five right of center judges on the Supreme Court are, or have been at one time or another, members or supporters of the Federalist Society.   I have mentioned that society of conservative lawyers and law students often whenever writing about the Supreme Court  — both of Trump’s Supreme Court justices were selected from a list of twenty-five carefully vetted Federalist Society recommended ideologically pure candidates.    Here is a feature article about the Federalist Society  which gives a lot of excellent background, history and some chilling reporting. 

This is David Montgomery from that detailed piece in the Washington Post Magazine:

There is much for this crowd to celebrate. The conservative and libertarian society for law and public policy studies has reached an unprecedented peak of power and influence. Brett Kavanaugh, whose membership in the society dates to his Yale Law School days, has just been elevated to the Supreme Court; he is the second of President Trump’s appointees, following Neil Gorsuch, another justice closely associated with the society.  They join Justice Clarence Thomas (who said last spring he’s “been a part of the Federalist Society now since meeting with them … in the 1980s”), Chief Justice John Roberts (listed as a member in 1997-98) and Justice Samuel Alito (a periodic speaker at society events). The newly solidified conservative majority on the court will inevitably decide more cases in line with the society’s ideals — which include checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning. In practice, this could mean fewer regulations of the environment and health care, more businesses allowed to refuse service to customers on religious grounds, and denial of protections claimed by newly vocal classes of minorities, such as transgender people.

The creators of the Federalist Society understood that controlling the narrative to shape public opinion is an important precondition to making laws favorable to that point of view.   Moscow Mitch on the Federalists, from the David Montgomery piece:

“My goal … is to do everything we can for as long as we can to transform the federal judiciary, because everything else we do is transitory,” McConnell says. “The closest thing we will ever have an opportunity to do to have the longest impact on the country is confirming these great men and women and transforming the judiciary for as long into the future as we can.” McConnell notes that the judges list played a big part in getting Trump elected. The majority leader looks out over the gathering almost mistily as he concludes: “I hope you are proud of what we’ve done.”

As far as the Federalist Society’s longterm effect on culture and the law:

Much of the Federalist Society’s influence comes not from its very public Washington victories but from its behind-the-scenes, grass-roots ability to shift the law at the idea level, even the cultural level.

The creators of the Federalist Society, who also created many influential “think tanks”, ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (authors of “Stand Your Ground” laws and others like it), endowed university professorships, generously funded otherwise fringe, insurgent political campaigns, put on-point talking heads into every public debate, funded “grassroots” political “movements” like the “Tea Party”, hired public relations firms and pollsters to promote their views — and private investigators to find kompromat on enemies they consider dangerous (they found nothing on Jane Mayer when she was investigating the Koch network) have largely succeeded in mainstreaming their once extreme, unpopular views.   Here’s a description of one of countless similar campaigns.    The Federalist Society’s professional network is an integral part of this larger plan.

Surfacing promising judicial candidates who can be nominated when conservatives have electoral power is just one byproduct of the network, and on its own maybe not the most important one, Teles explains. There’s a supply-and-demand relationship between the judges and the network. The judges need scholarship and arguments extending Federalist principles into new areas. Where new legal theories depart from the status quo, they need them to be vetted and legitimized through public debate. They require targeted cases raising questions that provide an opening to move the law. Without professors and lawyers in the network filling that demand, Teles says, “you’re not going to maximize what you got through the electoral process.”

Some very fine people, the finest people, one suspects.  Like Federalist Society members George Conway and Don McGahn, both giddy at the recent black tie Federalist Society victory celebration bash.

 

Imbecile-in-chief intent on laughing last

Of all the damage this destructive narcissist has done so far, the thing that probably irks me the most (from a competitive list) is his despicable championing of a down-the-line partisan hack with multiple skeletons in his closet for a lifetime position on the Supreme Court [1].   The Federalist Society poster boy (a life member who was in its inaugural class at Yale Law School in the 1980s) will rule on important legal issues, unappealably, for possibly decades.  Every one of his votes can be predicted based on the issues involved, the position radical, corporatist conservatives favor, and his thoroughly consistent past rulings.   There were twenty-four other names on the list the Federalist Society gave Trump, yet the president chose to force the most despicable controversial and openly divisive of them on America.   For a generation.

Looking at choir boy Kavanaugh’s perpetually smiling face, looming out of his black judicial robes, makes me sick.   It’s tempting to use words like “scumbag” and “piece of shit”, but you get the point.   If an ugly, syphlitic penis had a face, it would be that self-satisfied, smirking mug.

I just read an excellent article by a writer named Megan Garber about the power of uproarious mockery and how Trump used it against Christine Blasey Ford, whose testimony was so vulnerably candid and powerful that even FOX news was in despair, during the break in the hearings, wringing its collective hands that Kavanaugh’s chance for appointment to the Supreme Court was over.  That was before Kavanaugh “manned up” in the afternoon session to forcefully strike back against his vicious enemies, crying, snorting and accusing, aided by a shrill, indignant Lindsay Graham and an insurmountable one vote Republican party-line majority in the Judiciary Committee.

A few days later, while the FBI was doing a very limited, five day complete investigation into Blasey Ford’s accusations, Trump, in Mississippi, had a rally of supporters cracking up at her expense.    From Megan Garber’s account:

“I had one beer,” the president, imitating Ford, said, thrusting his index finger upward to emphasize the number. He kept the digit upraised. “I had one beer!”

The president then added another character to his routine: an anonymous interrogator of Ford. “Well, do you think it was—” he began to ask.

“Nope!” he said, gleefully interrupting himself and his fictional questioner. “It was one beer.” The joke built speed. “How did you get home? I don’t remember.How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember.How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

At this, the crowd at the rally guffawed. They cheered. They broke out into applause. The president, thus galvanized, thus supported, thus loved, continued his one-man interrogation: “What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”

Of course, she remembered an awful lot of specifics, including, vividly, Kavanaugh’s drunken, dickish face looming over her as he held her down and groped her and his drunk friend Mark Judge nearby.  She remembered enough for the FBI to have easily found the exact home in which the attack took place that summer afternoon in 1982 — within a walk of the Country Club where she swam–  in  a locked room on the second floor, across from the bathroom at the top of the stairs.   Had the FBI been permitted to fully investigate, or even interview more than a small, select handful of “witnesses”, let alone talk to Kavanaugh or Blasey Ford, the specifics could easily have been confirmed.   Instead “Boof” Kavanaugh was.

Megan Garber includes this from what should have been Blasey Ford’s “end of story” testimony: 

“What is the strongest memory you have, the strongest memory of the incident, something you cannot forget?” Patrick Leahy, the Democratic senator from Vermont, asked Ford last Thursday, during her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The professor of psychology, serving as her own expert witness in the attack that she alleged Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge perpetrated, replied: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”

“You’ve never forgotten them laughing at you,” Leahy said.

“They were laughing with each other,” Ford replied.

“And you were the object of the laughter?”

“I was underneath one of them, while the two laughed.”

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”

Contrast this level of certainty and detail to what was contained in the written answers Trump gave to the Special Counsel during the investigation of his possible criminal conspiracy with Russia during his historic 2016 presidential campaign and his ongoing (and continuing) pattern of obstruction of justice, a pattern that escalated dramatically and immediately once the Special Counsel was appointed. 

Remember that these written answers were submitted because the president’s lawyers had ruled out an interview with Mueller, a guaranteed “perjury trap”  since the president has proved himself, over and over, to be simply incapable of not lying.    Trump’s lawyers’ written answers claimed he had no memory of anything, no detail too large or too small for him to have no recollection of.   

Mueller called these answers “inadequate, incomplete, imprecise and insufficient”.  A good description, certainly of the stand-up guy president’s final answer, to a detailed question about the soon to be sentenced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

TRUMP:

[no answer provided] 

Why this has hilarious FUCK YOU not been more widely publicized, I have no idea.   

The evasive and “inadequate” written answers and Mueller’s detailed queries have been on-line for a while.  You can read them here.  Scroll down to the last one for the punchline, or just check out the question and its “insufficient” answer below.  [2]   

Hilarious, no?

 

[1]  multiple accounts of years of his black out “beer” drinking, two independent, credible and detailed accounts of gross sexual impropriety (the one at Yale never investigated at all, in spite of numerous witnesses to it coming forward during the confirmation hearings), his denial of details of his close association with his disgraced former mentor Alex Kozinsky (and Kozinsky’s sexually explicit listserve), a long pattern of extreme partisanship including aggressive prosecution of then president Bill Clinton and undisclosed, classified services rendered to Dubya Bush, including during the controversial Florida recount episode.   

There was enough controversy that the voice of American Jesuits said Kavanaugh must withdraw his name from consideration.  Instead the blameless jurist made a tearful, snorting partisan speech accusing the Clintons of launching a well-funded dark money campaign of revenge against him — an unhinged speech that should have disqualified him.   To wit:

A calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. 

[2]

SPECIAL COUNSEL’S OFFICE:

b. Following the Obama Administration’s imposition of sanctions on Russia in December 2016 (“Russia sanctions”), did you discuss with Lieutenant General (LTG) Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, Erik Prince, or anyone else associated with the transition what should be communicated to the Russian government regarding the sanctions? If yes, describe who you spoke with about this issue, when, and the substance of the discussion(s).

c. On December 29 and December 31, 2016, LTG Flynn had conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about the Russia sanctions and Russia’s response to the Russia sanctions.

i. Did you direct or suggest that LTG Flynn have discussions with anyone from the Russian government about the Russia sanctions?

ii. Were you told in advance of LTG Flynn’s December 29, 2016 conversation that he was going to be speaking with Ambassador Kislyak? If yes, describe who told you this information, when, and what you were told. If no, when and from whom did you learn of LTG Flynn’s December 29, 2016 conversation with Ambassador Kislyak?

iii. When did you learn of LTG Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak’s call on December 31, 2016? Who told you and what were you told?

iv. When did you learn that sanctions were discussed in the December 29 and December 31, 2016 calls between LTG Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak? Who told you and what were you told?

d. At any time between December 31, 2016, and January 20, 2017, did anyone tell you or suggest to you that Russia’s decision not to impose reciprocal sanctions was attributable in any way to LTG Flynn’s communications with Ambassador Kislyak? If yes, identify who provided you with this information, when, and the substance of what you were told.

e. On January 12, 2017, the Washington Post published a column that stated that LTG Flynn phoned Ambassador Kislyak several times on December 29, 2016. After learning of the column, did you direct or suggest to anyone that LTG Flynn should deny that he discussed sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak? If yes, who did you make this suggestion or direction to, when, what did you say, and why did you take this step?

i. After learning of the column, did you have any conversations with LTG Flynn about his conversations with Ambassador Kislyak in December 2016? If yes, describe when those discussions occurred and the content of the discussions.

f. Were you told about a meeting between Jared Kushner and Sergei Gorkov that took place in December 2016?

i. If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, the substance of the discussion(s), and what you understood was the purpose of the meeting.

g. Were you told about a meeting or meetings between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev or any other representative from the Russian government that took place in January 2017?

i. If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, the substance of the discussion(s), and what you understood was the purpose of the meeting(s).

h. Prior to January 20, 2017, did you talk to Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, or any other individual associated with the transition regarding establishing an unofficial line of communication with Russia? If yes, describe who you spoke with, when, the substance of the discussion(s), and what you understood was the purpose of such an unofficial line of communication.

TRUMP:

(No answer provided.)

Don’t forget about Mr. Trump’s mother

Our classy president is on an aggressive jihad against poor, working immigrants from shit-hole countries.   This merciless war on people seeking a better life in America is another example of his violent repudiation of the realities of the past, in this case his own family’s history.   Trump’s mother’s noble ancestry, as told by Wikipedia:

Mary Anne MacLeod (Trump) was born in a pebbledash croft house owned by her father since 1895 in Tong on the Isle of Lewis.[2]  Local historians and genealogists have described properties in this community at the time as “indescribably filthy” and characterized by “human wretchedness”.[5][6] The outbreak of World War I weakened its economy and male population.[2]

Raised in a Scottish Gaelic-speaking household, Mary was the youngest of ten children born to Malcolm (1866–1954) and Mary MacLeod (née Smith; 1867–1963).[7] Her father was a crofter, fisherman and compulsory officer at Mary’s school.[2][3][8][9]English was her second language, which she learned at the school she attended until secondary school.[2]

 

As one account has put it, she “started life in America as a dirt-poor servant escaping the even worse poverty of her native land.”[8] Having obtained a U.S. Re-entry Permit—only granted to immigrants intending to stay and gain citizenship[8][9]—she returned to Scotland on the SS Cameronia on September 12, 1934.[13] She was recorded as living in New York by April 1935 in the 1940 U.S. Census.[13]

Though the 1940 census form filed by Mary Anne and her husband Fred Trump stated that she was a naturalized citizen, she did not actually become one until March 10, 1942.[3][8][9]

FredTrump1950-02.png

 

Check out the mustache on Frederick Christ Trump, in 1950, for fuck’s sake, five years after Mr. Hitler’s defeat in World War Two.   Talk about yer Nazi bastards…

As for Mary MacLeod Trump’s effect on her son, the future president:

As a parent she was more reserved than her husband.[2] Friends of the children noted fewer interactions with her than with him.[2] In appearance she was slight of build but was noted for an elaborate hairstyle, labeled in one account a “dynamic orange swirl”.[3] This bore a commonality with her son Donald, who once wrote, “Looking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother.”[3]

 

An Inconvenient Truth

Google:

Oscar-winning documentary about the environment featuring the unlikeliest of movie stars. Former presidential candidate Al Gore holds this film together as, in front of an audience and with few aids beyond photo slides, he explains how humans have messed up the planet. Gore issues an urgent warning on what must be done, and done quickly, to save the earth.      

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I really should make a new category, like homo imbecilis or something, for posts like this, which are essentially about the heedless stupidity of “The Wise Ape”.  This award winning film was screened everywhere thirteen years ago, clearly presenting a dire picture of our ravaged earth and setting out things that needed to be done, “and done quickly”.    That was in 2006, thirty six years after the first Earth Day rally, thirteen years ago.

It’s 2019.  Our latest effort to save our planet here in America was electing a man who claims the freedom-hating Chinese invented the hoax of Climate Change to screw American business, a man who appoints former fossil fuel executives to oversee the climate and diplomacy, a man who removes government scientific findings from the EPA (Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency) website, a man who mocks anyone who disagrees that he’s the smartest and handsomest (and sexiest) man ever to hold the office of president.  

A man who must have heaved a big sigh of relief yesterday when his former buddy Jeffrey Epstein woke up dead in his cell [1].   Bagpiper Bill Barr issued a statement, apparently they are going to mount a full investigation into Epstein’s convenient death, an investigation even more thorough than the exhaustive five day FBI probe that completely and totally exonerated Justice Kavanaugh of the sick, dangerous Clinton-orchestrated accusation of youthful, drunken groping.   Their boss — a man for the ages.

Homo imbecilis, amigos… 

 

[1]  A death as convenient as the perfectly timed death of Ken Lay, the Dubya Bush compadre who was going to prison for fraud connected to Exxon.  The only executive in many years poised to be actually imprisoned (actually, his codefendant Jeffrey Skilling, wound up serving 12 years).  Makes you think.

Kenneth Lee Lay (April 15, 1942 – July 5, 2006) was the founder, CEO and Chairman of Enron and was heavily involved in the Enron scandal, a major accounting scandal that unraveled in 2000 in the largest bankruptcy ever to that date. Lay was indicted by a grand jury[4] and was found guilty of 10 counts of securities fraud in the trial of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.[5]Lay died in July 2006 while vacationing in his house near Aspen, Colorado, three months before his scheduled sentencing.[6] A preliminary autopsy reported Lay died of a myocardial infarction (heart attack) caused by coronary artery disease; his death resulted in a vacated judgment.[7][8][9]

Lay left behind “a legacy of shame” characterized by “mismanagement and dishonesty”.[10] In 2009, Portfolio.com  ranked Lay as the third-worst American CEO of all time.[11] His actions were the catalyst for subsequent and fundamental corporate reform in regard to “standards of leadership, governance, and accountability”.[10]

Thank you, Jesus, for that fundamental corporate reform.  Ken didn’t die in vain…

Lay was one of America’s highest-paid CEOs; between 1998 and 2001, he collected more than $220 million in cash and stock in Enron and sold 1.7 million shares.[12][13][14][15] However, during his trial in 2006, Lay claimed that Enron stock made up about 90% of his wealth, and that his net worth at that time was negative $250,000.[16]

blah blah blah

As President, Lay flew Bush and his wife to Washington on an Enron corporate plane.[27] In December 2000, Lay was mentioned as a possible candidate for United States Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush.[28]

From 1989 to 2002, Lay’s political contributions totaled $5.8 million, with 73% going to Republicans, and 27% going to Democrats.[2] From 1999 to 2001, he gave $365,410 to the Republican Party.[1]

Trump’s Aktion at Koch Foods, Forest, Mississippi : Torture

We are torturing people again.  MAGA, man, as great as we ever were!

Lawrence O’Donnell shared a Mississippi television station’s report on the aftermath of Wednesday’s roundup of 680 low-paid Hispanic workers at seven chicken “processing plants” by ICE.   Democracy Now! also played a clip from the wrenching piece in their report on the president and Stephen Miller’s latest aktion against “illegals,” many employed by Koch Foods.  I hope outraged accounts of this video of the crying children of the workers dragged away get onto the front page of the New York Times and on Fox as well.  The largest ever ICE raid in a single state, history making.  Maybe WJTV’s short report will wake up the collective conscience of our citizens.

O’Donnell introduces the short clip, which he shares in its entirety, saying “Alex Love and his video crew found the victims of Donald Trump’s torture  in Forest, Mississippi yesterday.”     It is hard to watch the upset children who are seen in the short report, but the entire piece is only about a minute long.   The cruelty Trump is displaying toward these children and their parents is undeniably torture.   Watch this short piece , if you haven’t seen it, and tell me it’s not.

O’Donnell notes that the only people arrested in the coordinated ICE raids were undocumented Latino workers, not any of the employers who illegally hired them.   He opines that this is so because we now have Republican law enforcement, Trump law.   It’s hard to disagree with his assessment.   You can’t arrest the Koch Brothers, who own at least one of the seven raided facilities!    This is America, where liberty and freedom from government coercion rule!

O’Donnell’s entire nine minute report is important to watch (I know you readers rarely click on the links here, but click this one, I have it cued up for you).  He nails an essential element of the fundamental unfitness for power that animates our cruel 78,000 vote Electoral College president.  Trump is a man without any empathy for anyone.  He is a sadist who orders torture, and apparently enjoys the power to make others suffer.   The law is never an obstacle to Trump’s appetites.

Federal law and the Army Manual define torture as 

an act committed by a person under the color of law specifically intended to inflict physical or mental pain and suffering  

Torture, in spite of its rebranding and widespread use under Cheney and Dubya, is still against American law, against multiple treaties and international agreements America is a signatory to.  Torture is also an offense against common decency, even among modern day savages.   This president authorizes and encourages torture, along with numerous hateful practices that make it permissible in his world — racism, misogyny, xenophobia,  intolerance, contempt for law, scorn for due process (fairness), exemption from all law for those in his circle, the harshest application of the law for his many enemies.  His angry base apparently loves these kind of public displays of utter contempt by Trump. 

O’Donnell, in yesterday’s piece, is outraged by the in-your-face hypocrisy of the shallow, self-serving, empathy-lacking Donald John Trump, seeking a propaganda op for a campaign clip where he can show fake empathy to recent victims of gun violence as his administration is busily torturing children.   O’Donnell pulls no punches in laying out Trump’s utter lack of temperament (and experience) to make policies of any kind.

This latest incident of the public torture of children (only seen by Americans because “enemies of the people” aired it) was carried out at the very moment Trump was at an El Paso hospital for a photo op, pretending to care for people who’d been shot.   Although his party continues to block all reasonable restrictions on weapons of mass murder, Trump planned to pose with people wounded in two cities ravaged by recent mass killings.   Two cities mourning recent gun mass murders whose leaders asked Trump not to come.  All eight survivors of the El Paso massacre declined to be visited by the president for his staged moment of false empathy.   Prudently, Trump’s handler’s banned the press from the hospital, seeking to write the alternative narrative as they saw fit.

Those eight survivors of the mass killing fighting for their lives in an El Paso hospital may have been squeamish about being in the presence of the man who’d inspired the shooter to drive hours to kill Mexicans in the border city.  Some may have heard Trump attacking Democrats in Dayton earlier that day, on a similar mission of staged, fake compassion.   Perhaps they believed that the mass killing had been perpetrated by a violent coward fired up to kill by Trump’s nonstop hateful rhetoric.  The shooter’s manifesto  made reference to Trump’s constant memes: infestation, invasion, rapists, criminals, replacement.  It could have been written by Trump, with help from the slightly more literate Stephen Miller.  

Trump was at the El Paso hospital for photo/propaganda ops with victims of the shooting, to show how much he cares.   Not one of the eight consented to see him, so he stood in the hallway, in character,  nonchalantly lying for a cellphone video about the size of his enormous crowds of support in El Paso and how much of a loser former Congressman Beto O’Rourke was with his tiny crowd.  We can talk about this, what an obliviously lying braggart Trump is, instead of Trump’s deliberate infliction of torture on children.

The great David Bromberg paused late in his show at Town Hall a few years ago, during the falsely sold war in Iraq (Operation Shock and Awe), and started musing about what has happened to our great nation, a democracy that once gave hope to the downtrodden of the world.   A man a few rows behind us, in a military uniform, stood up and demanded that Bromberg cut the politics and just play his music.  Bromberg stopped, looked at the man, thought for a second and said “we torture people now?”   Then he did as the protester requested, he continued playing, his point made.

Obama famously admitted “we tortured some folks” (the only “accountability” moment for any American involved in the recent hideous, inhuman, illegal practices)  so now we can simply get back to torturing children and their parents in the spirit of Dick Cheney’s “Dark Side” and American Exceptionalism?

We torture people now?   Seriously?

A lot to keep up with … Koch edition

The “news” shit storm comes at us hard, fast, furious, disgusting and delivered  directly to our pockets, with little notification beeps to inform us of the latest.   The instinct to turn away from this hurricane of spattering fecal matter is hard to resist and we resist that instinct at our peril.  I commonly respond to “what have you been up to?” with “trying not to go insane.”   I keep looking as the disgusting squadrons of turds are propelled like an endless fleet of bombers dropping their awful payload.  

The only way to counter the massive disconnect we are confronted with in today’s politics by sound byte is to make larger connections.   Nothing happens in a vacuum, context is crucial.   The constant aggravating ruckus makes it difficult to see the bigger picture, by design.   Meanwhile, the abused earth itself veers toward the premature end of its life cycle as good people despair.

Here’s a quick piece on how all roads, in the radical right, lead to the Koch network.  Determined, extreme right wing “liberty lovers” the Kochs have played an outsized, skillful, ruthless, long game.   Until recently this long game was played secretly, though lately the octogenarian Charles and David Koch are taking their bows in public.  After more than forty years of savage, determined fighting they have largely won everything they dreamed of — moving American democracy close to a permanent one-party far right government that will protect their glorious liberty in perpetuity.   

How do the Koch’s have anything to gain from Trump’s clampdown on immigrants?

We learn that 680 immigrants were arrested in a massive roundup in Mississippi yesterday.  They were grabbed at work, working in  Koch Foods’ chicken “processing plants,”  working for the Koch Brothers.   How does this help the Kochs?   As Democracy Now! reported today:

The arrests targeted chicken processing plants operated by Koch Foods, one of the largest poultry producers in the U.S. Last year, Koch Foods paid out $3.75 million to settle an Equal Employment Opportunities Commission class-action suit charging the company with sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latino workers at one of its Mississippi plants. Labor activists say it’s the latest raid to target factories where immigrant workers have organized unions, fought back against discrimination or challenged unsafe and unsanitary conditions.

source

“Labor activists say it’s the latest raid to target factories where immigrant workers have organized unions, fought back against discrimination or challenged unsafe and unsanitary conditions.”

Why did the Kochs hire so many illegals to work in their factories, slaughtering, dismembering and packaging chickens?   Who knows, probably a strictly practical business decision.   The Kochs hate unions, and discrimination laws, and health and safety rules for food production.   Recall that Libertarians like the Kochs don’t like regulations of any kind.   Such restrictive laws strangle freedom!

For more on the talented, well-born brothers, their background and the source of their family fortunes and beliefs, listen to the great Jane Mayer, interviewed shortly after her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, came out.     

Check out the interview, it is fascinating, and horrifying.

The Grey Lady takes a bold, principled stand

There was apparently a shitstorm from readers after the NY Times ran the neutral-sounding headline “Trump  Urges Unity vs. Racism.”    The Times heeded this outraged critique and changed the headline to read: “Assailing Hate but Not Guns”.  Way to go, New York Times, paper of record.   First draft of history and all.

New-York-Times-Headline-Change-Trump-Speech-Shootings-with-border-e1565102571711-620x434.jpg

As always, America’s finest news source, The Onion, said it best:

‘New York Times’ Amends Recent “Hero Trump Disarms Would-Be Shooter’ Headline.

…“We were wrong to imply that President Trump courageously rushed into an active-shooter situation inside a Washington, D.C. gas station, held the gunman in a chokehold until he dropped his weapon, and then provided first-aid to casualties, thus single-handedly preventing more bloodshed. We deeply regret intimating that the shooter realized the error of his ways and denounced his bigoted beliefs after a tough-love conversation with Mr. Trump. Readers will see that these statements have been retracted from the second edition.” At press time, the new headline, “Trump Gives Speech” had been changed to “Unifier-In-Chief Provides Hope To Fractured Nation.”

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