Category Archives: History and Politics

Hannah Arendt speaking to this moment

Nothing is more dangerous to nature and humanity than an inability to think.    This inability to think is deliberately, mindfully fostered by those who make the most money, and seize great power, when  people can’t think.  Without critical thinking it is impossible to choose well between complex alternatives, to accurately identify problems in the first place, to protect ourselves from predators. 

A populace that can’t think is ideal for manipulation, many of them will be ready to tolerate or commit atrocities for an incoherent “cause”.  The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, as Francisco Goya the painter observed.   Here’s Hannah Arendt, who clearly identified this central villain of human history, from a few generations ago.  

American children raised watching TV, and devices, see more than 10,000 hours of advertising, tailored to their baby minds, before they learn to read. Today attention spans are shattered, brains and social interactions rewired, by constant smartphone notifications from people trying to sell something, push some idea, inoculate the “user” against critical thinking by amplifying their own prejudices and likes and silencing opposing ideas. The algorithms that cater to our personalized prejudices are making a small number of neuroatypical men unlimited billions of dollars as they emotionally and intellectually immiserate billions of vulnerable human beings.

We are at the “mercy” of psychopaths at the moment. Only we, by acting together and thinking as critical problem solvers, can stop these merciless, insane bastards who would have everything. They will own everything even if it takes destroying the earth itself, the biosphere, all the animals and all but a handful of specially selected humans who will live on militarized luxury islands, in outer space or in well-furnished spas deep under the ground. Fuck those putos.

Thousands of Trump ICE arrests dismissed

Kyle Cheney crunched the numbers, in a recent article in Politico, and found that federal judges ruled against ICE in 10,000 cases brought contesting the illegal tactics frequently employed by Trump’s federal goon squad. ICE has won about a thousand times, a 10-1 skew in favor of the law. The use of force, detentions, and conditions of detention, and denial of constitutionally guaranteed rights were deemed illegal in 90% of the cases.

The federal circuits are unaccountably deadlocked, in regard to ICE policies. There is a divide between The Rule of Law and MAGA/Project 2025 over the ICE question. That question is whether Trump’s masked goon squads need to follow the Fourth Amendment, be truthful to judges, present actual evidence or if their executive branch agency really has to honor the 9-0 Supreme Court affirmation of the writ of habeas corpus (the right to go in front of a judge to contest the reason you’re being held in prison). The Federalist Society Six will eventually have the final say about the criminally insane president’s right to unilaterally suspend Fourth Amendment and habeas corpus rights, and trial court judges in several districts have their hands tied in the meantime by Appellate decisions.

Criminal charges brought by Trump’s DOJ are routinely dismissed, by judges and juries, for lack of evidence of a crime. A number of his attempted vindictive indictments were rejected by grand juries. His DOJ has repeatedly committed frauds on the court and prosecutorial misconduct, including jury tampering. Top DOJ officials routinely go on the air to declare Trump’s enemies guilty before they are even indicted.

In a court of law, evidence is required to prove a claim, particularly when the State intends to deprive a person of their liberty or their life. Evidence that there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed is required to get a judge to sign a search warrant. Evidence is the factual basis for any legal claim. Vexatious litigants like the petulant, pampered, professional victim in the White House hate this requirement of “evidence.” Evidence is as abhorrent to a compulsive liar as the truth itself. Judges require evidence (outside of the Federalist Six, of course), as does our justice system.

If you are Trump, you send lawyers to shop for a cooperative judge to give you a search warrant to seize 2020 ballots in a county that voted for the Democratic candidate, without evidence of any kind of crime — and well beyond the statute of limitations. You illegally appoint unqualified acting state’s attorneys to commit hanky panky to get indictments from grand juries, claiming to have slam dunk evidence they don’t have. Some are even forced to admit prosecutorial misconduct in court.

When it comes to Trump’s crimes, the same principle applies in reverse. A search warrant, legally obtained and based on evidence of criminal possession of documents and obstruction of the investigation (both of which turned out to be true) — a witch hunt by a weaponized DOJ engaging in “lawfare”! Trump is entitled to billions in compensation for being the target of a weaponized DOJ, IRS, the electorate, etc. So are all his wealthy “friends” and those violent loyalists willing to risk death for his lies, they are all entitled to millions.

Trump’s DOJ was recently found to have maliciously prosecuted Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man they illegally rendered to the torture prison in El Salvador. To save face, after defying a federal judge’s order to turn the airplanes around, and claiming for months that they had no jurisdiction over El Salvador (the dictator of El Salvador acknowledged these US prisoners were living in cells rented by Trump), they prosecuted Abrego for a non-crime they had no evidence he committed. They did this after publicly vowing that IF he ever got back into the US because some traitor judge ruled he had to come back, they’d put him on criminal trial for felonies they falsely assured the public he was 100% guilty of. That case was dismissed with a rare finding of “malicious prosecution”. Trump’s psychotic lackies are now determined to deport Abrego Garcia to one of several African war zones the State Department classifies as highly dangerous. Abrego has agreed to be deported to Costa Rica, who has indicated they’d take him, but the DOJ is determined to send him to South Sudan, ASAP.

Trump’s Department of Justice has lost the “presumption of regularity” judges always gave government lawyers when they appeared before them. There is nothing regular about a DOJ routinely hiding evidence, lying to judges, making public statements about the guilt of the parties they haul into court. Never have we had an acting Deputy Attorney General tell his lawyers that they have to be ready to tell judges “fuck you” if they ask inconvenient questions that could impede the president’s illegal agenda. Erez Reuveni, a former DOJ lawyer, quoted criminal weasel Emil Bove, now federal appellate Judge Bove for life, to that effect. Reuveni was fired for admitting to the court that he had not been given any evidence to present to the court. In fact, he’d been instructed to defy the judge by one of the president’s most aggressive mongooses (no offense to mongooses, but look at this motherfucker:)

I keep thinking of one of the hundred or so cases Trump and the RNC brought (and lost) before the 2020 election to restrict voting by mail and the use of drop boxes (recall this was in the middle of the hpandemic, voters who believed Covid was highly contagious and deadly skewed overwhelmingly anti-Trump). This federal case, Trump 2020 v. Boockvar, against numerous election officials in Pennsylvania, caught my eye. The media was not reporting on it (it was one of many such frivolous lawsuits) so I followed it on PACER, the online database of federal cases. I was frustrated that the judge, a 43 year-old Trump appointee named J. Nicholas Ranjan, was not dismissing such an amateurishly filed case presented with zero evidence of its mostly incoherent claims. Week after week I followed this case. Judge Ranjan granted a motion to compel Trump and the RNC to submit evidence supporting its many bogus claims. Plaintiffs delivered a box full of screenshots and printouts from FOX, NewsMax, Breitbart, der Sturmer and other reliable legal authorities. I waited for Ranjan to dismiss the case. He didn’t, not for some time. But it was well worth the wait. The judge made a record that ensured he could not be reversed on appeal when he finally dismissed the case.

These two quotes are from the Kyle Cheney article linked above:

“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” wrote U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee based in New York, in the case of a man whose lawful status was revoked after ICE arrested him. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”

“Despite hundreds of similar rulings in this and other courts resoundingly in favor of the ICE-detainee petitioners, ICE continues to act contrary to law, to spend taxpayer money needlessly, and to waste the scarce resources of the judiciary,” said U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III, a George H.W. Bush appointee from Pennsylvania.

Senator Andy Kim was pepper sprayed today by masked agents outside of  infamous ICE detention center, GEO Group’s private Delaney Hall, in Newark, New Jersey. The detainees are on a hunger strike over conditions there that have been found to constitute torture — insufficient, expired food, unclean water, lack of medical care, abusive treatment. The other day the governor of New Jersey was prevented from entering to inspect the facility. This is the same hellhole that refused admission to the mayor of Newark, and then let him in before he was briefly and illegally arrested when he left, on orders, presumably, of the highly qualified Alina Habba.  The melee that followed led to assault charges (still pending) against US Congress member LaMonica McIver.  Apparently she assaulted an ICE agent’s elbow with her eye and her stomach during a chaotic shoving match between elected officials and masked goons licensed to kill and gas with impunity. Evidence, I suppose, will eventually be presented in the case against her. I suspect it will be similar to the suspect evidence judges have rejected in many other fraudulent Trump DOJ vindictive prosecutions.

As for Trump’s Stephen Miller-led deportation Gestapo, in 2018, under Trump, there were six detainee deaths in ICE custody. In the year and a half the malevolent creature has been back in power: 61 acknowledged deaths in ICE custody (dying detainees are often rushed to hospitals to take their deaths off the books of ICE, but 61 deaths in detention in 2025 and the first half of 2026 are confirmed on ICE’s own website..

Fuck these fuckin putos.

THIS IS AN ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPH — no Photoshop, no AI, NO COVFEFE!!!

GOP without the masks

A few shorts, showing the real agenda of the David Duke-supported front man for White Evangelical Christian Supremacy (no Papists need apply, Leonard Leo). You simply write history the way you want it to have been and burn any book that contradicts your preferred story. The Confederate plutocrats never lost the Civil War, it just took them a century and a half to morph into the force we are confronted by today, with the aid of many obsessive billionaire oligarchs and their corporate avatars.

And this kind of open corruption and fraud is perfectly acceptable in today’s oligarch friendly GOP:

Finally, that $1,776 million slush fund — in “settlement” of a baseless $10,000,000,000 “case” against his own executive agency (IRS) that was about to be dismissed as frivolous (Trump was both plaintiff and defendant and attempting to make a deal for a taxpayer funded $10,000,000,000 for himself) — to pay off an army of violently insane J6ers and rabid top Trump asslickers, at Trump’s absolute discretion as irrefutable “head” of this new Commission of Weaponized Peace and Crime Punishment Covfefe, is the mad turd’s biggest, most openly irrational and lawless fuck you to America yet.   Commissioners, who can be hired and fired by the boss with or without cause, may include: MAGA Mike Johnson, Sidney Powell, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Stewart Rhodes, Enrico Tarrio, Rudy Giuliani, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Ron DiSantis, Alan Dershowitz, Ghislaine Maxwell, Vladimir Putin and, as commissioner “emeritus,” the Honorable Hermann Goring.

Are you still hesitant to call people who hate democracy this much, are this racist, lawless, cruel, destructive and as prepared to weaponize government, unleash violence (and pose as persecuted victims of “weaponization”), while they attempt to seize absolute, unquestionable control of a one-party state by any means necessary, Nazis? These fuckers have allocated billions to pay for a vast network of lucrative, privately owned, for-profit, concentration camps. Can I make the connection any clearer between two extremist parties run 100% by the will of their clearly insane leader?

Lying is cool again in MAGA-land

If you want something badly enough, and have no scruples about lying, it must be exhilarating to land your dream job after lying your ass off. Lying in a public service setting is only a crime if it can be weaponized against an enemy of the current president and cost that hated enemy tens of thousands of dollars, or more, defending herself in court against baseless charges. Isn’t that right, Pam?

The other day Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a business partner of Jeffery Epstein well after his 2008 conviction, flanked on his way to his closed door non-sworn testimony by a dozen big, imposing men (to protect him from the press) apparently lied his corrupt ass off while sweating through his suit. This putz is the same guy who, while publicly supporting Trump’s unconstitutional tariffs, also bet millions that the tariffs would be struck down, and made millions for himself and his sons, when the Supreme Court eventually ruled Trump’s tariffs illegal. So what if he lied about his close association with a blackmailing sexual predator he claimed he hadn’t seen since 2005, so fucking what?!!! What about TRANSEXUALS and caravans of raping, murdering, disease-infested, blood-poisoning, pet dog and cat eating brown ILLEGAL ALIENS?!!! What about BLACK VOTERS?!!!

Look at Justice-for-Life Boof Kavanaugh, a poster boy for anything goes while under oath, if you’re loyal to your winning team. FOX news was despondent after Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford got done testifying about the inebriated teenaged Kavanaugh tackling her, feeling her up and trying to get his hands inside her bathing suit before he apparently passed out, rolled off her and she was able to get away from him. The talking heads on FOX, and I remember watching it in real time, concluded that the Kavanaugh nomination was cooked. It certainly looked that way to me too.

Kavanaugh, a longtime rightwing Federalist Society partisan (most of his partisan legal writings while a legal advisor to Dubya, whose election he’d helped to secure in Florida, and even his later legal and judicial writings, were withheld from the Senate Judiciary Committee/American people [1]) had been a zealous young advisor to highly principled right wing activist/special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. He had strongly advised Starr to give Bill Clinton no break during his under oath deposition, so that they could eventually trip Clinton up when he got tired, and get him on perjury. After melting down under hard questions himself, when Kavanaugh flashed entitled rage and snarled at one of his questioners, Senator Amy Klobuchar, his allies on the Senate Judiciary Committee quickly called for a time out.

Boof presumably cried it out behind closed doors, was comforted by Lindsey Graham and others, probably spoke to Trump during the break, The president would presumably have asked him if he was a “fucking pussy” or a “real man” and how much he really wanted the job, if he was a pussy. When the hearing resumed, Graham came out wildly attacking the commies who were trying to defame and destroy this good, Christian man, this churchgoing father of girls.

Meanwhile, the lies Kavanaugh told under oath were quickly turned into truth on the internet. When asked what “boof” meant, next to his Georgetown Prep yearbook photo, he lied. Boofing is when your frat bros put a tube in your upturned anus and pour vodka or another pure spirit directly into your colon. Apparently produces quite the buzz. Kavanaugh replied, lying, that it was a reference to his flatulence. Embarrassing, yes, but not as bad as being nicknamed Boof for taking a tube of whiskey up the ass to impress your friends and get shitfaced in the exclusive $60,000 a year high school he attended.

Kavanaugh also lied about the term Devil’s Triangle, claiming it was a “drinking game” (for underage drinkers…), when it was an apparent reference to his desire to have sex, or claim to have had sex, with a young woman named Renata, known to be amenable to such things. Operatives, from an IP address in the same building where Kavanaugh was being questioned, instantly updated the Wikipedia entry for Devil’s Triangle to indicate it is, indeed, just what Kavanaugh said it was — an innocent, uh, drinking game he liked to play while underage at Georgetown Prep — and not a claim, probably also a lie, of youthful sexual conquest.

Judge Kavanaugh’s lies were deemed immaterial, just like his lie that Roe v. Wade was “settled law” supported by strong precedent, until he voted with Alito, Gorsuch and Coney Barret to overturn it, based on the learned wisdom of a seventeenth century British witch hunter. Literally. (Note, Mike “Lock Her Up, Q-Anon, I Take the Fifth” Flynn’s lies about his undisclosed work for foreign governments and illegal contact with the Russians were also deemed “immaterial” by master rightwing piece of shit AG Bill Barr.)

Which brings me to corporate balls and strikes umpire Chief Justice John “Arbitration Clause” Roberts, longtime enemy of Black Americans’ right to vote. Callais , and its unprecedented shadow docket enabled immediate effect, was Act III in destroying the Voting Rights Act (VRA) once and for all, legislating unappealably from the bench. Talk about “activist judges.

Act I was a 2013 case involving racist Shelby County, Alabama (suing the nation’s first Black AG), in which Roberts struck down a unanimous 98-0 vote in the Senate, a 390-33 vote in the House and President George W. Bush calling the VRA, at a signing ceremony, “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” Roberts thus substituted his judgment for every elected representative of the People, ever senator and member of Congress, along with the president who appointed him to the court. With four fellow corporatist rightwing justices, he ruled, 5-4, suck it, y’all, the Court hath spoken. Roberts also lied in his decision, claiming the vast majority who voted for it in Congress, after looking over a record 16,000 pages of current data, had relied on 40 year-old data to reauthorize the law that fixed a century long problem. A pox on this smiling corporatist shithead:

Speaking of shitheads, here’s some AI by the guy who flew an AI fighter jet, maskless at high altitude, to dump an endless river of his AI excrement on a large crowd in New York City who had marched in a No Kings protest. Fuck that puto.

[1] Let us only focus, for a minute, on the historically liberal classification of Kavanaugh’s written record as a lawyer and judge.   90% of his legal writings were withheld from scrutiny during the disgracefully partisan confirmation process.   Classified, top secret, like his president’s financial information — and like which rightwing billionaire paid off Kavanaugh’s jumbo credit card debt, or the massive ad buy to get him confirmed, right before his confirmation hearings started.

This shroud of secrecy over Kavanaugh’s partisan record, dating back to his law student years as a hard drinking Federalist Society zealot, and the mysterious wiping of a large credit card debt, contrasts starkly with the full records disclosed for every previous nominee, for each of  Obama’s recent appointees.    Kagan and Sotomayor’s full writings from their judicial and legal careers were given to the Senate Judiciary Committee (and Obama had a terrible record on transparency, in spite of his many inspirational speeches about it).   Less than 10% of petulant partisan Kavanaugh’s record was available for scrutiny by the body rubber stamping the zealot’s rushed confirmation by a one vote, party line majority.

source (citing himself…)

Nazis don’t care how much they need to humiliate themselves in the fight to ruthlessly dominate everyone else

It is an abomination, in a democracy (or anywhere else, for that matter) for masked, heavily armed “law enforcement” agents to use violence, including deadly violence, against civilians for any reason, or no reason. Totalitarian regimes rely on heavily armed, unaccountable goon squads, often in disguise, ignoring all law in their pursuit of the regime’s enemies, real and imagined. Every such regime has had its Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, Death Squads, Secret Police — American slavery had its well-armed slave catcher militias, and later its Ku Klux Klan, those brave defenders of southern white women’s virginity wore masks, and outnumbered their unarmed victims ten to one, just like today’s ICE agents.

Under Trump 2.0, ICE, armed for military engagement and funded up their masked wazoos, is that violent goon squad. They can murder American citizens, on video (sometimes ones they shoot themselves while firing bullets into a woman’s face through her car window) with no consequences for themselves. They are protected because they are carrying out the will of the Leader. The vast majority of Americans are appalled at this shit, particularly the murderous variant on Trump’s constant bullying of ordinary citizens and others. But Nazis always double, triple and quadruple down. They intend, by doing this — in your fucking face! — to break the will of their victims to resist. Here’s Heather Cox Richardson:

In February, G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers crunched the polls and found that reforms to ICE are extraordinarily popular. Ninety-two percent of Americans want ICE agents to wear body cameras, for example, and 80% wanted an independent investigation in the killings of Good and Pretti. Morris noted that between 60% and 90% of voters—a supermajority that includes Republicans and a majority of Independents—say they want “transparency, accountability, rules, and oversight” for federal agents.

Today, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump’s White House advisor on border security, Tom Homan, assured Republicans that mass deportation is coming and that the administration will flood immigration officers into jurisdictions that aren’t cooperative. Michael Williams of CNN reported that Homan told Republicans angry that the administration is not deporting enough people: “You ain’t seen sh*t yet. This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming.” He added: “You’re going to see more ICE agents [than] you ever seen before.”

The administration’s disregard for the will of the American people also shows in its approach to its war on Iran. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: “The operation is over. Epic Fury, as the president notified Congress, we’re done with that stage of it. We’re now on to this Project Freedom,” the attempt to open the Strait of Hormuz. The 1973 War Powers Act required the president either to get congressional approval for the war or to withdraw the troops within 60 days of notifying Congress of a military action. That deadline was May 1.

Now, according to Rubio, the war is now in a different phase: opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Trump’s military adventure.

But Iranian officials have responded to Trump’s Project Freedom with military strikes against both the vessels attempting the transit and other Gulf countries. This afternoon, Trump backed down.

source

The invertebrate lickspittles who serve their demented, compulsively lying leader must resort to counterfactual narratives and bark threats and absurd justifications to stay in their precarious positions of power. Good Catholic Tom Homan “we’re going to round up MILLIONS, y’all ain’t seen shit yet!” and Little Marco Rubio “Epic Fury is over, we rebranded, like the corporate ass-rapers we base our company’s policies on, to Project Freedom, so we get to restart the 60 day clock on the War Powers Act, psyche!”

They are vomiting the quiet parts out loud, because to Nazis, there is no means too humiliating if the end is possible absolute power, revenge on all critics, the violent silencing of dissent and, ultimately, severe, humiliating punishment for all enemies. Anyone, like myself, for example, who routinely compares these fucking Nazis to the German Nazis who were forced to fight a war they insisted the Jews started, with terrible results for everyone involved.

On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.

source

“A matter of political controversy”

For a Trump nominee to concede that the violence on January 6, 2021, a riot that shut down a joint session of Congress about to make Biden’s victory official, was not a patriotic Day of Love, and perfectly reasonable “legitimate political discourse” is to betray his/her/its deranged master. No Republican is allowed to say that January 6 was anything bad, at worst it can be called a “matter of political controversy.” You know, we can agree to disagree about what we disagree about, right? A talking point, no matter how incoherent, is good enough in the corporate America of 2026, when it comes to blindly partisan lifetime appointees to the federal bench.

The same goes for the legitimate election of Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election. “He was inaugurated…” is the only acceptable answer to the question “was Joe Biden elected president in 2020?”. It is political suicide in Trumpworld to concede that Biden won an honest and fair election (that would make Trump, history’s greatest winner, a loser!). You certainly don’t want to get the most vengeful compulsive liar in American history mad at you. So you choose your evasive words carefully, or repeat the ones your learned colleague just farted out.

In a similar vein, The Confederacy, of course, never lost the Civil War, a war of Northern aggression which was not fought to protect slavery but over states’ rights — to have slavery in their own states. The Nazis never lost World War Two, or caused the deaths of tens of millions, they just had to lay low while the generations who knew their crimes in detail died off. When enough time goes by everything in the past can be seen as “a matter of political controversy.” Everything inhuman is GREAT AGAIN, for anyone still gaga for MAGA. In the land of the desperate, faith beats reason every time.

War is (lucrative as) hell

War is hell, except to those happy few who profit from the atrocities.   It takes billions of dollars a day, as we learned recently, to bomb the shit out of a far away land, to destroy its civilian infrastructure, kill its leaders and make it submit to our demands, whatever they may be.  

The Nazis were the first modern regime to target civilians for death and terror, to demoralize and torture the population to advance its war aims (he says, pulling this dramatic factoid directly out of his ass and qualifying it with the hazy word “modern”) [1].   The Japanese did the same in places they invaded, with swords, to hellish effect, as did the Americans in that horrific world war, mostly by air.  The targeting of civilians is a war crime under the international laws enacted to prevent another World War Two style mass murder event.  Killing an unarmed civilian, a surrendering soldier, blowing up a hospital, a school, a water treatment plant, bridges, power plants, any non-military target, threatening to do any of these things, all war crimes. The devil, as always, is in the details.

What happened after the US violated international law, (its president also defying the US Constitution, in contempt of Congress and the electorate) and rained unprovoked death and destruction on Iran?   That remains to be seen, but since the US withdrew from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (Reagan — he didn’t want to take shit for illegally mining the harbor of the new communist state in Central America) there will be no enforceable criminal sanctions for the American killing of 160 girls at an Iranian school targeted by AI, blown up by the world’s most sophisticated Air Force.  

Likewise for the people Trump and Hegseth lethally droned on boats in the Caribbean, people who were eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets!  Wait, those are Haitians in Ohio JD Vance lied about…  The people we murdered in those boats a thousand miles from our shores, over a hundred of them now, are TERRORISTS, yes, that’s right, narco-terrorists who were, in fact, killing Americans by the millions, literally, as Pam Bondi testified, tens of millions, an invading army, and under emergency anti-terrorism powers, the US president can legally order their murder. 

Maybe not legally, but who is going to stop him?  Obama did this to a US citizen (and his son, a week later), under the Dick Cheney Doctrine, on the president’s sole determination, based on the best available intel, designated the father a terrorist, a pirate, hostis humani generis, outside of the realm of law of the civilized nations, reduced them both, by armed drone, to chopped meat. No need for criminal charges or due process of any kind for either of them.  The killing of the boy was said to have been a mistake, but there was never an apology to anyone about it.   “Fun fact”:  Trump’s special forces killed the boy’s little sister, Nawar, a few years later, in a controversial, illegal raid in 2017. Nawar was eight when she was shot to death [2].   War and its horrific excesses continue in a straight line, soon to be drawn by robots. The history of war is always written in the blood of the meek, the ordinary and the decent, for the benefit of the profiteers, folks untroubled by torturing some folks, or seeing them slaughtered.

You have Israel mass killing in Gaza, letting their “settlers” murder with impunity on the West Bank. Israel is not the only nation doing this in the world right now, but Israel is doing it. Now they are bombing southern Lebanon, fighting a terrorist menace. A matter of national survival, Israel says. On the other hand, you have more than a million innocent Lebanese civilians, driven from their homes, many of those homes destroyed by bombs, countless injuries and many deaths. Blowing up the bridges they need to cross to return to the rubble of their homes is a war crime. As my grandfather used to say, when I caught him being a hypocrite, “call me ‘pisher'”.

Israel has not been prosecuting anyone for killing non-Jewish civilians, though they’ve passed a law allowing Palestinians to be executed in Israel for certain crimes. This law doesn’t apply to Jews because Israel is not, no matter what its antisemitic and arch Jewish detractors (such as myself) might say, an apartheid or otherwise racist state.     

Damaging a statue of Jesus while depopulating southern Lebanon will not be tolerated by the world’s most moral army, the army of the sole democracy in the region, America’s beloved ally. It makes Israeli soldiers look anti-Christian, which is not a good look for an army of Jews supported by faithful. well-funded Christian Zionists. Depopulating southern Lebanon is a different matter entirely, as is the killing of unarmed Palestinian paramedics coming to the aid of the injured, murdered and buried in a mass grave, along with their ambulance, by an Israeli bulldozer.

As is the use of the passive voice to describe what happened when at least one Israeli shot two Palestinians to death near a school in the occupied West Bank. Got to admire how this shit is done, and how deftly the Grey Lady turns those headline phrases.

[1] I “stand corrected” by robotic intelligence:

[2] Nawar al-Awlaki, the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed during a U.S. military raid in Yemen on January 29, 2017, which was the first military operation authorized by President Trump. The raid resulted in the deaths of several civilians, including Nawar, and raised significant controversy regarding its execution and the loss of innocent lives. Wikipedia NBC News

Civilian deaths

The U.S. military initially denied there were any civilian casualties, but later declared it was investigating if they occurred.[37] The Pentagon later confirmed that civilians, including women and children, were likely killed in the attack.[47] A Yemeni government official in Al Bayda Governorate said on January 31 that at least eight women and seven children (ranging in age from 3 to 13) were killed.[48] Human Rights Watch reported on February 24 that at least 14 civilians, including nine children, were killed in the operation.[10] The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), a London-based NGO, found that the operation went “dreadfully wrong” and that, according to local villagers, 25 civilians, who were not members of AQAP, were killed; this included nine children under the age of 13, with the youngest being a three-month-old baby. The BIJ listed the names and ages of the dead children. Beside the nine children killed, the BIJ reports that one pregnant woman was also killed.[36] The civilian deaths appear to have been a result of the aerial gunfire from U.S. support aircraft, according to a CENTCOM statement.[49] source

Great lesson on the Strait of Hormuz

David Feldman, in his incomparable style (I started to say ‘inimitable’, but his distinct delivery isn’t hard to imitate), uses maps to lay out the supreme idiocy of Trump and Hegseth’s loud assertions that they won the war against Iran overwhelmingly and are only negotiating now to… uh, they completely and utterly won, decisively, destroyed Iran’s ability to wage war with unprecedented lethality and violence in the name of all that is holy (and the bossy f-ing pope be damned),  which is why they have agreed to a ceasefire and are negotiating terms with a nation that, whenever it wants to, can stop all oil tankers from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

It is clearly the lügenpresse [1], the lying globalists who control mass media (you know who he’s talking about…) lying about the most perfect war, more perfect, even, than Mr. Trump’s perfect call asking Ukrainian president Zelensky to “do him a favor” if he wanted the arms shipment Congress had already approved for Ukraine’s defense against Putin’s invasion.   The stinking rat who made that secret phone call public, and lied about the transcript, which was perfect (PERFECT!),  is going to get prosecuted pursuant to Tulsi Gabbard’s referral, and that will happen toot sweet, says Kashyap Patel, who will now be subject to being deposed in the idiotic defamation case the angry asshole brought against The Atlantic for smearing his good name (I know, what good name?).  It’s all the fault of the lying goddamned commie mass media that needs to be brought to heel, clearly.  These public servants are all perfect, the most perfect ever to serve this good nation.  PERFECT YOU SICK FUCKING LYING TREASONOUS MANIAC BASTARDS!!!!!

[1]

Total exoneration

Donald Trump has never been totally exonerated in his long life of being endlessly, unfairly persecuted, no more than he has ever been held accountable for any of his various crimes and misdeeds. He has defeated justice many times, by delay, bribe (e.g. Pam Bondi in Florida, $25,000 to her campaign if she’d drop case against his fake university) obstruction, vexatious litigation, using government resources to prosecute vendettas, making threats against judges, jurors, witnesses, calls to violence, getting others to cover up his many crimes.

The second most corrupt Attorney General of modern times, Bill Fucking Barr, lied when declaring that the Mueller report “totally exonerated” Trump when Mueller wrote, in his report:

Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment [that Trump did not act with corrupt intent and did not commit felonies]. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. . .

. . . The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

I know we live in a post-fact age, but consider this:

Any president who leaves office, illegally taking with him with boxes of classified and top secret papers, although presumed innocent until convicted, is a criminal suspect until investigated and exonerated of wrongdoing. Especially if, like Trump, he claims he can declassify them with his mind, that he doesn’t have them, that he returned them all already, that he’s willing to show the government that he doesn’t have them, then gets one of his lawyers to lie that no more classified documents are in his possession, and so on, rope-a-doping the authorities for a year and a half. When a federal judge signs a search warrant, specifically describing the evidence of crime being sought and the exact places where they are likely hidden, that’s not an “illegal raid”. There is nothing more legal, under our law, than the execution of a search warrant adhering strictly to the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

The punchline; they find some of the classified documents the president illegally took when he was dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. They find boxes of the documents he claimed he didn’t have, in a bathroom, in a ballroom, in his sock drawer, the ones he lied about having (or selling to Putin, Mohammed bin Bonesaw, et al).

He got away with clear violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice because he had a corrupt judge, appointed after he lost the election he claims was stolen from him, throw the case out, on the shabbiest of legal theories (tip of the cap to Clarence Thomas) after dragging her feet for over a year ruling on routine motions.

Consider Trump’s long campaign to reverse the results of the 2020 election, an election he was told, and knew, he lost (‘how did I lose to that piece of shit?’ he asked one of his lackies after losing the election). 60 baseless law suits, pressure on various state officials, a lying $50,000,000 ad campaign (payments for ‘Stop the Steal’ ads stopped on January 6, don’t you know?), slates of fake electors, threats to state officials, an illegal plan to get the DOJ to contest results in states he lost, a plot with his “friends” in Congress (“The Greenbay Sweep”) to throw the final certification into the House so he’d be declared the winner, increasing madness unto epic fury leading up to the passionate Day of Love on January 6, 2021, when he whipped up a crowd he knew to be armed to go to the Capital for a bloody riot the RNC later rebranded as “legitimate political discourse”. We all saw that legitimate political discourse unfold on TV, along with the president who sent the mob to disrupt the joint session of Congress and watched the assault on TV for over three hours, and how it led to 140 Capitol and D.C. policemen hospitalized with grievous injuries sustained during the legitimate political discourse. That he beat being prosecuted for his multi-tentacled treason and shitting on his oath to defend the Constitution, by delay, obstruction, threats, violence, etc. does not mean he was exonerated for jack shit.

Now Trump’s fully weaponized, selectively prosecuting DOJ, led by his criminal and impeachment attorneys, has fired everyone involved with either prosecution against their boss. At a far-right event the other day, Nazi consigliere Todd Blanche proudly announced this purge was complete. Fair is fair. Come to kill me, I kill you, how you like that, asshole?

Here’s one of the “righteously” fired DOJ attorneys, J.P. Cooney, with a short summary of how guilty Trump was of both of these disqualifying criminal conspiracies. Cooney is now running for Congress in Virginia.

HUNTER BIDEN!!!!

Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.

As part of the fund-raising effort, Affinity’s representatives have already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invests the proceeds of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves, two of the people briefed on the discussions said. PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has formed close ties with Mr. Kushner and the Trump administration. . .

. . . The efforts show the blurring of the lines between public service and private profit-seeking during Mr. Trump’s second term [1]. Only a few weeks ago, in his role as Mr. Trump’s “peace envoy,” Mr. Kushner met in Geneva with Iran’s foreign minister. The U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran began shortly after those meetings concluded without a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Kushner, 45, also spearheaded the Trump administration’s successful efforts to extract hostages from Gaza and negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in an attempt to end their war.

In January, Mr. Kushner traveled to Davos, Switzerland, as part of the official U.S. delegation at the World Economic Forum, where he unveiled the Trump administration’s plan for a “New Gaza.” source

I know, what about Hunter Biden and the Biden Crime Family? Why didn’t Merrick Garland prosecute him for his fishy ties to a Ukrainian oil company? THE DOJ WAS WEAPONIZED, OBVIOUSLY.

Meanwhile, Jared’s epically furious father-in-law is selling the glorious game of the already won, hole-in-one, home run, slam dunk Iran War to his gamer fanboys. USA! USA!!!!

[1] Note the classic deployment of the passive voice, blurring the line of how the line has been blurred and by whom, if anyone. Later on, though the Times correctly puts Kushner’s unofficial title of “peace envoy” in quotes, it makes the ambiguous statement that the pinhead Kushner “spearheaded the Trump administration’s successful efforts to extract hostages from Gaza and negotiated between Russia and Ukraine in an attempt to end their war.” You’ve got to love the even-handedness of the Grey Lady in giving Kushner his props. Our way of life, and our current excellent condition on the world stage and here at home, would not be possible without her graceful, line blurring contortions of fairness in the name of someone’s version of the truth.