Category Archives: History and Politics

Know your enemy

The billionaire reactionaries behind fearsome  MAGA figurehead Donald Trump have commissioned a 900 plus page manifesto which is only now beginning to get attention.   It is called Project 2025.  It is the blueprint for an America where the clock is turned back to around 1919 (before women could vote, the year of Red Summer  when violent reprisals by lynch mobs against returning Black WWI veterans skyrocketed).

Here is a short summary of some of its plans, put together by Robert Reich.

Naturally the Lying Orange Polyp has tried to distance himself from the plan.  He claims to know nothing about it. 

It turns out that 23 of the 37 authors of the reactionary wet dream were members of his administration.   Here is a short list of several of them.

Of course, it is no surprise that America’s Greatest Liar would lie about it.  He claimed not to know who his supporter David Duke was.  He claimed to know nothing about the violent militias he later called on for his Hail Mary attempt to violently stay in office on January 6th.   He claimed never to have had sex with a porn star he paid $130,000 to, in a complicated scheme to avoid detection, to remain silent about their brief, weird sexual liaison.  He claimed never to have had sex with the woman who, in his telling,  flirted with him in a department store who he then raped, and was found civilly liable for raping (untrue, merely sexually assaulting, as he will point out).   After losing two defamation cases she brought against him, he continues to call her a liar.   There are 30,000 plus more examples from his four years in office.

The sickening surprise is the corporate media’s exclusive focus on the supposedly disqualifying age of a candidate three years older than the Orange Polyp.  The New York Times today leads with several headlines calling Biden’s fitness to run into question:

Resilience Has Fueled Biden’s Career. But So Has Defiance. (He has repeatedly defied NY Times requests for an exclusive interview)

A Senate Democrat Says Biden Must “Do More” to Assuage Voter Concerns. (Joe Manchin still a Democrat? Kirsten Synema?)

Election updates:  President Biden spoke at a Philadelphia church, as calls continued for him to quit the race. (see, e.g., NY Times editorial calling for him to be forcibly removed as candidate)

As New York Times headlines continued to hammer home, Biden has always been defiant, a Democratic Senator says he’s still not convinced Biden can be president, calls continue for him to quit.

Any mention of Trump? Funny you should ask, it’s the very next headline.

The process of choosing a running mate for Donald Trump has created a new roster of rising Republicans.

Any word about Trump’s fitness to be MAGA’s retribution, carry out revenge on Rosie O’Donnell and others on his enemies list, bolstered by preemptive Supreme Court immunity for criminal acts he deems necessary for “bold and decisive [official] action”? A peep about Project 2025?

Nah!

Hours wrestling with relentless bots…

Computers and their ilk operate on a yes/no, black/white, on/off system. They tolerate no mistakes, you must input exactly what they require, fair enough, their entire operating system is binary, based on yes or no. Much like our modern corporate entities in that way.

In this black and white machine world I felt like I was arguing with Alito over the meaning of “Originalism”. Alito: it’s whatever fucking I say it is, heretic. Me: you previously said all your judicial decisions are based strictly on the original intent of the framers. Alito: fuck you, cuck.

I spent several frustrating hours setting up a required payment plan, jumping through one hoop after another on a third party website, revealing personal and financial information, in order to publish my second post on Substack. Two hours of full-throated Tourretic cursing I hope the neighbors weren’t around to hear. I finally complied with every request, in the form they required, with the help of the lightning fast, generally helpful Substack bot.

Anyway, here’s today’s post, recycled from a recent one here. Check it out

Happy Independence from tyrants day

We live in a nation that declared its independence from a tyrannical king (he ruled by Divine Right so it was impossible, by definition, that he could be a tyrant) by stating the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” So far so good.

Now, 248 years later, a small group of wealthy men who are more equal, more important, wiser, more deserving, infinitely more powerful, have loudly declared their own self-evident truth: power and wealth equals moral superiority and the right to impose that superiority on all inferiors.

Since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that racist separation of people is inherently unconstitutional, these enraged, supremely entitled fuckers have been on the warpath against “activist” judges expanding constitutional rights. They have created their own powerful network of orthodox, doctrinaire, true believing activists united into a movement by a set of “conservative-libertarian” principles and the many well-funded influential “think tanks” that promote them. This network includes the Federalist Society, a judicial appointment machine, which has six of their fiercest proven culture warriors on the Supreme Court.

Not long ago it would have been unthinkable that “originalist” justices who can find no support in the original writings, debates and intent of the sacred Founding Fathers, no support in the Constitution or in judicial precedent, would create new binding law wholly out of their belief that their unappealable interpretation of the will of Jesus Christ and their mandate to protect vast wealth are, justly or unjustly, the last, final, unappealable verdict on all issues in democracy.

These proven activist “conservative-libertarian” members of a doctrinaire, political/moral ideologically-driven judicial fraternity have the last word in what is lawful and what is not. The scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, a public protection outfit created by well-known Marxist Richard Nixon, do not get the final word on what is harmful to humans, the Federalist Society does. Women and girls have no constitutional right to bodily autonomy. The president, if he conspires to commit crimes with his official advisors in the room, may never be prosecuted if his VP, AG or Chief of Staff is one of his co-conspirators in the crime now protected, by six Federalist Society judges, as an official act — the Federalist Society will now decide if a given president is acting officially when he kills a political rival. Abortion is not healthcare, there is no environmental emergency, democracy is whatever we say it is, women and girls are not a protected class of citizens, go to hell libtard cucks, atheists and feminazis, we are overturning decades of totally unfair and sick radical Left activism!

July 4th is a day to take heart, my friends. The colonists’ rebellion against the will of the infinitely more powerful King of England, who rightfully owned the colonies, was launched with little hope for easy victory. The cause looked doomed early on and for most of the war of independence.

American authoritarians have been hard at work for seventy years to bring about this historical moment when they could turn back the clock to the days when insatiable white Robber Barons were great — no regulation of polluting industry, no labor laws, no bodily autonomy for females (even raped ten year-olds), no laws against the human right to be racist, even violently so, no fixing the environmental crisis we face, unlimited assault weapons for angry, even insane, white men, no voice of the masses of American voters in deciding matters of public urgency, no more “majoritarian tyranny”!!!

I say to my fellow Americans today, on the anniversary of the launching of our always delicate experiment in democracy and striving toward human equality: fuck those fucking putos. This is a moment for courage and true patriotism, all hands on deck.

In this perilous moment, faced with choosing problematic democracy or American Nazism, we must all fight to preserve the freedoms we have and recover the ones recently taken from us by six unelected members of a radical right judicial fraternity who were selected by their fellow fanatics (and five of six appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote) for their proven devotion to their anti-democratic cause. Fuck those fucking putos.

Stay strong and don’t lose your focus. Happy July 4th!

Who runs this country, really?

Top news, baby, as of 3 pm today. CNN, Clinton News Network, needs a clever new translation of its acronym reflecting its key role in MAGA. The New York Times has gone full Nazi, even if unintentionally. The polls don’t lie, even if they are often completely wrong. Biden OLD, OLD, OLD!

If you think highly influential corporate persons do not have easily bruised feelings too, in addition to a ruthless bottom line, you are sadly mistaken. USA! USA!!!

A frustrated citizen, shouting into the silent darkness

My fourth attempt to reach the Senate committee that oversees the operations of the US Post Office.

Federal Voter Suppression Scheme, under color of law, in full effect

fourth attempt to reach your committee

Partisan megadonor Louis DeJoy preps the federal agency he heads to suppress millions of targetable ballots against the candidate he’s made massive donations to.  There is a quorum of governors in place to replace him (two vacancies being Tubervilled?).  Not even their Election Mail Committee seems concerned about the inexplicably long nationwide delays in mail service ahead of what is expected to be an unaccountably close election. 

I would like to send you the letters I sent to the USPS Board of Governors with details about this terrifying reality that nobody, including the Senate committee that oversees the Post Office, seems at all concerned about.   HOW DO I DO THIS?

Is there any way to get a response to my query?   I have had only silence, and an automated reply, from my two senators, my congressman, your committee.

Is democracy worth fighting for, or is the radical right’s position that “majoritarian tyranny” has put this failing country in a fix only autocracy can save us from the more intelligent assessment of the challenging moment we face as a nation?

I decided, and I think wisely, not to add “what the fuck is wrong with you useless fucking fucks? Are you all already preparing to transition to full Nazi rule, you goddamned mercenary mother abusers?”

I also didn’t trouble them with the damning fact that within two months of DeJoy’s appointment in June 2020, he had already ordered 671 high volume mail processing machines dismantled.  He also ordered the removal of mail boxes across the country (guess which zip codes were affected). 

Trump refused, in August 2020, as the pandemic raged, to release funds ($3,000,000,000, approved by Congress) needed to get the Post Office up to full speed before the election and ensure the timely delivery of ballots cast by mail. Instead DeJoy’s post office sent letters to millions of voters informing them that their mail in ballots might not be available in time for them to vote by mail. The Post Office Inspector General apparently did not find that DeJoy, who predicted additional Post Office cutbacks and massive delivery delays before Election Day, had done anything unethical, or maybe not.

Here is the Postal IG’s report. The Inspector General concluded that there was no ethical conflict with the Trump megadonor and his wife, Dr. Aldona Wos (Trump’s nominee to be US Ambassador to Canada) owning between $30,100,000 and $75,000,000 in assets in Postal Service competitors like UPS and trucking company J.B. Hunt as DeJoy met all ethics requirements regarding disclosure, divestment and recusal from decisions in which he may have a conflict.

Of course Trump’s Postal IG found that. [1] Why wouldn’t he, or if you prefer, why would he? Recall Trump’s imbecilic retraction of his statement about Putin meddling in the 2016 election. The world’s most prolific liar said, with the straightest of faces, that he’d obviously meant exactly the opposite of what he said, as one does.

It turns out that the Trump “megadonor”, who is nowhere near a billionaire (net worth a puny $600,000,000) gave a piddling $2,500,000 to Trump and the RNC in the last election cycle or two. Here is the website for Louis Dejoy and Aldona Wos’s charitable foundation.

[1] From the IG’s report:

On July 21, 2020, and August 3, 2020, DeJoy provided written memoranda to the Board of Governors (the Board) and Ethics recusing himself from participating in matters involving the remaining 14 company holdings identified by Ethics. In the memoranda, DeJoy also instituted a screening process to avoid participating directly or indirectly in any matters involving those identified holdings. DeJoy took these preventative measures within the three-month period required by federal ethics regulations.

Trump megadonor Postmaster General has the ability to halt delivery of millions of mail-in ballots from selected zip codes

While most people I know are crushed by despair at the seeming inexorable grip Nazis have on our problematic, vulnerability riddled democracy, and fretting about Biden’s widely propagandized inability to continue as a highly effective president [see video below for a reality check], I am taking action. When Nazis are preparing to come for you, don’t stand there worrying aloud about how strong, brutal, contemptuous and undefeatable they are, find every way in your power to stop the weak-minded, true-believing, goose stepping fanatics.

As I wrote to several nonresponsive elected officials I voted for, and today several media outfits (and friends in various states and electoral districts to send to their senators and representatives):

I know I can’t be the only American voter aggravated that Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy is still in charge of mail delivery.  He has routinized long, random, inexplicable delays in mail delivery and has the ability to target individual zip codes to not deliver mail from, in a nation where 43% of votes in the last presidential election were cast by mail.  A small number of uncounted ballots in strategic districts equals Electoral College victory.  DeJoy has the ability to make sure tens of millions of likely anti-Trump votes are never received and never counted.

Attached is my hair on fire letter (re: ability of Trump megadonor Postmaster to indefinitely delay delivery of and void millions of mail in ballots) to the governors of the US Postal Service.  I send it to you in hopes that you can help get this outrageous situation public attention and scrutiny, and that democracy can then take the needed steps to combat this insidious voter suppression plan being carried out under color of law.

I’m alarmed that it’s not a major news story, not even being reported on:  

Partisan megadonor preps the  federal agency he heads to suppress millions of targetable ballots against the candidate he’s made massive donations to.  There is a quorum of governors in place to replace him (are the two vacancies being Tubervilled?).  Not even their Election Mail Committee seems concerned about the inexplicably long nationwide delays in mail service ahead of what is expected to be an unaccountably close election.

Blah, blah, blah. I feel as old as Biden looked as he shambled out onto that CNN “debate” stage the other night to face down our own American Hitler, with no moderator present. You object to the comparison to Hitler because there are no death camps? Give the Orange Turd a chance, he’s already got plans drawn up for massive concentration camps. Hitler didn’t open the death camps overnight. Took almost ten years in power. Give MAGA time! Auschwitz wasn’t built in a day, boys and girls. 

Here’s the inarticulate dotard Biden, pretending not to be senile. Take heart, and as Mary Trump wisely said the other day, if you’re in a panic and feeling desperate, don’t make public statements until you calm the fuck down:

Nazis 6 Democracy 3, again

When I say Nazi this is what I mean: a supremely ambitious person with a doctrinaire set of beliefs, the advancement of which, and their unappealable imposition on everyone else, is justified by any means necessary including violence and lawlessness. These obedient mymirdons derive their intoxicating power from an all-powerful leader whose will and actions in accordance with that will may not be questioned, except on pain of death.

After all, Führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft (“the Führer’s word has the force of law.”)

NY Times posts one letter critical of their pro-Trump editorial

After noting that the Times editorial board’s “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race” is still on its homepage, you peruse the letters to the editor.    You have to read a few letters that agree with the NY Times position that the Democrats must create a process to make Biden step down before you get to this one, followed by several more agreeing Biden must step down (a sampling the Times no doubt considers a “preponderance of the evidence”).  The NY Times, at its best:

To the Editor:

So let me get this straight. A presidential candidate who is a convicted felon gives a debate performance that is often incoherent, consists primarily of obvious lies, and includes a refusal to unconditionally commit to accepting the results of the presidential election, and your editorial is filled with histrionic calls to remove the other guy who’s run the country ably and ethically for almost four years because he had an off night on the stage?

You really should have consulted with your theater critics, who can school you in the many ways the run of the show ultimately matters more than the blips in previews. Your failure to focus your outrage on Donald Trump’s truly bizarre and bewildering statements in favor of such an overwrought and shortsighted response to Mr. Biden lets the real danger to our democracy off the hook.

Judith Hamera
Pennington, N.J.

Nicely done, Judith.

And this nice, self-evident bit from one of our nation’s greatest winners, a billionaire:

Profile in trembling cowardice

I have many bones to pick with the New York Times.  It is often hard to tell, based on their moral suppleness in presenting propaganda and spin right next to plain, old-fashioned fact, how the Times editorial board differs from that of any Rupert Murdoch rag.   The Times ran dozens of articles, including, and especially, today, about questions over Biden’s age (81) and now, the predictable “we told you so” editorial.  

Here is their latest, about which, in spite of the Grey Lady’s vast influence and my vexation over its complicity in right-wing spin, I am also philosophical. The essential status quo embracing spinelessness of the journal of record just got demonstrated again. Here’s a sample:

As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.

Let’s parse a little bit of this bullshit.   

Reckless gamble?  More reckless to leave this helpless, doddering, ancient fossil on the ballot after his bad night in a TV debate format his handlers never should have signed on to (no fact checks, no moderator intervention, one minute to respond to Trump’s many lies) than to create a process to oust your candidate, make a last minute change, admitting your incumbent president/candidate is unqualified for reelection, in spite of his many accomplishments in the face of unified MAGA resistance? 

Democratic leaders better equipped (to acquit themselves better in a 90 minute televised campaign battle called a debate?) — which ones?   Does this ability qualify them to defeat Donald Trump and the reactionary billionaire backed MAGA movement?

No reason for the party to risk not changing their candidate in the weeks before their convention?   Just because there is no process for it and the very few times it was tried, this close to an election, the replacement candidate was trounced, just because it would show hysteria and cowardice, and confirm MAGA propaganda– while also guaranteeing Trump’s election, to do so now?

Another morsel:

Ending his candidacy would be against all of Mr. Biden’s personal and political instincts. He has picked himself up from tragedies and setbacks in the past and clearly believes he can do so again. Supporters of the president are already explaining away Thursday’s debate as one data point compared with three years of accomplishments. But the president’s performance cannot be written off as a bad night or blamed on a supposed cold, because it affirmed concerns that have been mounting for months or even years. Even when Mr. Biden tried to lay out his policy proposals, he stumbled. It cannot be outweighed by other public appearances because he has limited and carefully controlled his public appearances.

The president’s performance cannot be written off as a bad night?

It can’t be outweighed (not by his record, the respect of his fellow democratic leaders worldwide, the many good decisions he continues to make, his bearing on the world stage) by other public appearances because he has limited them in the past?

The Grey Lady finally spoke some plain, indisputable truth, buried toward the very end of a piece urging Democrats to create a process to force their candidate to voluntarily step down:

It is a tragedy that Republicans themselves are not engaged in deeper soul-searching after Thursday’s debate. Mr. Trump’s own performance ought to be regarded as disqualifying. He lied brazenly and repeatedly about his own actions, his record as president and his opponent. He described plans that would harm the American economy, undermine civil liberties and fray America’s relationships with other nations. He refused to promise that he would accept defeat, returning instead to the kind of rhetoric that incited the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.

Followed by:

Democrats who have deferred to Mr. Biden must now find the courage to speak plain truths to the party’s leader. . .The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.

The courage to cower, the clearest path, create a process, indeed… so simple when laid out with the authority of the NY Times editorial board. 

Conclusory, opinionated, cowardly, stupid, ill-reasoned, ahistorical, serving not democracy but Trumpism.  Aside from that, and making references to propaganda promoted in its own pages as proof (dozens of articles about Biden’s alleged decrepitude and semi-senility) this shameful editorial is a very fine piece.  Read it for yourself.

Grey Lady Editorial Board