It’s shocking to me that a newspaper like the New York Times can print a sentence like this with a straight face (see below). Either their editorial standards have slipped, they truly don’t give a shit about the facts, they are trying to please people on the extreme right, as well as their more distracted liberal readers, or they truly have a Nazi bent somehow.
Read this bit from a recent article about MAGA reliance on a now debunked informant statement in their rush to find a crime or misdemeanor to impeach Biden for and let me know what you think about the word choice “payback for Democrats’ treatment of … Trump” rather than something about partisan retribution for the impeachments brought to try to hold a rogue president, now doing his damnedest to dodge criminal trials for 91 felony counts in four jurisdictions, accountable.
By the way, former DOJ States Attorney Scott Brady, the Trump loyalist who brought the form 1023 to the attention of the public, a guy who resigned one month into the Biden administration, (as he had previously refused to serve under Obama), appears to have knowingly lied to Congress not long ago about the reliability of what turned out to be Putin’s propaganda fed through an informant now in prison and under indictment for lying to the FBI about millions in bribes supposedly paid to Hunter and Joe Biden by a Ukrainian oil company.
Wake up Merrick Garland, a six-year investigation into Hunter Biden’s dick, in the interest of appearing scrupulously fair, means that you have to at least investigate the complicity of fucking MAGA asshole Scott Brady. You already have the letter from Jerry Nadler of the House Judiciary Committee asking for the investigation. Just fucking do it.
The four female members of the court, while joining the 9-0 vote against a state’s right to disqualify an insurrectionist from the ballot — if that insurrectionist is running for federal office — wrote that the five men (and I use the term very loosely) had gone too far, had overreached.
Then the court ruled 9-0 that no candidate for federal office can be disqualified as an insurrectionist unless the MAGA-crippled Congress enacts a constitutional law to enact the disqualification section of the otherwise self-executing 14th Amendment.
The court also scrupulously avoided any discussion of the Colorado Court’s finding that for purposes of the 14th amendment Trump is an insurrectionist, and as such rightfully disqualified under the second Civil War Amendment (and arguably the single most important one in the Constitution for modern democracy).
Doing the math we realize that the 9-0 judicial overreach (to once again favor a Republican, in this case also a Nazi) hung by one vote, that of Black Klansman and corrupt disciple of Antonin Scalia (being on the Supreme Court places me above ethics, you contemptible fucks), the billionaire-funded husband of Ginni, a powerful far-right player in Trump’s insurrection.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the unethical, unimpeachable Clarence fucking Thomas, the well-paid swing vote in the decision that holds every member of Congress who participated in the plans to overturn the election on January 6, 2021 (as well as the rioters themselves, should they seek federal office) immune from any consequences under the Constitution, unless the Congress Trump currently controls makes a new law to enforce an amendment that never needed a law to enforce it before. Mazel tov, Nazis and Klansman, you have a lot to celebrate today.
If your ideas are unpopular, because they represent only one percent of the population’s interests, you cannot count on democracy to implement these ideas. You have to think outside of the democratic box. You propagandize through supposedly non-partisan “think tanks” that you fund, support extremist candidates, create an extremist judicial fraternity and stack the courts with well-trained judges steeped in your unpopular worldview. Then it is simply a matter of having these courts impose your values on everybody, as long as these courts have the final word on what is law and what is justice.
Heather Cox Richardson, as usual, nails it:
Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
As he did in striking down enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act simply by ignoring inconvenient facts, like many sessions of vigorous debate in Congress, thousands of pages of data considered, ongoing attempts by states with a history of racist laws to disenfranchise voters and suppress the vote, the unanimous Senate vote to re-authorize the Act, the near unanimous vote in the House, and the Republican president’s warm public embrace of the Act as he signed it into continued law, Roberts made the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment a matter of Federalist Society opinion about whether an insurrectionist is eligible for federal office, absent a specific, constitutionally sound law passed by Congress.
In the Voting Rights Act case the holding was 5-4: the Voting Rights Act worked beautifully to eliminate racially discriminatory voter suppression and no longer needs enforcement. In this Colorado decision to disqualify an insurrectionist, textualists and liberals apparently agree that Colorado had no right to remove Trump from their ballot, no matter what their factual findings may have been, and therefore that no state may remove Donald Trump, or any candidate for federal office, from the ballot, absent Congress passing a new law to enforce section three of the 14th Amendment.
Leave out a few key facts, ignore the central one (Trump planned, advertised, aided and gave comfort to participants in a riot that shut down the government in a violent attempt to keep him in power), reframe the narrow issue that you are looking at, et voilà, you can pull any politically expedient holding you would like out of your corporate “balls and strikes umpire” ass. You can even broker a deal to make it a unanimous 9-0, including the spouse of a powerful participant in the attempt to overthrow the election of 2020.
The Court declines to intervene in many cases because of their Political Question Doctrine and professes, under federalism, to defer to states on abortion, criminal law, family and business law, voting rules and procedures and many other matters, but reaches the conclusion, without touching the finding that the candidate in question, at minimum, aided and abetted insurrection, or Colorado’s evidence-based finding that he did, that this political question is one they can unanimously decide, bindingly, on behalf of all fifty states. The plain text oftheirsacred originalist Constitution, and the expressed, well-documented intent of the framers, be damned.
What I don’t understand is how this dog shit decision was 9-0. This time nobody on the Court has a word to say about the stench?
As long as the only value in your culture is corporate profit-driven wealth, you are going to get this kind of dog shit front page “reporting” from even the most reliable of profit-driven corporate media.
1) Only Biden “superfans”, presumably isolated intellectuals and dreamers, think that tens of millions of under-educated voters supporting an insane, vindictive, racist, misogynistic fraudulent populist autocrat is crazy.
2) Polls, which are so frequently wrong as to be dismissible just by virtue of being political polls, show that many non-Biden Superfans believe Trump policies (ban Muslims, separate migrant children from families, no Covid restrictions, overturning women’s right to bodily autonomy, huge tax breaks for top 1%, etc.) are better than Biden’s (none of which they can identify).
Other breaking New York Times stories:
Biden old; Trump beating him in polls; Biden stutters; Trump makes hilarious joke of own dramatic cognitive decline, polls find; Biden appears feeble, hypochondriacal; Trump’s inexhaustible rage and love for fast food is contagious; Biden trails Trump, another poll finds, Superfans mystified.
Most people are so concerned with being normal [1], working and playing in the recognized world of reward and achievement that everybody exists in, that when people start breaking down from the stress, even when they become fragile as glass and barking mad, they will insist that they understand everything perfectly and that it’s other people who are fucking insane. You can trust me on this, or you can take a breath and look around.
[1] normal- for the thoughtful details of what this means in practice, see The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate.
Project 2025, written by the far-right ideologues of the influential Heritage Foundation, sister think tank to the rightwing judicial fraternity the Federalist Society, The Institute for Humane Studies, The American Legislative Exchange Council and dozens more funded by Charles Koch and every fascist billionaire in the country, begins with these words:
It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.
see footnote
Winning elections, at this apocalyptic moment in human history, against the “Radical Left” already in control, due to the irreversibly rising tide of ignorant majoritarian hordes, is simply not enough to preserve their sacred values of unlimited wealth and uncheckable power for the privileged.
Also, they cannot win honest elections anymore and they know this very well. Hence, Project 2025, a plan to go for all the marbles, once and for all.
Charles Koch learned in 1980 that his “libertarian” beliefs could not win elections, at best, his brother and his presidential running mate were barely able to get one percent of the national vote, which was appropriate since those were the only interests they represented. The far right’s project, seeing they could never prevail through fair democratic elections, became to capture the religious extremist vote, and the vote of every angry, lost soul, to make the vote look competitive, and to seize power by extra-electoral means.
Brilliant, privileged, covetous men like Charles Koch understood their ideas would never win elections, being of benefit only to a tiny fraction of the top 1% of Americans. So they began the long game of Making America Great Again (for Robber Barons, Monopolists and families of inherited wealth) by funding strong rightwing candidates in local elections, taking control of state houses, gerrymandering to keep control of state legislatures, churning out political philosophy and propaganda from “think tanks,” generating model legislation like Stand Your Ground and other gun protection laws, anti-voting, anti-labor, anti-environment and anti-abortion laws and bringing carefully constructed ideological lawsuits that would be heard in captured federal courts and ultimately decided by graduates of their far right, religious extremist judicial fraternity, the Federalist Society.
Their bigoted, polluting, oligarch-empowering ideas cannot win democratically, so their project is to destroy democracy with a very firm-handed minority rule, enforced by carefully vetted loyalists to a strong leader. They are authoritarians, or, as I always see it, regular ambitious folks always ready to go full Nazi on the citizenry.
Heather Cox Richardson lays out the connection between Putin, Trump, the forces of global authoritarianism and its angrily righteous partner, religious extremism, tying together recent events and a little bit of recent history, which is worth noting again, including this:
The use of Russian disinformation to destabilize democracy in the U.S. looks much like the information warfare Russia has used to establish Ukrainian leaders that worked for the Kremlin. It was the ouster of one of those leaders, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2014 Maidan Revolution ten years ago that prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine later that year. Yanukovych won office with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort, who advised and, briefly, chaired the Trump campaign in 2016, when it weakened the Republican party’s platform plank that supported arming Ukraine against Putin after his 2014 invasion.
Seeding lies about corruption that came from Russian-linked Ukrainians was central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment: his phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky demanding Zelensky announce an investigation into Burisma and Joe Biden’s son Hunter was part of an attempt to create dirt on the Bidens. That call happened after Trump’s advisor Rudy Giuliani went to Ukraine, where he talked to “an active Russian agent,” according to the FBI. FBI agents warned Giuliani that he was a target of Russian disinformation.
That poison has now spread from Trump’s rogue team in the White House to the Republican Party itself, which has apparently been carrying water for Putin at the very center of our government.
The whole piece is here, very much worth reading in its concise entirety, and thinking about as we prepare to preserve democracy and prevent Project 2025, the billionaire funded plan to make Bill Barr’s theocratic worldview the permanent government of our nation of immigrants.
Trump was impeached the first time for making an improper political demand as he held up American arms and extorted the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He told him on a perfect call that many people heard, and that Bill Barr subsequently tried to hide, that all Zelensky needed to do before Trump would release military aid to Ukraine was announce an investigation into Biden corruption, and that he and his allies in Congress would do the rest. No need to actually open an investigation, America’s Greatest Liar assured Zelensky, the main thing is just to announce it, on American television, so we have a big Benghazi-type scandal to run with before the election.
Zelensky turned out to be a man of principle and a skillful politician with a bit more mettle than Trumpie counted on. Barr was still Trump’s most ardent and capable legal enabler and, after trying unsuccessfully to bury all records of the perfect call, he appointed a diehard rightwing DOJ official (who had refused to serve under a Democrat but came back to be appointed by Trump) to dig more deeply into the scandalous sounding matter that Rudy, Igor and their crew were trying to stir up in Ukraine.This DOJ investigation led to FBI informant Smirnov (now in prison awaiting trial for peddling Kremlin lies to the FBI), who took the bull by the horns and planted the entirely false Russian story that both Putin and Trump wanted out there about Biden’s corruption and bribe taking from corrupt, lying, Nazi Ukraine. Then they could let Trumpie’s myrmidons in Congress do the rest. And they have been doing the rest relentlessly. Incoherently, much of the time, but with characteristic blustering Nazi-style vigor.
Recall that after losing the election in 2020, incessantly transactional Trumpie told the DOJ just to announce that the election had been corrupt and leave the rest to him and his henchmen in Congress. You remember that one, right?
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump sought inside help from the Justice Department to execute his campaign to reverse the 2020 election, according to evidence presented by the House Jan. 6 committee Thursday.
“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump implored top Justice officials in a Dec. 27, 2020, conversation memorialized in then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue’s contemporaneous notes.
Counting on the disgusted exhaustion of people of average intelligence to prevent them from keeping a thousand hideous details in mind and the angry credulity of people of below average intelligence, the Nazi machine grinds on, doing exactly what it always does — marching behind the insane, iron will of the infallible narcissistic Leader who believes that he alone has the right to decide who gets rich, who gets lynched and who goes to the death camp with Rosie O’Donnell, Mike Pence, Bill Barr and the rest of the gutless pigs who have defied, insulted, betrayed and misunderestimated [1] him.
[1] With a tip of the yarmulke to eloquent language stylist George W. “Dubya” Bush
The longest lasting relationship in Donald Trump’s life appears to be his strong bond with Russian strongman, murderer and war criminal Vladimir Putin. The KGB began cultivating Trump as a Useful Idiot back in the late 1980s when they found out he had presidential ambitions and that he was supremely vulnerable to flattery.
Just call Trump a genius and you become his best friend at the moment, do this decade after decade and you’ve made a lifelong friend of a man so insecure that he spends most of his time bragging about his (inherited) wealth, his brilliance, the size of his enormous, virile member (contrary description by Stormy Daniels is just another hateful, jealous lie!) and his claim that the laws don’t apply to someone as great and special as him.
On the second anniversary of Putin’s old-style total war invasion of a neighboring democracy, which he justified as liberating Ukraine from Nazis, and in which he called for the killing of Ukrainian government officials who had thrown out his puppet Yanokovich eight years earlier, Trump‘s handpicked Speaker of the House, a cherub faced hard right Christian fundamentalist theocrat who loves the taste of the big orange guy’s ass, has lawmakers on vacation.
Every effort to keep the Ukrainian military armed and fighting Putin has been blocked by the Trump/Putin MAGA faction in the House. Every MAGA member of Congress takes their orders directly from Trump, as evidenced over and over, and the rest of the GOP is too spineless and afraid of violent retribution against them to vote with the hated Democrats, even after they announce they’re not running for reelection.
No money has been allocated for the continued defense of Ukraine by Ukrainians, even as Putin continues to kill his political rivals and anyone else who disobeys him. These billions of dollars in American military aid, by the way, go directly to American munitions manufacturers, and the people that work for them.No humanitarian aid to the people being slaughtered, and starved in Gaza, in the Israeli far right’s righteous Jihad against terrorism.Trump simply doesn’t care about Muslims, or anyone else, frankly.
Global Nazi types like Steve Bannon, and white Christian Dominionists, assorted fascists and haters of every stripe are united beyond national borders. They slyly use the word “globalist” to refer to the time honored slur against Jews, who they claim control the world to the extreme detriment of good Christians everywhere. This popular Q-Anon-like theory is fleshed out in the 120 year old Czarist forgery The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, still a brisk international seller. But today globalist more accurately describes a worldwide coalition of authoritarians and religious fundamentalist bigots, Putin, Trump, Xi, Orban, Modi, Netanyahu and their ilk. Their propagandists energetically wield their high-pressure fire hoses of excrement, spraying random shit everywhere to keep everybody disgusted, distracted, overwhelmed and trying to clean clingy fecal matter off of themselves.
And so today, after the second anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we find ourselves talking about the latest instance of Christian Dominionist Idiocy, Jesus Christ ruling in Alabama (according to a theocratic state Supreme Court) that a fertilized egg is a child. Ukraine is under renewed siege by a modern day Stalin, or Hitler, take your pick, close to 30,000 Gazans are dead as the rightwing/religious coalition in Israel continues its righteous, civilian slaughtering War on Terror, and the US government can offer no help to Ukrainians, Gazans, or anyone else, blocked by the will of one man, Putin’s best ally in the West.
Meanwhile Trumpie hawks a line of Chinese-made gold spray painted sneakers, brags about his luxuriant head of golden hair and praises a leader like Putin who can boldly kill anyone he fucking wants to. And lines up mega-wealthy fascists to pay the almost $500,000,000 he now owes to New York State. Elon Musk was his guest just a few days ago, but there’s also Putin, or Mohammed Bin Salman. There is no shortage of immense piles of shit with billions of dollars to burn to serve their own rabid egos, who might, someday, want Trump to do them a favor, though.
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