Category Archives: History and Politics

The SAVE MAGA Act

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

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

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

Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Script for ICE/CBP reforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

And for my follow-up email:

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

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

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

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

Source

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

When psychopathy is normalized

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

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

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

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

two from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

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

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

Criminally insane

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

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

Fascist enterprise graphically laid out by the Grey Lady

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

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

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

Third Reich stuff

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday afternoon, Trump went on the attack.

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

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

source

Back to the soulless JD Vance: 

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

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

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

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

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

Truth Anti-social, Nazis will be Nazis

After a member of unelected Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller’s deportation goon squads shot a peaceful woman, Renee Good, in the face, three times, at close range, just before Trump myrmidon Kashyap Pramod Patel shut local authorities out of the investigation of the cold-blooded murder [1], Kristi Noem, proud killer of puppies, issued this lying statement, on social media, of course.

“ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”

Drug prices, as we all can plainly see, as we were promised, have also dropped between 1,300% and 8,000% since the Glorious One took office again (I myself got a check for almost $48,000 from a pharmaceutical giant, or so I’m told), so we have no reason to doubt anything in ICE Barbie’s account. To call her a piece of shit is an insult to excrement. Speaking of stinking, greasy, fly-encrusted turds:

Trump jumped in with his own fact-free post lying that the shooter had been run over: “I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe that he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

Heather continues:

That both DHS and Trump posted false accounts of the shooting even as there are four videos circulating that reveal those accounts to be lies shows they no longer are making any attempt to justify their actions. Instead, they are demanding Americans abandon reality in favor of whatever the administration says. If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think. Accepting that lie is a loyalty test.

But it is not working.

read the rest here

[1] Dan Rather:

The agent who killed Good was identified by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He is an Iraq War veteran who has been with ICE since at least 2016. The agent was previously injured in a traffic incident while seizing an undocumented man who was later convicted of dragging the agent with his car. This doesn’t justify what happened. At all.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration guru, who is not a lawyer, maintains ICE agents are untouchable. “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop or obstruct you is committing a felony,” he said on Fox. This is patently false in America — always has been and always should be.

Though Minneapolis’s mayor and Minnesota’s governor vowed to seek justice for Good, Trump & Co. made sure they were unable to. The FBI announced on Thursday morning that it would be handling the investigation alone, boxing out the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Historically, the agencies work together.

The BCA said in a statement that the U.S. attorney’s office “had reversed course: the investigation would now be led solely by the FBI, and the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.”

source

Whatever they say, whatever proof they claim to have, it never happened, none of it!!!

“[Trump], in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”

If this testimony had been aired live, two days before the law required all of the Epstein files be made public, imagine the shit show, even on Bari Weiss’s CBS. That’s why it happened behind closed doors, why Trump’s puppets waited until New Year’s Eve to release it. Jim Jordan, a belligerent cretin whose claim to fame is that as a college wrestler he was impossible to pin (like when he was assistant coach watching college wrestlers being sexually abused by his boss, and since) was completely overmatched by Jack Smith. Smith made the clear case against Trump for conspiring to overthrow election results after losing the election in 2020. There is no doubt that the events were set in motion for the benefit of one man, Donald, and the amoral billionaires who are his chief benefactors/beneficiaries. To wit:

Meritocracy

Here are the two slam dunk federal cases against Trump, in a nutshell. He violated the Espionage Act by illegally taking classified documents with him when he left the White House. He “negotiated” with the Department of Justice and the National Archives for a year about retaining the documents, lied about having classified documents, claimed he could declassify them with his mind, had his lawyer lie in a false affidavit that he’d already returned them all. There was probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant. The FBI found file boxes full of illegally retained government documents, including classified ones. There is not anything alleged about any of this. His obstruction of justice, his lies, his lawyers’ lies, his illegal retention of the documents, all matters of public record. Only Clarence Thomas, in a note to Venezuelan-American judge, lame duck Trump lifetime appointee Aileen Cannon, got Trump off the hook for this one, by declaring Jack Smith illegally appointed (spoiler alert, he wasn’t, he was only appointed too late to do his job).

The Washington D.C. case is equally straightforward. Trump knew he’d lost the election, he was told several times by his closest advisors, as they later testified under oath. He continued to lie about iihht (and $50,000,000 was dumped into an ad campaign to promote this lie). He worked with fake electors from several states in a scheme to throw the election to the GOP majority (by state) House. He called election officials to twist arms in states he lost. He had operatives accessing voting systems, bringing frivolous lawsuits, spreading knowingly false information. He called for a crowd to assemble in Washington D.C. for the morning of the certification of Biden’s win. He whipped up the crowd for an hour and urged them to parade (without a permit, which would have mobilized DC police to supervise it) to the Capitol to “peacefully” fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore. As the riot unfolded, and before his allies fled for their lives, e called his allies in Congress urging them to execute the plan to illegally keep him in office. He watched the riot live on TV for hours. It was with great reluctance that he finally made a video telling the rioters to go home (none were arrested), that he loved them, that America would never forget this day of love.

Just to prove his great fuck you to democracy had been perfectly righteous, on his first day back in the Oval Office he pardoned all of the rioters who were found guilty of violent assaults on January 6th. A Day of Love. 2020 was a stolen election, ask any current GOP member, they all wriggle away from answering that Biden won. “Well, Biden was the president…” they will say. Yep, he was.

Meantime, a robust 1% of the Epstein files have been made public (with massive redactions) by the most transparent administration in US history under (and in defiant contempt of) the Epstein Files Transparency Act Trump himself signed into law. Do not compare the murderous, compulsively lying Mr. Trump to Mr. Hitler! How dare you?!! By all means, dude, illegally invade a South American country and render the leader and his wife to … CECOT? What could go wrong?

This is why wealthy fascists paid Bari $150,000,000 to run a former flagship news service

“Anti-woke” influencer Bari Weiss was chosen to run CBS news by billionaire Trump donors/CBS buyers Ellison, father and son, because they like the cut of her jib. She can look woke cucks in the face and own them. The Ellisons paid her $150,000,000 for her blog when they hired her as Editor-in-Chief of CBS. Here’s an email Weiss wrote to CBS news staff after killing the story of hundreds of humans rendered, without any legal process at all, to an El Salvadorian torture prison for indefinite detention and abuse.

Our mission?   Media monopoly, owned by oligarchs, promoting curated “news” supportive of the regime’s policy goals to implement permanent one party, totalitarian rule?   Hmmm, I guess that tracks.  It may indeed seem radical, on a slow news week when nothing of great national consequence is happening, to kill a carefully vetted story damaging to the fulfillment of their mission.   

Slow news week.   The DOJ violating a law the president signed, withholding 99% of files in a brazen, lawless attempt to protect an actual cabal of powerful, untouchable pedophiles, likely also including their boss, an adjudicated rapist  — slow news.  The chaotic serial dumps of thousands of compromising documents relating to notorious pedophile, teenaged girl trafficker and blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, including numerous mentions of his fellow “playboy” the president, and the sudden “discovery” of a million new files … a very, very slow news week, you dig.  

At least Rupert “Fair and Balanced” Murdoch’s FOX news can straighten this CBS kerfuffle out. CBS may have indeed have had a reasonable, even if dubious, or possibly spurious, rationale for killing the story:

Psychopaths will be psychopaths

Yawn, very slow news week.  Merry Christmas to those who celebrate.