Category Archives: History and Politics

Ron DeathSantis– cool dude

Heather Cox Richardson on strongman wannabe Ron DeathSantis:

This destructive storm highlights the distance between reality and the ideology that calls for getting rid of the federal government.

As a newly elected congress member in 2013, now-governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against a $9.7 billion federal flood insurance assistance package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Now, with Florida on the ropes, DeSantis asked President Joe Biden for an emergency declaration to free up federal money and federal help even before the storm hit, and said Tuesday, “We all need to work together, regardless of party lines.” 

Heather then describes the hugely successful Republican push since Reagan to move wealth increasingly toward the already very wealthy and away from the average American

There is a direct correlation between growing economic inequality and the growing popularity of authoritarianism. Scholars of authoritarian systems note that a population that feels economically, religiously, or culturally dispossessed is an easy target for an authoritarian who promises to bring back a mythological world in which its members were powerful.

But, having lifted strongmen into power, they learn that they were only tools to put in place someone whose decisions are absolute and who is no longer bound by the law.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-28-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Got to work hard to get out the vote and make sure this Trump wannabe DeathSantis, overruling the will of Florida voters regarding former felons voting, with his armed “election integrity” goons intimidating voters, still loses reelection as Florida gauleiter [1]  by a million votes.

[1]  A Gauleiter was a regional leader of the Nazi Party who served as the head of a Gau or Reichsgau. Gauleiter was the third-highest rank in the Nazi political leadership, subordinate only to Reichsleiter and to the Führer himself. The position was effectively abolished with the fall of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945.

MAGA= fight to the death

In order to ensure that the greatest former and future president in history has the final say, no matter what, loyal MAGA officials will do whatever he tells them to do, espouse anything he tells them to believe in.   It was a small shock at first to see a “principled” “moderate” “true conservative” like Mitt Romney (who once famously, if belatedly, took a stand and voted guilty on one article of impeachment against Trump after MAGA-man literally unleashed a lynch mob to try to overturn the 2020 election) vote with the rest of his party for united rejection of everything Biden looked for a bipartisan coalition to pass.   It’s just normal now.  If we can call it that.  Usual is a better word, or expected.

So F POTUS, who shut down his own government at one point, to get his way (very presidential, sir!) and who had the debt ceiling raised three times to pay for things he wanted government to pay for, has stamped his cloven hoof and told his MAGA followers in Congress that they better not piss him off by caving in to the partisan, sick, dangerous Radical Left Democrats who are destroying the nation he’s still working so hard to make great again.   

Here’s Heather Cox Richardson with the story about the looming fight to the death about raising the debt ceiling (and the alternative is the US defaulting on its debts, massive unemployment and a major recession) and the demand of the psychopathic god of the godless party of religious fanaticism.  The rest of her Letter from an American gives the historical parallel with the same scorched earth tactics used by the former Confederacy in 1879 — and how it came back to bite them in the 1880 election:

And yet, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, said, “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will…help Democrats…resume ramming through partisan socialism.” His stand was in part because it was not clear he had the votes he needed to support an increase, even though establishment Republicans like McConnell were quite aware of the damage a default would create.

Driving the Republican stance was former president Trump, who pushed MAGA Republicans to use the threat of default to get what they want. “The way I look at it,” he wrote, “what the Democrats are proposing, on so many different levels, will destroy our country. Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede all of the horror they are trying to inflict upon the future of the United States.” Trump was not happy when McConnell backed down. He issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding” and added, “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-29-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

The logic is so clear, so classic.  They hurt me.  Kill them all.  It was the final stand of one of F POTUS’s great heroes, Mr. Hitler, another master of five dimensional chess: if Germany lost the war they all deserve to die, for letting me, God’s chosen instrument, suffer an undeserved defeat because they are weak, unworthy of a leader like me and deserve to all die defending my corpse.  And so it was for many German boys, slaughtered at their posts as the Red Army and the Allied armies took Berlin the day Hitler shot his beloved dog, poisoned his wife and killed himself.  Insane fuckers fight to the death and beyond.

Hub and Spoke RICO case against F POTUS and allies

The best explanation I’ve had for Merrick Garland’s slowness and longtime reticence about prosecuting F POTUS and his criminal associates was from Joyce Vance, many months ago. Vance, a former federal prosecutor, explained that the best way to prosecute all of these seditious creatures and take them off the political playing field is through a RICO prosecution. RICO is the racketeering law that Giuliani and others used to put away many of the top Mafia dons, their consiglieres and capos.

RICO is a powerful law, with long prison sentences. Vance pointed out that it’s not that hard to obtain convictions under RICO. The problem is if the case is not perfect and airtight, a good appellate lawyer will not have a hard time poking a hole and getting the entire conviction thrown out. Imagine fucking F POTUS and his gang being successfully prosecuted under RICO, getting long prison terms and then being sprung on appeal, having the entire prosecution tossed out. That would be devastating and the end of democracy.

So Vance pointed out that Garland has to work with extreme care to make sure there is not a weak link in his RICO case. This process typically takes a couple of years, she said, but it’s the best shot at taking down a gigantic criminal conspiracy. Garland knows he has one shot.

Recently Alex Wagner on MSNBC had an interview with a former prosecutor who has drawn a map of a likely RICO prosecution. All I can say is “damn!”. Look at the diagram and then watch the short segment. Then take solace in the fact that in this legal battle against lying zombie F POTUS and his zombie army of third rate lawyers, Garland has not made a false move or lost any significant motion in court. Garland has also made a few brilliant legal moves cutting directly through F POTUS’s most grotesquely muscular attempts to obstruct justice, his lifelong project. Now he has to indict, prosecute and convict gold plated Teflon Don.

Bagpiper blows bad breath

Blustering, bagpipe blowing, bullying buffoon Bill Barr barges belligerently between talking heads to blow some bad faith bad breath toward the viewers.  Barr weighs in on the detailed claims of NY AG Latisha James’s civil fraud lawsuit against his corrupt benefactor, the CEO of the Trump Organization:  

“What ultimately persuades me that this is a political hit job is, she grossly overreaches when she tries to drag the children into this.  Yes, they had roles in the business, but this was his personal financial statement and the children aren’t going to know the details of that, and be able, nor are they expected, in the real world, to do their own due diligence and have it reviewed independently.” 

A man who knows a thing or two about political hit jobs.  And it’s not like his Special Prosecutor John Durham, hired to expose the corrupt motives of those rabid partisans who’d investigated and documented Trump’s many ties to his role model Vladimir Putin, and his obstruction of that investigation, came up with bupkis to document the Radical Left’s purely political hit job on the innocent Trump and associates, after a much longer investigation than Meuller’s.

Joyce Vance points out that one of those “children” (ages 44-38) was the senior advisor to the president of the United States, while the other two ran Trump Inc. while their father was busy making America Great Again.   

I wish, and keep wishing, that people like Barr, Bolton, Mulvaney, Christie, et al would just keep their poisonous, Nazi adjacent opinions to themselves.  Granted, opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, but these guys never wash their asses, ever. Sheesh.

Justice, justice ye shall pursue

I started to write that you can’t claim a search warrant was unfair after the search finds the evidence that the warrant enabled law enforcement to look for, but, of course you can. You simply lie. There’s no law against lying, as long as you don’t do it under oath.

That’s the reason no sworn statements were included in F POTUS’s belated emergency application to his handpicked judge Aileen Cannon, in Donald J. Trump b United States of America. Even though every such application must be supported by sworn statements, with the bullshit they had to work with it would have been perjury had Trump’s lawyers submitted a sworn statement. So Cannon spared them that risk by waving away their failure to plead anything under the penalties of perjury.

I’m thinking about judge-for-life Aileen Cannon, clearly abusing her discretion by taking jurisdiction over a case there was no legal grounds for her to hear and then acting as an attorney and advocate for F POTUS. Her baseless ruling temporarily blocked law enforcement from investigating F POTUS’s criminal retention of documents he illegally possessed.

Accessory to obstruction of justice? I think so.

Trump’s proposed Special Counsel for Election Fraud

Or perhaps it was Attorney General. At any rate, she’s now expected to testify before the Fulton County criminal grand jury investigating interference in the election in Georgia by F POTUS and Rudy, among others.

Whoopsie! She failed to appear today. Now she is subject to arrest, oh dear!

She may be crazy, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say she’s no more nuts than her good friend and comrade in arms Ginni Thomas, who has finally agreed to come in, informally, and stonewall the libtard cucks of the J6 committee.

Trump Judge Aileen Cannon overturned 3-0 on appeal

Every person with any legal training knew that Aileen Cannon’s staunchly loyal, batshit ruling the other day, enjoining the Department of Justice from conducting its criminal investigation into evidence seized during a legal search of Mar-a-Lago, was unsupported by any evidence, was literally arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of discretion.

A three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with all the other reasonable legal minds who have looked over this strictly MAGA decision. They wrote, unanimously:

The Justice Department “argues that the district court likely erred in exercising its jurisdiction to enjoin the United States’ use of the classified records in its criminal investigation and to require the United States to submit the marked classified documents to a special master for review,” a three-judge panel of the appeals court wrote. “We agree.”

The NY Times reported that F POTUS maintains his alternative view of the facts:

… in an interview that aired late Wednesday, Mr. Trump made the extraordinary claim — not advanced by his own lawyers or supported by prior practice or legal precedent — that he had the right as president to declassify documents by wordlessly willing it to be so.

“You can declassify just by saying ‘it’s declassified,’ even by thinking about it,” Mr. Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News.

The three judge panel had that canard covered:

Mr. Trump “suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was president,” the appeals court wrote. “But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified.”

The court went on to say, “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal.”

source

Lawrence O’Donnell provides an excellent overview of the decision and what it means.