Category Archives: History and Politics

Mass media is fine with the GOP’s new normal

Jennifer Rubin, in today’s Washington Post, with an excellent analysis of corporate media’s yawning attitude toward a radicalized political party intent on taking power by any means necessary.   Mass media treats GOP elected officials  who refuse — seventeen months and counting — to concede their man Donald Trump lost a fair election in 2020, including those who plotted to “legally” overturn that election, as ordinary politicians.   

There is nothing ordinary about pretending a last ditch riot intended to seize power never happened, about a far-reaching, well-funded, months’ long, coordinated plan to overturn a free and fair election, nothing ordinary about a party that insists it never lost literally hundreds of court cases (most before the election, trying to limit the “illegitimate” vote) on the merits, simply because they could not prove allegations of fraud they still insist, citing alternative facts, they have massive evidence of.

Nothing ordinary about a party that insists that what you are seeing, reading, watching has nothing whatsoever to do with what millions of faith-based Americans honestly believe about the other party and their most famous supporters (hi, Tom Hanks) sodomizing babies and drinking their blood. 

Here’s Jennifer Rubin, preaching to the choir that includes about 60% of us, in a thoughtful word to the mass media called The media still haven’t learned how to cover the GOP threat to democracy.

Filibuster, personal style

The filibuster, which is now virtually automatic under Mitch McConnell, was introduced in the Senate over two hundred years ago by the advocates of a free market that included slave labor, men like South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun (pictured below), spokesman for the Peculiar Institution and perfecter of the modern filibuster [1].   It is a parliamentary device designed to defeat any proposal by cutting off all debate in the Senate [2].  The filibuster doesn’t just stop a vote on a proposed law, it blocks public discussion of the proposal in the Senate.  

Think about that for a second, the tyrannical nature of that parliamentary move, an increasingly popular political ploy, with no constitutional support, that can presently be launched by any one senator in the minority party and requiring a super-majority to defeat.   It rests on the idea that if people heard the argument, heard the reasons the policy was desirable, our side would lose.  The only way to prevail, particularly if the act would be wildly popular, is to kill the idea before it can make its case.

So it is between people sometimes.  If I am afraid of something you have to say, for any reason, I can filibuster you simply by making clear my refusal to talk about it.  End of story.  Good night and have a very nice day.

[1]

Mitch McConnell’s claim that “the filibuster is the essence of the Senate” has been tossed aside by his opponents as bad history, violently inconsistent with how Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison aimed to structure the Senate, and perhaps even unconstitutional. All true. But what McConnell’s screed should remind us is that the filibuster has always been the essence of the politics of white supremacy — even as it now poses a broader threat to democracy itself.

McConnell draws on a playbook stretching back to John C. Calhoun, who as vice president in 1841 forged the filibuster into a conscious instrument to block majoritarian democracy as part of his project of creating a durable framework for slavery in a nation he knew would eventually vote against it. Calhoun, generations of Southern senators and now McConnell have shared a determination that majority votes should not be the last word in the United States. Privileged minorities should be able to override the will of the entire people — if their interests are endangered. Yes, Calhoun was focused on slavery and race, but his first filibuster was over national banking. The interest he sought to  protect from a national majority was that of the South as a region, extending beyond slavery to issues like tariffs. . .

. . . While  the filibuster — the essence of Mitch McConnell’s Senate — is the most powerful weapon the right-wing opponents of democracy have seized, Republicans in 2020 are deploying the full panoply of anti-democratic strategies devised over two and a quarter centuries by Calhoun’s followers. The most important campaigns being waged by conservatives at this moment emphasize the spread of gerrymandered districts, purged voter rolls, legalized bribery, a politicized judiciary, state pre-emption of local home rule and crippling the executive authority of majoritarian governors, even Republican ones.

source

[2]

Gardenier was one of the earliest champions of the filibuster, a term that refers to the use of obstructive tactics such as long, dilatory speeches and the repeated introduction of parliamentary motions to block or delay legislation. Today, filibustering is almost exclusively associated with the Senate, where individual Senators wield extraordinary power over debate. In the modern House, on the other hand, the majority party rules, and individual Members have little influence concerning the course of debate; over the years, the House, which is more than four times the size of the Senate, has developed rules which strictly control who can speak and for how long.  

https://history.house.gov/Blog/2020/June/6-11-Filibuster/

Democratic progress (every bit opposed by the GOP) from FDR’s New Deal to 1980

Thom Hartmann produced an excellent short digest (below) of the problem with American oligarchs not paying taxes, being in open revolt against even a 20% minimum corporate tax (under FDR the rate was 48% on the wealthiest corporations). Joe Manchin and that narcissist asshole from Arizona, of course, support the billionaires on this insistence that they’re entitled to every penny they earn or inherit, making it unchallengeably bipartisan, thanks to the “bipartisan filibuster”. Hartmann presents the many popular programs instituted by Democrats against the united opposition of the Republican party, up to 1980, when the GOP regained national power.

On the Republican side, since Reagan, we have the slashing of tax on the wealthiest, protection of giant corporations, increased abuse of the filibuster and the dismantling of the administrative state.  Also, a corruptly appointed majority of anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court, legalizating, 5-4, unlimited secret money in political campaigns, eviscerating (5-4) Voting Rights and brazenly protecting unlimited gun and corporate rights.

Compare that policy record against these Democratic policies opposed by Republicans. Here’s Hartmann’s list (most of it):

Social Security, the minimum wage, [child labor laws– ed], unemployment insurance, world class public schools, free to inexpensive state colleges, the right to unionize, civil rights legislation, voting rights legislation, publicly owned utilities, new highways and airports, quality mass transit, antitrust laws to maintain competition and protect small businesses, Medicare,  the Environmental Protection Agency, Medicaid, school lunch programs and food stamps, workplace nondiscrimination for women and racial minorities, federal deposit insurance to protect people from bank failures, Head Start and literally hundreds of laws that protected consumers and the environment from corporate predation  and dangerous products.

As Franklin Roosevelt said:  On the one hand there has been a vast majority of citizens who believe that the benefits of democracy should be extended and are willing to pay their fair share to extend them.    And on the other hand there has been a small but powerful group which has fought the expansion of these benefits  because they do not want to pay their fair share.

The next clip (both are from the video below) describes what the federal government accomplished for the citizens of our democracy just during the first few years of the New Deal, including this statement by FDR about the oligarchs of his day:

“You would think, to hear some people talk, that those good people who live at the top of our economic pyramid are being taxed into rags and tatters, but what is the fact? The fact is that they are much further away from the poor house than they were in 1932 and you and I know that as a matter of personal observation.”

Hartmann points out the $1.7 TRILLION ($1,700,000,000,000) windfall America’s now several hundred billionaires received during the pandemic and then plays the rest of FDR’s comment:

“A number of my friends who belong in this very high upper bracket have suggested to me on several occasions of late that if I am re-elected president they will have to move to some other nation because of high taxes here. Well, I will miss them very much.”

Note on the Book of Irv

As I suggested yesterday, I’d like to get back to rewriting the story of my father into a readable 250 pages (the first draft, which you can see here as it emerged, is about 1,200 pages) but I’ve been unaccountably distracted by the worldwide resurgence of the kind of fascism that always leads to mass murder, after years of brutal repression.   The world’s getting a little appetizer in the deliberate war crimes Trumpie’s pal Putin is committing in a war of unprovoked aggression against the civilians of Ukraine [1].   

The movement we have here has been on the move for decades, pretty much since the New Deal programs began, funding their dozens or hundreds of powerful octopus arms with billions in hereditary wealth, determined to destroy the administrative state, all social programs, and reserve government coercion for poor people who don’t have shit to say about it.  These are the same supremely entitled motherfuckers who are always upset when “entitlements” like Social Security, child labor laws, anti-pollution laws, unemployment insurance, pro-labor and pro-environmental enforcement agencies, government–subsidized private health insurance for the old, the poor, a century- belated ruling that segregation is unconstitutional, anti-lynching laws and so forth become the normal expectations of ordinary American citizens.

Globalist is usually right-wing code for “nefarious fucking socialist Jews” (which, as a nefarious fucking socialist Jew, I am allowed to say, happy Passover, y’all) but it applies much more accurately to the global coordination between extreme right wing parties.   When it comes to the international fascist movement, Sloppy Steve Bannon is right there, 100% gung ho, ready to be a muscular martyr for the cause.  Ditto angry Trump confidante Stephen Miller, racist Jeff Sessions’s protege and loyal Trumpist in the bunker with the mad former president.  Furrow-browed Tucker Carlson, TV dinner fortune heir (and the political party Carlson propagandizes for), loves Victor Orban, the Hungarian fascist, and hosted his FOX show in Hungary, a model society for his ilk — why do gays need rights?   Why should I be against Putin, he never called me a bad name?   Why do George Soros and the Clintons hate our freedom so much?   How do we actually know Trump wasn’t cheated, along with the rest of us, in a cleverly rigged election?  Why are Blacks always angrily complaining about unarmed family members being killed by cops when whites never do?    Why do I always pose these hateful things as questions?   Do you want to get sued for directly defamatory, or prosecuted for treasonous, behavior? Do you actually believe my viewers want nuanced answers? Do I not give them answers they already know every night, in the form of leading questions? 

So, yeah, I’m distracted, I don’t know why, keeping one eye on the 50/50 chance we will have our own one party state, bound by a Fuhrer’s Oath of personal loyalty to a compulsive liar and vindictive king of open corruption, where a timid but comparatively decent party bows to the will of violent mobs and submits peacefully to their own public executions.   C’est la vie, I suppose.

[1]

Not to say the US didn’t do virtually the identical thing under the aptly named Dick Cheney when it launched a preemptive war, based on lies told over and over to the citizens of the US and the world, against Iraq a few decades back.  How many Iraqi children and old people did we kill, maim, turn into homeless refugees?   We will never have an accurate count of the many thousands our smart and stupid bombs killed or crippled, though the number of brown refugees who fled the brutal “liberation” of Iraq was in the millions.

INFLATION!

You want a scary story? The money you have in your pocket is losing value!

The pandemic seems to be winding down, and now with a centrist non-authoritarian in the White House, one who has shown a willingness to impose modest taxes on the wealthiest 0.01% of our finest citizens, human and corporate alike, the corporate media’s story seems unable to focus on the steady economic recovery in the USA, it must be on a crisis — and the failure of a reasonably competent Democratic president to fix things beyond any president’s control and against a united party determined to see him fail. Here’s the Grey Lady the other day, hammering a familiar corporate theme:

Gasoline weighed heavily in the increases, hmmm, oil company profits hit all-time highs. Hmmmm… maybe there’s another explanation for corporate leaders using Biden as a punching bag for this worldwide rise in gasoline prices and worldwide inflation…

Here’s Robert Reich:

people, just like you and me! For the love of God, haven’t they and their billionaire human counterparts been crucified enough by class and social justice warriors? Will the vicious attacks on our greatest never cease?

Probably not.

Not that they have any reason to care about that very much…

Fake news — which Hitler admired and praised in Mein Kampf

As the Fuhrer approvingly pointed out, in his admiring analysis of Allied propaganda in World War One, swapping in an incendiary, false caption under an actual photo is a powerful technique to make masses of people experience targeted rage and hatred.  And, as we see in this brutal age of “social media”, it never gets old:

Here is an actual photo of a crazed narcotics-addicted left-wing extremist US Congressman falling asleep mid-sentence on liberal media, to the clear horror of the left-wing host.

Here is the Clinton News Network, with a typical example of their biased lying, simply to make a universally adored very stable genius look like a childish imbecile:

SAD!!

One long spray of the firehose of excrement, clearly analyzed

It is hard to keep track of all the flying poop, as thoughtful Merrick Garland knits his brow over the facts and the law and how best to follow them, but this model prosecution memo, by Barbara McQuade, lays some of it out — the part about Trump’s plan to coerce Pence to throw out votes that made him lose the election, and the conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding — as clearly as possible.  Then she analyzes the legal cases. The actions taken by the conspirators were varied, frenzied and included throwing every possible kind of shit against the wall to see what might stick as a talking point on right wing media to amplify widespread belief in unfounded lies and justify overturning an election lost by the incumbent.  Here are a few nuggets (her full memo is linked at the bottom of this post):

In a separate suit, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tx) brought an action on Dec. 28 to declare Pence had authority to reject the election results. In a response submitted by the Justice Department on Dec. 31, Pence opposed the suit.[47] Pence’s brief said, “A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction.” The district court and court of appeals dismissed the suit in the following two days. . .

. . . Later on Jan. 2, 2021, Trump and attorneys Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman conducted a Zoom conference call with 300 legislators from swing states won by Biden.[55] According to Michigan State Sen. Ed McBroom (R), who participated in the call, the Trump team urged the legislators to overturn the choice of voters in their states, but provided no evidence of voter fraud.[56] As McBroom reported: “I was listening to hear whether they had any evidence to substantiate claims” of significant voter fraud that could change the results in Michigan.”[57] “(T)he callers did not provide additional information, he said, and he did not support a delay in the electoral vote count.”[58] . . .

. . . Also on Jan. 5, Eastman met with Short and Jacob at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Eastman argued that Pence should reject the Biden electors, according to two sources.[104] By the end of the two-hour meeting, Eastman had conceded that having Pence reject Biden electors was not a viable plan. Eastman later denied so conceding.[105] . . .

. . . Late on the evening of Jan. 5, Trump issued a false statement that Pence had agreed to take action beyond counting votes on Jan. 6.[110] According to reporting, Trump directed his campaign to issue a statement that he and Pence were in “total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.” In fact, this statement was false, the exact opposite of Pence’s position, and was issued without consulting with the vice president or his office.[111] Soon after issuing the statement, Trump called Giuliani and then called Steve Bannon who was also at the Willard Hotel. Trump said that Pence had not caved. Pence was “very arrogant,” Trump repeatedly said.[112]

[even fascistic secret torture memo author/professor John Yoo advised Pence he had no legal right to do what Trump had demanded]

“I advised that there was no factual basis for Mike Pence to intervene and overturn the results of the election,” said Yoo, who now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley. “There are certain limited situations where I thought the Vice President does have a role, for example in the event that a state sends two different electoral results. . . . But none of those were present here.”[140] . . .

. . . At about 2 p.m., protestors broke a window at the U.S. Capitol and climbed inside.[142] The Senate and House of Representatives soon went into recess and members evacuated the two chambers.[143] At 2:24 p.m., Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”[144] The Capitol would not be secured again until about 6 p.m.[145] . . .

Barbara McQuade concludes that 

This evidence is sufficient to obtain and sustain convictions of charges for conspiracy to defraud the United States and for obstruction of an official proceeding.

and lays out the case for each.  She acknowledges certain dangers in prosecuting a former president with an angry private army, but concludes the only thing worse than the possibility of deadly violence by his followers is not prosecuting the lawless turd. Merrick?

United States v. Donald Trump

Power corrupts

It’s quite possible that people like Mitch McConnell are born corrupt, I don’t know.   But how do you forcefully condemn an angry, corrupt president for being a sore loser mad enough to organize and unleash a violent mob to kill your enemies, after orchestrating his acquittal in a proceeding to make sure he never runs again, and then support his future candidacy?   Mitch explains:

Red Summer? More Lies!

If you are a history teacher in a state that has a right wing legislature and governor (and it has been a concerted project of the right to capture as many Independent State Legislatures as possible, along with the federal courts) your career may be in danger if you ask your students to google Red Summer. You see, having students click on a website that documents dozens of little known racist massacres of a hundred years ago will undoubtedly make innocent, white, Christian kids feel bad. History can be a very mean adolescent girl.

This largely forgotten season of racist violence and horror, painted red with the blood of its innocent victims (among them many Black WWI vets), does not even include bloody mayhem like the now infamous massacre and destruction of the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood  in Tulsa (1921) or plenty of others we hear about, to our surprise, from time to time.   The Atlanta race riot of 1906, for example.     At exactly the moment the last Russian Czar was winking at massacres of Jews, called pogroms, white leaders here were acquitting everyone involved in our own anti-Black pogroms, while punishing any surviving Blacks who may have been seen fighting back.

After the Civil War the only southerners who faced any consequence for taking up arms to fight in the “Northern War of Aggression” (apart from the Confederate warden of the infamous Andersonville Prison camp, an early concentration camp where thousands died, who was executed for his war crimes) were the Black veterans of the Union army, routinely tortured and murdered for standing up for their constitutional rights.   See, e.g. Colfax Massacre, Easter Sunday 1872.

Teach this sort of bloody history at your own risk, Florida history teachers.   According to our own shamelessly pandering white nationalists in various state and federal offices, it is strictly up to the states to decide how American history will be taught to future generations, fucking anti-racist, anti-fascist freedom haters! That’s the lesson of the Civil War, Independent State Legislatures get to decide the intimate fates of their citizens, as well as the last word letting them vote and, more importantly, on counting their ballots! Independent State Legislature Doctrine, bitches.