Another insightful opinion piece by Jennifer Rubin (gifted to you by the earth’s second or third greatest man, Jeff Bezos.) Another argument that is impossible to refute, except with a hearty, though only 39% persuasive, “fuck you, wasshole!”
Category Archives: History and Politics
Putin and Trumpism, still numbers one and two
Number one and two in the sense of the polite way people sometimes refer to the output of the urethra and colon. Also in the sense of causing a large percentage of their population to embrace irrational beliefs that sometimes disproportionately kill them.
Putin was trained in this dark art in the KGB, Trump simply has the natural gift of a sociopathic compulsive liar with an overwhelming need to be loved. The US, which leads the world in Covid deaths, is a close second only to Russia in the percentage of citizens who would literally rather die than ever take the vaccine, and other reasonable precautions, against the pandemic. Freedom from what they believe is tyranny is worth more than life to these folks.
Twenty percent of Americans polled report that they will never take the vaccine, are unwilling to ever take it [1]. Most of the 2,000 a day dying of covid in the US are unvaccinated. The US is once again Exceptional in this, most other nations are in the single digit percentage for those diehard Live Free or Kill Myself 20% of our exceptional fellow citizens, folks who believe they have never lost any fight, war, argument or game of tic tac toe. Their steadfastness in resisting science, and their ability to move freely from state to state and cough on anybody they choose to cough on, enables us to easily lead the world in daily covid deaths. Here in New York City I am often in stores that post a strict mask policy people feel free to ignore, with no consequences. American Exceptionalism — fuck your fucking so-called social fucking contract, asshole! Here’s the worldwide death chart:
Here is Chris Hayes, on the lying liberal media [2], laying out the deadly case of this exceptional American delusion that freedom equals the right to catch a deadly, but now controllable, disease and spread it to as many people as you like, before you yourself angrily die from it. The exceptional American belief that willing a thing makes it so and that freedom means, under certain circumstances, the right to infect and kill whoever you come into contact with. If I never admit I was wrong, I WAS FUCKING RIGHT!
[1]
Yes, I know about the general reliability of polls, but this one, as described in the video above, is based on the self-reporting of respondents. They are asked the questions and 20% of Americans, versus 5% of Spaniards and 7% of Australians, said “shit no, I’m no moron, I would never let the Deep State put that poison in my body.”
[2]
die Lügenpresse, give credit where credit’s due, this was stolen from the old Nazi playbook. Fake News! Nazis, many feel, have been as falsely maligned by the fake news as our American as apple pie Ku Klux Klan. So unfair! SAD!
The deadliest poison often comes from “friends”
The New York Times editorial board decided the most important story for Saturday, in a country on the doorstep of authoritarianism, was the following critique of our beleaguered president (because of worldwide inflation, don’t you know?):
When you click on the link you learn that not only is Biden not passing the so-called Big Mac test, he’s failing!!!
I had the stomach to read this poisonous editorial board editorial to the very end where one reads this:
The role of presidents in shaping the nation’s economic fortunes is generally overstated. But if the government can complete the work it has begun, this administration may yet deserve the victory laps it is taking for successful stewardship of the nation’s economy.
The discomforting truth is that the United States last year faced a choice between a protracted period of economic pain and an economic recovery whose benefits are temporarily attenuated by high inflation. Mr. Biden made the right choice. But it came at a real price — economically, for the nation, and politically, for him.
read the whole poisonous “critique” here
It’s hard not to offer a hearty “fuck you and what the fuck is your fucking problem?” to the New York Times editorial board . Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax, The Wall Street Journal, The NY Post and FOX news could not have done it better! It is certainly a model of editorial restraint. Mazel tov, momzers...
Bear in mind:
To recap the NY Times’s perfectly reasonable sounding analysis: Biden took office during a pandemic/economic/political nightmare on a global scale, and his policies worked, much better than in most other places.
The White House finds itself in the position of a physician who has administered a successful course of treatment but who has neglected to prepare the patient for the side effects or to give the timeline for a full recovery. A lot of pain was averted, but it’s hard to feel gratitude for things that didn’t happen. The economic outlook is strong, but it’s hard to feel gratitude for things that haven’t happened yet. Right now, the pain of inflation is front and center for most.
They also point out, almost accurately:
A one-year expansion of the child tax credit helped to reduce the share of American children living in poverty to the lowest level since the government began to keep records in the 1960s. But Democrats, unable to agree on the terms of a permanent expansion, have allowed the expanded benefits to expire, depriving millions of working families of needed help.
source
Something like “Biden and Democrats, needing every vote to pass laws and budgets, even by reconciliation, were blocked by all fifty Republicans and two conservative Democratic senators who are staunch opponents of minimum wage and the child tax credit, and incoherent defenders of the filibuster, who stand athwart all progressive aspirations, no matter how modest,” would have been a little more accurate, and fairer, description of Biden’s inability to get anything passed.
The Times continues (my recap): Admittedly, the president alone is not responsible for fixing all of that, particularly not in his first year in office. He did a good job, much better than anyone could have predicted. BUT, the price of a Big Mac is up, so that’s Biden’s fault, he failed, which is why, even though highly successful on most of these supremely challenging fronts, during the second half of a period when the world’s ten richest men doubled their net worth to the tune of five trillion untouchable bucks, Biden is still a fucking failure, as the polls show, largely because of inflation and nobody approves of a failure, particularly one who picks their pockets.
The Grey Lady has spoken. To millions, worldwide.
Fraud is also against the law
It’s not as if fraud is murder, fraud is just stealing from people, with a cunning lie that fools the credulous for long enough to get their money. Fraud may not be shooting somebody to death on Fifth Avenue, but it’s bad nonetheless.
It’s not as though these fraud allegations against the Trump Organization are anything new. Fraud is a big part of his lifelong business model and an integral part of Trump’s classy, gold-plated, exclusive brand.
Right before the Electoral College selected him as the president of the United States in 2016, Donald Trump agreed to pay the State of New York $25,000,000 (twenty-five million dollars) to settle, with no admission of wrongdoing, a case brought on behalf of defrauded former students of hugely profitable Trump University which also agreed to shut down [1]
It’s not like his fraudulent charitable Trump Foundation was closed because of fraud, it just happened that a few million dollars of the money Trump raised for the charity were spent by the Trump family in a legally improper way, and his charitable Foundation was forced to empty its bank account and donate all the funds to actual charities. The Trump Foundation, now bankrupt, was closed down as well. New York Attorney General Letitia James summarizes:
“Not only has the Trump Foundation shut down for its misconduct, but the president has been forced to pay $2 million for misusing charitable funds for his own political gain. Charities are not a means to an end, which is why these damages speak to the president’s abuse of power and represent a victory for not-for-profits that follow the law.” [2]
These pain in the ass witch-hunting DA’s and AG’s are a big part of the reason Trump retired to DeathSantis’s hospitably fascistic Florida.
Deflating the value of assets that you used, in their inflated form, for purposes of obtaining maximum loans and social status, and lowered for purposes of evading taxes … is that fraud? It would sure seem to be. Why this fraud is the subject of a very likely civil action by the NYS Attorney General (rather than a criminal one) is hard to grasp, at least without two minutes of diligent research on DuckDuckGo or Ecosia. Which wearieth me too much at the moment, tapping away, eyes agoggle, on this tiny but very, very smart phone, but feel free to drop a comment below if you do.
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2018/ag-schneiderman-statement-final-trump-university-settlement
Jon Ossoff, excellent speech in defense of the right to vote
It’s hard to believe democracy is still having to fight this same fucking war over and over again against the infinitely wealthy forces of reaction and entitlement, but there we go.
Jon Ossoff, the first Jewish US senator from the great state of Georgia (mein yamulka’s off to you, Jon), delivered a powerful speech in defense of passing a federal law to protect the once again threatened right to vote.
The only thing I wish Ossoff would have added was that not only was the Voting Rights Act last reauthorized in a bipartisan vote, as he points out, but in a unanimous bipartisan vote, 98 to zero in the Senate. All 16 Republicans still in the Senate voted for Voting Rights in that 98-0 vote, the same folk now all unanimous in filibustering debate and a vote on the same law they’d embraced in 2006, like the craven tools of authoritarianism they now plainly are (OK, not that last part, Jon).
Powerful speech well worth hearing, very sad that not even one of the sixteen Republican former voting rights supporters was moved by it.
Majority Rule vs. the machinations of the unscrupulous uber-wellborn
Why is the 1965 Voting Rights Act so crucial to democracy? The law was a great victory for equality at law after a bloody, generations-long fight for enforcement of the constitutionally guaranteed right to vote, a right long denied, openly and also under many subterfuges.
From the start, wealthy, determined reactionaries gritted their teeth about Black, brown and urban poor people voting and got to work to counter “majoritarian tyranny.” Over decades they figured out how to get the Supreme Court to grant them a series of game changing powers to perpetuate their privileges.
A key prize was the new constitutional right to form legal entities to spend limitless amounts of tax-deductible money to engage in fully protected freedom of speech, to express partisan political views and influence political outcomes, to the extent their vast fortunes allowed. Everybody else, one vote and limited campaign donations, at best. The right to vote is the majority’s only voice to oppose the designs of determined, activist billionaire reactionaries.
The right to vote is the essential right of democracy, in a government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. It can take millions of us casting votes to express our combined wishes to overcome the will of a handful of super-wealthy individuals, their identities secret, spending limitless, anonymous, tax-deductible dough to influence elections, to lobby and buy the Sinemas, Manchins, McConnells and their ilk.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse describes the electoral game, tirelessly and cleverly rigged by right-wing billionaires and their hired political operatives and other hirelings to secretly wield undemocratic influence on a mass scale.
Whitehouse ends his speech talking about the dark money funded “Honest Elections Project,” a corporate entity created solely to influence elections. The Honest Elections Project exercised $45,000,000 in 100% anonymous free speech prior to the 2020 elections. No individuals are associated with this gigantic influence machine because all identities are legally laundered through 501(c)(3) Donors’ Trust, which also makes their political gifts tax deductible. Here’s Whitehouse:
Somebody wrote [The Honest Elections Project] a $19,000,000 check to suppress votes.
Folks, if we don’t get to the bottom of this we’re going to have a real problem on our hands, and when we get to the bottom of this, the American public will be with us because they hate this stuff.You can be a Bernie Bro or you can be a Tea Partier, you can disagree on everything. and you agree that big dark money corruption has no place in American democracy.
Hard to argue with any of that (hence the filibuster, which silences all debate). The whole presentation is well worth taking in.
Excellent poll question for registered Republicans
The Media’s false equivalence is deadly
The corporate media, at its fairest and most balanced, often presents things in this frame:
Since there are very fine people, (along with a few bad apples), on both sides, on both sides, all Americans have to try harder to aim for the sane middle ground, between Black Lives Matter and the Klan, between Nazis and Jews, between billionaires and low value citizens, and we’ll be right back to tell you exactly how you can find that Golden Mean, but first, these important words from our sponsors.
Robert Reich lays it out in five minutes
and this bit of bitter common sense, also from Reich
McConnell gloats
From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, January 19, 2022
Greg Sargent, from today’s Washington Post:
At the one-year mark in President Biden’s first term, there’s no sugarcoating it: A barrage of new polls are absolutely brutal for him. Surveys from NBC News and the Associated Press both put Biden’s approval at 43 percent, and CBS News puts it at 44 percent, in large drops since last summer.
In short: Everything is going pretty much as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has planned. We know this because the Kentucky Republican told us exactly how he planned it. In fact, he laid out the playbook more than a decade ago, and it has changed little since then.
At dark moments such as these, after Biden’s voting rights agenda fell to a Republican filibuster on Wednesday night, it’s worth revisiting a largely-forgotten, 11-year-old quote from McConnell. It captures a crucial insight about U.S. politics that helps illuminate the struggles Democrats are facing, and why they feel so frustrating and intractable.
At the time, McConnell was similarly wielding his role as minority leader to obstruct another Democratic president, by denying any and all GOP support for proposals like the 2010 Affordable Care Act. McConnell explained his thinking to journalist Joshua Green:
“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
Why change the winning, hopelessness-inspiring gridlock formula that brought us Jesus’s choice Donald Trump and the triumph of Charles Koch’s once lunatic fringe John Birch Society?
Fake debate 2022 style
Today in Congress we hear GOP elected officials opposed to restoring the 1965 Voting Rights Act debate the issue. Most repeat the absurd GOP talking point, when not attacking Biden, as they urge bipartisanship while filibustering one popular policy debate after another in order to hamstring Biden and make him look weak “Democrats are trying to nationalize national elections!”
Communism pure and simple!
I suppose I should be happy that none of the obstructionists I heard are retreating to their normal post-Gingrich talking points “I know you are, but what am I?” and “make me!”
Also, the bits of the “debate” I heard were refreshingly free of snarled threats of scorched earth if the Democrats manage, against all odds, to carve out a filibuster exception for legislation protecting the right to vote.
And while I’m thinking about it, you know what? Send out a national ID card to every registered voter, which can be turned into a photo ID at any government office, and let it be presented at the polls when we vote, if that’s what it takes. End of fucking debate, defenders of the Confederacy.
