Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Federalist Society Endgame

The Federalist Society, a rightwing judicial fraternity, was created and is funded by ultra wealthy, right wing privilege holders. It was established to use the law to better protect the privileges of our best citizens, which is to say, inheritors of vast wealth, and those who join their ranks through their own efforts. It is devoted, by strict doctrine, to giving their political benefactors political wins in every possible case. Their judges often do this, especially in cases otherwise lost, by going well past what they need to find in order to make their rulings.

Their style of activist judging always includes a political victory for their agenda, to dismantling the regulatory/administrative state, limiting “majoritarian tyranny” (will of the voters) and ensuring full rights of citizenship only for our best citizens, corporate and human, regardless of the facts, the law, a 98-0 vote in the Senate.

For example, the Supreme Court Federalist Society contingent went much further than necessary to overrule the Colorado courts where Trump was disqualified as an insurrectionist. Without touching the facts of his insurrectionist plan and shameful, criminal behavior they made a ruling that allows every elected federal official who aided Trump in his insurrectionist plan to overturn election results forever immune from disqualification under the constitutional clause designed for that purpose by the framers of the 14th Amendment. The Federalist Society Six effectively wrote one of the most important democracy enforcing clauses out of the 14th amendment. In the name of demented Originalism, or some other Federalist Society endorsed doctrine pulled out of their collective, doctrinaire ass and protected not only Trump but his wide circle of elected insurrectionist henchmen and henchwomen.

In Georgia, Federalist Society member and political appointee Judge McAfee ruled correctly that there was no actual conflict of interest between the DA prosecuting Donald Trump and his criminal co-conspirators, and anybody else involved in the case. He did this after a long delaying circus in which the DA was asked extensively about her sex life and her father was interrogated about it too. The Klan itself could not have staged a more amusing spectacle than the one McAfee allowed.

Then after ruling properly, so as not to be overturned on appeal, he went out of his way to besmirch Fani Willis by writing of her “unprofessional” demeanor on the stand , a “stench of mendacity” and recommending a host of ethical and disciplinary remedies for her uppity attitude. He made these disparaging, jury poisoning remarks in dismissing an unsuccessful attempt to smear the district attorney, who, it turns out, had no conflict of interest of any kind. The Federalist Society spin, smearing a political opponent he could not legally remove from the case, is perfectly permissible among these endgame motherfuckers. McAfee gave his team the smear the frivolous motion was intended to create, after providing team Trump with a healthy and distracting delay.

Take Federalist Society member and former DOJ official MAGA Robert Hur. The finding of his report was that Joe Biden did not have the requisite intent to commit the crimes that Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated, as proved by his many attempts to cover up the crime and his repeated obstruction of justice. Hur distinguished the behavior of the two presidents to make the contrast and show that Biden lacked Trump’s clear criminal intent. That was the take away, Biden has not committed the crimes Trump stands accused of and that was all Hur was appointed to decided.

But a report stating that Biden was innocent of the crime Trump is a criminal defendant for was in no way helpful to the MAGA, or as I think of it, the American Nazi, cause. Hur therefore made the focus of his report, and the Breaking News headline takeaway, Biden’s cognitive feebleness. Based on lies? Going well beyond the scope of your appointment? Call me pisher!

The Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida (who assumed office after Trump lost reelection, talk about letting the voters decide), Aileen “Loose” Cannon, who, giving her the benefit of the doubt, is probably too stupid and inexperienced to handle a high profile, politically charged espionage case against her benefactor regarding his illegal retention of top-secret government documents, at least has experienced, brilliant Federalist Society counsel available to her.

This allows her to endlessly delay a trial that Trump will 100% lose with little risk to herself or her already damaged professional reputation. By not making any final orders about anything, Cannon has been able to spin this straightforward case out with no end in sight. And arguably because she has made no final orders of any kind, she has not given DOJ grounds for an appeal. Things she has done, no matter how stupid (inviting amicus briefs from the likes of Stephen “Death to immigrants” Miller and Citizens United), how biased toward one party (and against the federal government) or how clearly designed to give a criminal defendant the delay he always demands, are protected under her discretion as the trial judge.

If you had any cause to wonder whether allowing the widespread appointment of members of a doctrinaire right wing extremist judicial fraternity could cause any problems for democracy, the rule of law or the fair administration of justice, look no further than the loyal judicial fraternity members referenced above.

Gray Lady offering “context” to Hur’s report declining to prosecute Biden but emphasizing Biden’s supposedly feeble mental state

The Grey Lady, with one of her more mealy mouthed pieces of spotty reporting:

Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for including what some have described as disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state might come across to a jury as relevant and proper to discuss. . .

. . . Still, at several points, Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania induced Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like, “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.”. . .

. . . The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-scrutinized line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller made no decision on whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, only writing, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice. . .

. . . Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest person elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters from both parties. He and his allies have rejected those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.

No mention in the New York Times report of lines in the recently released transcript, spoken by Robert Hur, that directly contradict false assertions he made in the report. For example, at one point Hur noted Biden’s “photographic” recall of the layout of a house. Hur also claimed Biden didn’t even know the month or year of his son’s death. The transcript shows that Biden said “oh, God, May 30th…” and agreed when a staffer added it was 2015.  No mention in the New York Times of this rather glaring bit of partisan Bill Barr/John Durham-style lying. Making inaccurate or false statements is New York Times-speak for lying, but there is no note of even false or inaccurate statements by Hur in their article.

The Times also doesn’t report that one of these recorded sessions took place during the international negotiations immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel October 7th.

Nor does the Times include this fairly important fact for assessing Hur’s candor and his agenda, (or allude to anything like an immolation of former Trump DOJ partisan Robert Hur):

House Republicans asked Hur to testify before the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan (R-OH). Hur prepared for his testimony with the help of Trumpworld figures, and he resigned from the Department of Justice effective yesterday, so he appeared before the committee today not as a DOJ employee bound by certain ethical guidelines, but as a private citizen. . .

. . . Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote on social media: “I think Biden’s State of the Union address last week and Hur’s immolation today will go down in political history as Reagan’s ‘I am not going to exploit…my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment…only on steroids.” Conway was referring to Reagan’s response in a 1984 presidential debate to a question about his own age; Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.

Heather

This is another more intelligent assessment of what happened at the hearing, immolation or no.

No hint about any of this is given to readers of the New York Times report on the latest backfired attempt by MAGA diehards to magnify their wild claims that, unlike very stable genius Donald Trump, Biden is a feeble, stuttering old dotard who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, even when he is handing MAGA hecklers their asses on a platter in front of a live national audience.

MAGA’s got priorities…

“Thank you for your service. Now go shoot yourself.”

Republicans were able to wrest this small victory out of the temporary postponement of their ongoing threat to shut down the government.

Republicans were able to use the spending legislation to curtail a policy instituted by the Veterans Affairs Department that aims to prevent veteran suicides by flagging to a federal gun background check system when veterans are found to lack the mental capacity to handle their own finances.

Under language the G.O.P. insisted on, the V.A. could not do so without a court order. Republicans contended that the current practice relies on an overly broad definition of incompetence and could infringe upon veterans’ Second Amendment rights.

source

God forbid veterans who are facing extreme emotional and financial challenges aren’t able to continue killing themselves in the ungodly numbers they do every day, by any means necessary. If there’s one thing guns are particularly great for, it’s suicide.

Chuck Chuck BoBuck Grassley and the Grey Lady

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.

Clarence Thomas casts deciding vote to protect MAGA Congress (and J6 rioters) from being ineligible under the 14th Amendment (sec.3)

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.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was watching the influential, super-secretive right wing non-profit Committee for National Policy right up to the time they selected Trump for the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. Ginni was intimately involved in brokering the deal between Trump and Evangelicals (which included appointing Federalist Society only to the Supreme Court), and remained a regular visitor to Trump’s White House throughout. See also

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.

example of random MAGA projection porn

Another unappealable John Roberts special

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 of their sacred 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?

Here is Jesse Wegman’s right on analysis from today’s NY Times.

You can’t argue with Nazis

A Nazi has a closed mind and a simple, even if irrational, explanation for everything. They will repeat their mantra over and over again in response to any point you try to raise. It is futile to argue with Nazis, but it is essential to persuade anybody who is not a Nazi that Nazis are fucking Nazis.

If you are anti-Nazi, you might as well ask a Nazi why they never investigated Hunter Biden for taking $2 billion from the murderous Saudi dictator while Hunter’s father was the president of the United States. Or why their partisan six-year investigation into Hunter and the new Benghazi Commission for grounds to impeach Joe, based on a reliable source (now indicted) who spouted Putin‘s hand fed propaganda, does not turn up the heat to the boiling point to finally lower the boom on the evil Hunter Biden, and the hundreds of viciously anti-Christian billionaire Jews (not to mention Chinese communists and Ukrainian fascists) who prop him up.

If somebody’s last word in every discussion is a variation on “I will never listen to you, asshole, no matter what, because I am right and you suck cocks in hell, along with your so-called facts” I would say it’s time to talk to somebody else. You cannot persuade somebody who is a Nazi that there is anything wrong with being a Nazi. Anybody who can’t see that there is something wrong with being a Nazi is a fucking Nazi.

My best advice, once you see a door is closed with a fanatical insistence on the door slammer’s righteousness, and the endlessly asserted claim that you are a completely delusional asshole, if not also a poisonous fucking Jew, see that closed door as a very good thing and keep on walking.

Trump Riddle for a Saturday afternoon

Here’s one I really don’t get. Trump claims to be a mega-successful billionaire business genius. We know that’s a lie by how many millions of dollars he lost every year (take for example the $916 million in business losses he wrote off on his 1995 taxes), how virtually all of his ventures failed and/or were shut down for fraud, and how many times he declared bankruptcy. We all know he’s the most “transactional” president of all-time. He claims to be worth many billions.

He took cartons full of valuable classified documents down to his gaudy Florida resort after being dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. Putin would have gladly paid a billion for a pile of military secrets, so would Muhammed Bin Salman, or Trump’s North Korean BFF, or, for that matter, Hitler, if he was still alive. Trump would have had no hesitation to make deals with any of them, since everything is simply a transaction with him.

What happened to the money?

If he made the lucrative business deals anyone would assume he would have by selling the valuable government secrets, he wouldn’t be scrambling to put up bond for the over one half billion he owes as the result of recent court verdicts against him. He’d peel off that money from a fat billfold, announce confidently that he was going to win on appeal, and tell everybody to fuck off.

Leading to the obvious question: what happened to the money, Trumpie?

Just say Biden is corrupt and leave it up to my lackeys in Congress

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.

source

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