Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

First Amendment 101

No court, judge or prosecutor has suggested that the world’s greatest winner doesn’t have the right to say everything he said above, channeling one of his historical heroes. There is no gag order relating to any of his angry, paranoid rantings and projections that does not involve threats and intimidation of witnesses or public officials involved in his prosecutions.

He is free to do his dead-on imitation of the Führer, or to state that Hitler was a great person, and so unfairly misunderstood. He may describe in detail how he’d like to bring back an American version of Herr Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, or even declare that he loves Hitler, as it was Kanye West’s every right to say, whether he meant it or not.

The First Amendment covers a lot of fucked up and despicable things a person could say or write. You have the ACLU defending fucking Nazis’ right to spread Nazi propaganda as a First amendment issue, which it is.

A category of speech not protected by the First Amendment is fighting words, words which are intended as nothing more than a pugnacious “invitation to exchange fisticuffs”. Words whose only intent is to create ill will, stir rage and cause a lingering threat of imminent violence are not protected speech. If violence happens once as a direct result of your speech, and violence happens again after a similar speech and violence continues to happen as a result of your speech, then your speech has been shown to incite violence and is no longer protected by the First Amendment.

The scope of First Amendment protections for your violence-producing speech will be argued about by well-paid First Amendment experts for hire until the next riot your identical lies produces, then it will be argued about again, because the precise scope of fighting words has been narrowed by the Supreme Court over the years [1]. Like the high bar the ethics-free nine built for finding corruption of public officials, which now requires an explicit, provable agreement that both parties knew the deal was corrupt before corruption may be found. USA! USA!!!

[1] results of a quick search for an update on the 80 year old Fighting Words Doctrine:

Fighting words are words meant to incite violence such that they may not be protected free speech under the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court first defined them in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire (1942) as words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fighting_words

Why people hate lawyers

After 95 pages documenting the mountain of compelling evidence that then president Trump, loser of the “most secure election in US history” (Trump appointed maker of that statement immediately fired), intended to incite, and did incite, an insurrection [1], the violent riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 that disrupted the certification of Biden’s electoral college victory, the new judge, (appointed on January 10, 2023}, made her ruling about this particular insurrectionist’s right to be on the Colorado Republican presidential primary ballot.

She concluded that the oath mentioned in the Fourteenth Amendment, to “support” the Constitution, is very different from the president’s oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution and that, therefore, along with the President not being an enumerated officer of the United States listed in that clause, there was no problem with this particular insurrectionist being on the primary ballot in her state. All he is seeking is the highest office in the land, an “office” which was not mentioned specifically as an office in that clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. Here she goes, with the money shot:

313. Here, after considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that “officers of the United States” did not include the President of the United States. While the Court agrees that there are persuasive arguments on both sides, the Court holds that the absence of the President from the list of positions to which the Amendment applies combined with the fact that Section Three specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to “support” the Constitution whereas the Presidential oath is
to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, it appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section Three did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.


Which, of course, makes perfect sense…

[1] “Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” she wrote. “Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same.”

Rage rages, it’s all it can do

Have you noticed that when people are in a rage, angry on a deep level about things they can’t necessarily put into words and unable to calm themselves, only more rage makes sense to them?

The solid 35% of the country that loves wannanbe strongman Donald Chrump love him because he keeps fighting, no matter what. When he is proved wrong he just fights harder. When caught lying, or is criticized for echoing Hitler’s incendiary rhetoric, he angrily calls his critics liars, says they’re Hitler, with that winning sneer of his. “I know you are, but what am I?” His angry 35% love, love, love it. “You won’t be calling me Hitler when I put you in one of my camps, asshole…”

When the mountain of evidence against him in multiple criminal and civil court cases is steep and mighty he rages that it’s all a witch hunt, total lies told by hacks and peekaboo racist riggers, chiggers and diggers. His claims that the “most secure election in American history” (he fired the lying Trump appointee who lyingly made that claim) was rigged and stolen, by a cabal of Democrat [sic] radical thugs and traitorous, weak RINOs, while not provable in court, is still true! “Look how many millions of Americans believe it!” as Lyin’ Ted himself put it the day before the patriotic MAGA riot at the Capitol.

The bit that’s hard to wrap the old brain around, the bit I experienced recently in my personal life, to my great horror, is that even the most transparent and easily disprovable lies, as long as they inflame the emotions to righteous rage, can be very hard to resist, even for good people. For angry and or stupid people? A delicious slice of cake! You want to argue with a delicious slice of cake, you sick fuck? Go for it. Make my day, punk, what kind of assault weapon you bringing to the fight, pussy?

Trump plans blitzkrieg against all foes

“Today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communist, Marxist, Fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream…. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”    

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Source

God save us from Jewish Nazis. What the fuck, Stephen?

MAGA Mike

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner,” says MAGA Mike. If you want to know the rest of his views, simply read the new testament, he says. Read the Bible and pray to the only thing stronger than the two wolves democratically deciding the lamb’s fate.

. . . He advanced the conspiracy theory that Venezuela was somehow involved with the nation’s voting machines. On Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his Republican colleagues to block certification of the election on the grounds that state changes to voting in the face of the pandemic were illegitimate and unconstitutional. When questioned, during his first news conference as speaker, whether he stood by his effort to overturn the 2020 election, he ignored the question, and his fellow Republicans shouted down the reporter who asked it.

Mike Johnson Is a Right-Wing Fever Dream Come to Life

It’s obvious why the former president was so supportive of the new speaker. Mr. Johnson was “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” to Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020, as a New York Times investigation found last year. He made unfounded arguments questioning the constitutionality of state voting rules; he agreed with Mr. Trump that the election was “rigged,” cast doubt on voting machines and supported a host of other baseless and unconstitutional theories that ultimately led to a violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Johnson now refuses to talk about his leading role in that shameful drama. When a reporter for ABC News tried to ask him about it on Tuesday night, he would not respond; his fellow Republicans booed the question, and one yelled at the reporter to “shut up.” Such questions cannot be dismissed when Mr. Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Though changes in the law and Democratic control of the Senate make it much harder for the House of Representatives to impede certification of the vote, the American public deserves a speaker of the House who will uphold the will of the people, not someone willing to bend the rules of an election for his side.

Trumpism Is Running the House

The anti-ethics party threatens ethics probe

I don’t call these guys Nazis for no reason. This is from today’s New York Times:

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday abruptly put off its push to subpoena two conservative allies of Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas as part of a Supreme Court ethics inquiry that has met stiff resistance from Republicans.

Facing G.O.P. threats to engage in a bitter, drawn-out fight, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the panel’s chairman, halted his planned effort to compel cooperation from Leonard Leo, a longtime leader of the Federalist Society, and the billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

Mr. Durbin said that Democrats remained united in their desire to force more information from the men about undisclosed luxury travel and other benefits provided to the justices, but that they needed more time to assess a barrage of politically charged amendments that Republicans were planning to offer in an effort to embarrass them and derail the inquiry

It takes only simple math to understand the reason for this GOP opposition to investigating unethical rightwing extremists on the Supreme Court and the extremists with unlimited money and influence who support them after they lobby to get them appointed.

We get the democracy we deserve, I suppose.

Let the enemies of freedom tremble

Here’s MAGA Mike Johnson celebrating the overturning of Roe v Wade, in the summer of 2022:

“Late yesterday the Louisiana Department of Health informed abortion facilities in our state that the Right to Life has now been restored. Perform an abortion and get imprisoned, at hard labor, for one to ten years and you’re fined $10,000 to $100,000.“

You really have to watch the polite, quietly seething ones, especially if they’re smart. Another zealot handpicked by the orange Hitler wannabe, don’t you know.

New GOP litmus test, passed

When Ginni Thomas and her invitation-only nonprofit Council for National Policy brokered the deal between Trump and the evangelical leaders, prior to him becoming the GOP candidate in 2016, a key provision was that Trump choose federal judges from Leonard Leo’s list of loyal, well-trained right wing ideologues.   The promise to appoint only members of an extremist legal fraternity is one of the few promises Trump ever kept in his life.  The litmus test was judges who believed in their Christian souls that abortion was murder, and in the sanctity of the wealth of America’s greatest citizens.   The pastors threw their full weight behind the Flawed Vessel in their zeal to save fetuses.

Recall the other GOP candidates gathered on stage, at an earlier debate, none able to raise their hand that they agreed with the theory of evolution.  It would have cost them the Big Jesus vote to publicly go against the childish notion of God’s Intelligent Design.  Same with Climate Change, systemic racism, trickle down economics, regulation of polluters, tax breaks for billionaires, affordable health care, opposition to elimination of child poverty, opposition to an ethics code for their 6-3 Supreme Court majority, on down the list of their accursed orthodoxy.

New litmus test for the GOP:  Biden stole the rigged 2020 election, in conspiracy with hundreds of RINOs.  It is an article of faith now, believed fervently by 70% of Republican voters.    The brand new Squeaker of the House has declared that Trump won in 2020, he signed on to the Hail Mary Texas lawsuit (along with Cruz and dozens of other Republican all-stars), to overturn votes, a lawsuit so dumb the 6-3 Supreme Court threw it out, he voted to decertify Biden’s victory when Congress reconvened after the Trump riot on January 6th.  He swears Trump’s ass is delicious.

He passed the new GOP litmus test and was allowed to become Speaker.   A new fucking puto for Chrumpie to manhandle, to make himself feel powerful as his fake world collapses in on him.   God bless these United Shaysh.

the Boss