Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

The “Twitter Files” and Hunter Biden’s dick pix

Jim Jordan and the weaponization of government select committee have made a big deal about the supposed Twitter files, an even more explosive story than Hillary Clinton’s emails or her clear guilt in the death of four Americans at the embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Their claim is that Biden and the extreme left have used government power to coerce Twitter into censoring and suppressing the truth, including intervening to prevent posting of pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis. Just like the liberal corporate media! The Twitter files controversy may well be complete bullshit, but it’s something to get mad about!

When one of the world’s richest men, with unknown wealthy autocratic funders like Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, the ghost of Benito Mussolini, bought the public square that is Twitter, he immediately fired most of the content moderation folks and limited access to any view that did not agree with his right wing worldview. At the same time new CEO Musk gave unfettered access to right wing extremists, restoring accounts that had been banned, including the account of the architect and chief propagandist of the insurrection to overturn the “stolen election” of 2020.

In the interest of proving the vast Communist conspiracy against all wealthy people, Elon Musk turned over certain files to be exploited by the MAGA/America First weaponization of government select committee. Musk got once respected Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi to look at selected Twitter files to make the case that Twitter had previously been a partisan arm of the cucktard libtard deep state that has such hateful bias toward The Make America Great Again crowd. Taibbi and Jordan didn’t make much of a case, but here is an egregious example of some of the extreme anti-Trump prejudice of Twitter before it was purchased by Musk.

Trumpie tweeted this during the J6 riot, right before a crowd he’d whipped up with an hour of detailed, inflammatory lies about a stolen election, a crowd who’d already erected a gallows, began chanting “hang Mike Pence!” Note the provocative, unfair anti-Trump nature of the warning about the tweet:

This claim about election fraud is disputed

Taibbi once did great investigative journalism and wrote some excellent books, including a deep dive into the killing of Eric Garner on Staten Island by police, for the crime of being a big black serial committer of misdemeanors. In recent times Taibbi seems to have gone full MAGA. He doesn’t do too well defending his point of view against Medhi Hassan, coming off like a petty, defensive twerp. He gets mad when questioned about thanking Jim Jordan for the honor of testifying to the weaponization committee, and his praise of Lyin’ Ted Cruz. It is always great to watch Mehdi at work.

A timeless masterpiece by Heather

April 8, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

On April 8, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant was having a hard night. 

His army had been harrying Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s for days, and Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. The people in the Virginia countryside were starving, and Lee’s army was melting away. Just that morning a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant’s mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee still insisted his men could fight on.

So, on the night of April 8, Grant retired to bed in a Virginia farmhouse, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine. He spent the night “bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.” It didn’t work. When morning came, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.

As he rode, an escort arrived with a note from Lee requesting an interview for the purpose of surrendering his Army of Northern Virginia. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”

The two men met in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee had dressed grandly for the occasion in a brand new general’s uniform carrying a dress sword; Grant wore simply the “rough garb” of a private with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant general.

But the images of the wealthy, noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” he responded, before asking how many men needed food. He took Lee’s answer—”about twenty-five thousand”—in stride, telling the general that “he could have…all the provisions wanted.”

By spring 1865, the Confederates who had ridden off to war four years before boasting that their wealthy aristocrats would beat the North’s moneygrubbing shopkeepers in a single battle were broken and starving, while, backed by a booming industrial economy, the Union army could provide rations for twenty-five thousand men on a moment’s notice.

The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by men like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier’s uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work.

—

Notes:

U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885), volume 2, chapter 67, “Negotiations at Appomattox,” at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4367/4367-h/4367-h.htm#ch66

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© 2023 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

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NY Times cites John Yoo’s defense of Black Klansman Clarence Thomas

In light of recent revelations that Clarence and Ginni Thomas took many undisclosed lavish paid vacations (including a half million dollar luxury cruise in Indonesia) with, and recieved obscenely expensive gifts from, a right-wing billionaire and funder of the Federalist Society and other right wing causes, a far right real estate mogul named Crow who inherited great wealth from his father, the New York Times closes their short piece about the scandal with a quote from a former government official who also clerked for Clarence Thomas.

Coincidentally the former official was an author of the fucking torture memo, that secret legal fig leaf that made it “legal” for US contractors to violate international law and treaties that the US had signed, in order to go to the dark side fighting the “War on Terror.” Here’s fucking John Yoo with the last word on the latest unfair attack on Thomas in the “liberal” NYT’s short account:

John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who clerked for Justice Thomas and served in President George W. Bush’s administration, said he did not believe that vacations or gifts would play any role in the decisions he issued. The criticism of the justice’s ties to Mr. Crow, he added, reflected a broader campaign.

“This is part of this attack on him that goes back to ever since he joined the court,” Mr. Yoo said. “That somehow he couldn’t hold these views from his own free thoughts.”

source

Just the facts, ma’am

The Manhattan DA’s statement of facts in People of New York  v. Donald Trump begins:

1. The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election. 

2. From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York. The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.

Which, of course, is just the DA’a highly prejudiced personal opinion and another totally baseless, partisan witch hunt (like Mueller, the Rusher Thing, The Perfect Call to Ukraine Thing, The So-called “fake” electors thing, The Perfect Call to Georgia Thing, the Legitimate Political Discourse Thing, The Illegal Deep State Raid on Mar-A-Lago Thing), and, obviously, persecuted Defendant would have paid off the porn star he’d had a sexually explicit moment with ten years earlier even if he wasn’t running for president.  Then, this total LIE:

19. The Defendant directed Lawyer A to delay making a payment to Woman 2 as long as possible. He instructed Lawyer A that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public. As reflected in emails and text messages between and among Lawyer A, Lawyer B, and the AMI Editor-in-Chief, Lawyer A attempted to delay making payment as long as possible. 

20. Ultimately, with pressure mounting and the election approaching, the Defendant agreed to the payoff and directed Lawyer A to proceed.

It’s a quick read, and to me, a breath of fresh air after years of accelerating highly gaseous gaslighting.   You can see the “racist, degenerate, sick animal” DA’s entire statement of so-called facts here:

Statement of facts

BARR is back, baby!

Corrupt culture warrior Bagpiper Bill Barr is back, full stink, baby. Never one to shrink from a fight about who is the complete, evil asshole and who fights for Christ, Barr confidently dismisses the Manhattan DA’s case against Trump as a weak, pathetic, misguided political hit job on his boy. With great confidence he dismisses the theory of the case and the sealed charges that none of us have heard yet, with charge by charge theoretical analysis, no less. He then opines at great bad breathed length about how the case is held together with paper clips, string and spit. His summary is also great, I’ll spare you the 10 minutes, you can hear an odiferous bit of it here.

Meantime, Rupert Murdoch’s fair and balanced propaganda machine keeps pumping it out. As the imbecilic Jim Comer claimed on Fox yesterday, Alvin Bragg only thinks he has more power than the Congress of the United States of America and he’ll learn that when they drag him down there kicking and screaming (like the sick, deranged animal he is), subpoena be damned.

You have to picture it from these racists’ point of view, it would be like being a high ranking Nazi in Germany and having all these Jew lawyers drag you in front of Jew juries presided over by Jew judges. Who in their right mind would consent to a rigged game like that?

Nazis always “double down”

Trump’s DOJ told the Manhattan DA’s office to stand down as DOJ sheilded the boss from culpability for the cover-up of his timely hush money payment. The $130,000 was paid to shore up his injured campaign three days after revelation of his “you can grab ’em by the pussy” brag had hurt him in the polls. His bagman, Michael Cohen, was prosecuted, convicted and jailed for his crimes on behalf of Individual One, who was given a pass by his totally unweaponized DOJ. Total exoneration, like the Mueller witch hunt probe which led to the Michael Cohen conviction. Then, years later, the Manhattan DA investigated and brought politically motivated charges against the innocent leader. Then:

Another insane maniac takes assault rifles into an elementary school and massacres kids and teachers . Time to run the ad about how they want to call everything an assault rifle to completely disarm and slaughter us!!!

You can quibble that it’s unfair to call these people Nazis, just because they use all of the same techniques, and have the same ultimate goals. Fair enough, I suppose, if you find stuff like this perfectly cool: