Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

DOJ headline few are reporting, damn it!

This excellent DOJ description of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, the one the RNC called “Legitimate Political Discourse” and FOX and friends characterized as a “meek, respectful tourist visit protected by the First Amendment” should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country and all over the internet. It is from the recent DOJ sentencing memo (pp 73-75) for several leaders of the riot convicted of seditious conspiracy, violence against police and other crimes involved in the successful, violent, successful disruption of the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021 to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president. Here is part of the statement of facts:

The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was a criminal offense unparalleled in American history.

A. Nature and Circumstances of the Offense and Need for the Sentence Imposed to Reflect the Seriousness of the Offense and Promote Respect for the Law

These defendants each played a role in an unprecedented conspiracy to oppose the transfer of presidential power. As the Court noted after the second trial verdict, the seriousness of these offenses cannot be overstated. For over two-hundred years, since President George Washington first voluntarily relinquished his executive power back to the people and set in motion a tradition that has formed the bedrock of our democracy, the American people have chosen their president through free and fair elections. Not force. To justify their actions, the conspirators called the outcome they disagreed with “tyranny” that would lead to an apocalyptic end of the country. They sowed doubt in others, riled up and recruited them to travel to D.C., and led them in an attack on the Capitol by giving the riot leaders, in the form of so-called Oath Keepers. Their oaths of service were not to the country, but to themselves.

The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was a criminal offense unparalleled in American history. It represented a grave threat to our democratic norms; indeed, it was one of the only times in our history when the building was literally occupied by hostile forces. By its very nature, the attack defies comparison to other events. Every defendant here joined a conspiracy that contributed to this unprecedented attack on our democracy.


Moreover, opposing the transfer of presidential power and attacking the U.S. Capitol building and grounds constitutes an attack on the rule of law. Leading up to January 6, the defendants and their co-conspirators believed their view of the Constitution trumped all others and anointed themselves the “Guardians” of their “Republic.”

These defendants attempted to silence millions of Americans who had placed their vote for a different candidate, to ignore the variety of legal and judicial mechanisms that lawfully scrutinized the electoral process leading up to and on January 6, and to shatter the democratic system of governance enshrined in our laws and in our Constitution. And when they did not get what they wanted, they acted by together attacking the very people and place at the very time when those laws were in action.

At its essence, these defendants’ crimes are the antithesis of respect for the law. “The violence and destruction of property at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 showed a blatant and appalling disregard for our institutions of government and the orderly administration of the democratic process.” As with
the nature and circumstances of the offense, this factor supports a lengthy sentence of incarceration. A lesser sentence could encourage further abuses not only by these defendants, but by others who disagree with the next elections in our country’s local, state, and federal governments. See Gall, 552 U.S. at 54 (it is a “legitimate concern that a lenient sentence for a serious offense threatens to promote disrespect for the law”)

(citations removed, except for last one.)

source

WOW, bad for MAGA!

First, ABC News, there is nothing “so-called” about these fake electors. They submitted fake certifications that they were the real electors and they all voted for Trumpie, claiming that Trumpie had won the electoral votes of Georgia, presumably by one ballot, that 11780 votes Trumpie was looking for. The real electors cast their legally certified electoral ballots for the actual winner of the election in Georgia, Joe Biden, who won by 11,779 votes. The Trump “electors” were fake electors, you corporate asswipes.

Second, ten of these MAGA fraudsters were represented by the same attorney, paid by one of the PACs that Trumpie’s minions send money to. That lawyer did not tell any of her ten clients about the immunity deals from Fulton County DA Fani Willis. Willis took that lawyer to court for her failure to inform them of her offer. Eight of the ten so-called MAGA assholes accepted her immunity deal soon after being informed of the offers. Yow!

You go, Sister Willis, most of the country, and the world, is rooting hard for you.

Now you know the rest of the obvious story…

Rather than fanning the vague and hateful lie that there is widespread voting fraud, on all sides, and here’s another example of it, reports should always mention that voter fraud in the US is fleetingly, statistically insignificantly rare, except for the Stop the Steal crowd. 

Here’s what is missing from the report on the previous post, and, no, it is not members of both parties who are warned by judges not to intimidate witnesses at their trials, that’s a MAGA/Mafia/Nazi thing.  Buried toward the end of the article published in the Times Union, dateline Troy, NY:

Crist is a former news reporter and longtime GOP political operative in Rensselaer County who has wielded enormous influence in local politics and for many years has been McLaughlin’s political confidant. Wallace is a former Republican legislative aide in the state Assembly and Senate who also has a private political consulting business. Gordon is a former Troy mayoral candidate and a member of the North Greenbush Town Board.

The charges include allegations that the trio conspired to use their official positions to violate the constitutional rights of subordinate county employees to intimidate them into requesting and filing absentee ballots, according to federal prosecutors.

source

What a fucking shock.

The age of disorientation

I’ve been bothered by the increasing angry incoherence at the core of our culture. It has really gotten out of hand in recent years but it has always been headed this way. I understand that in a culture that values only money and the things it can buy, a certain amount of incoherence will be necessary to sell poisonous substances for vast profit, to sustain an unjust, exploitative, extractive economic/cultural system that is destroying the earth itself for the benefit of a tiny, hereditary minority. Without the incoherence nobody would go along with this.

A recent example to stand in for all the rest of it, little white children are butchered in a Christian school by a maniac with an assault rifle. The obvious solution is to make it harder for maniacs, and everybody else, to get rifles designed to spray bullets to kill as many as quickly as possible. The obvious question is why anybody needs an assault rifle except for mass murder, but we’ll leave that aside. So the vast majority of us call for restrictions on access to these kinds of mass killing machines. What is the argument on the other side?

Make sure every little white child in a Christian school from the age of four always has an equally powerful assault rifle with them at all times to defend themselves against such maniacs, because freedom means that everybody is allowed to have any kind of deadly weapon they want anywhere. Look, the Second Amendment guarantees it! Forget those inconvenient opening words about a well regulated militia. A brilliant and fanatical right wing judge wrote those words right out of the amendment, as his doctrine of Originalism required. So you see there are two sides to this so-called debate.

Everyday there are a thousand more examples of this kind of desperately insane crap from people with an agenda to dominate in spite of the deadly consequences to the world of their domination. We are subject to a constant firehose of incoherent, maddening, divisive, profit-driven complete horseshit, misinformation, propaganda, lies, calculated provocative idiocy, whatever you want to call it. So the incoherence has long rankled me, of course, as someone who tries to resolve vexations by pursuing agreement on the things 99% of us can agree to, and we can build on that to compromise about other things. Obviously, though, if problems could be solved that way one person would not be thought a hero and a genius because they owned more then 10 million people including millions of children who go to bed hungry in the wealthiest country on earth, and those many thousands who die needless, preventable deaths for lack of healthcare and all the other externalities of a culture of billionaires.

What I realized after my recent disorienting brush with turning into Rush Limbaugh as my frustrations with post-surgical pain my painkillers did nothing to dampen, an idiotic post surgical lack of care and concern, enhanced by oxycodone, which while it didn’t cure my pain, certainly stirred my anger, my indignation, my strong sense that all of my feelings were extremely righteous, is that the raging machine that drives this culture is disorientation.

If we can’t agree whether it’s day or night, whether we are traveling east or west, whether medical precautions are wise or a form of tyranny akin to what the Nazis did to certain German homosexuals, we find ourselves demoralized and disoriented. When people are disoriented they will cling to literally anything to give their life some kind of coherence. The irony, of course, is that, because they are disoriented, they will cling to the most incoherent possible things in their need for coherence

We want to protect freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Common sense and common decency both tell us that if a little girl is raped she must be treated with the tenderest possible care, every consideration given to her health and recovery. 16th century Catholic theology, however, winds up trumping all of that, we must honor the sacredness of the rapist’s seed which has created sacred life in the tiny womb of that young rape victim. And so instead of balancing what Jesus Christ himself would have done against the right of a rapist to see his child born, six unappealable lifetime appointees, selected by a powerful psychopath from a list of people who believe they speak for Jesus Christ himself, rule that, if she lives in a certain political jurisdiction, the girl must carry the sacred fertilized egg to pregnancy and go through the agonies of childbirth even at the age of 10 or 11, for the sake of their beliefs. Their beliefs, mind you, not the girl’s, not the girl’s family, not other people who love the girl, not the greater good of society not the beliefs of anyone but the six who have the power to impose their will on everybody else in the name of the greater good, in the name of the actual son of God, according to the “one true religion” as written in the immutable, multiply amended sacred text that founded our great democracy.

If that shit is not disorienting to you , you’re much stronger than me, and I salute you, I guess. But the frame I’m seeing things in lately is that disorientation is the technique that is used to keep people from opening their eyes, becoming “woke” if you like, connecting history with the present and the future as a kind of cause and effect one might draw important lessons from in a world under growing threat from a dozen angles. What happened when people were allowed to forcibly grab, restrain, torture and hang people without consequences 70 years ago, 200 years ago, 1000 years ago is a pretty good indication of what will happen if we allow people to grab, restrain, torture and hang people without consequences today. It may be common sense to say this, but in the age of disorientation it is equally valid to say “why don’t you go fucking hang yourself, you woke, transexual libtard cuck? We burn books here, asshat.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the Age of Disorientation.

One tiny encouraging thought, incoherent rage may be a successful argument in the so called Court of Public Opinion for a solid 30% of the population. But in an actual court of law, where there are only a small number of cases they can be unappealably decided by unprincipled partisan judges ignoring the law and the facts of the case (see for example our Supreme Court), angrily arguing that the woman testifying under oath that you raped her is a publicity seeking, gold digging liar hired by George Soros and other evil global monsters (wink wink, see Q) who you wouldn’t fuck with Mike Pence’s dick, will more often than not come back to bite you in Mike Pence’s dick, as a matter of law, justice and common sense.