Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Department of Justice, if you’re listening, Hunter Biden’s laptop!

In our advertorial culture, where the wealthiest interests have a billion ways to influence public opinion, no citizen can rely on anything, meaning that whatever we say or think is just as good as the exact opposite, which we can also insist on with impunity, if the timing is right, with no consequences for our credibility.    If you walked into this pay-to-play world from a place with traditional values about truth, fairness, the need for facts to back an argument, you’d think you’d gone mad.   

It’s part of a deliberate strategy, you can watch Putin do it every day (we are liberating Ukraine from Nazis! — wait, from US/Ukraine chemical weapons, from NATO…) and, of course his “not a puppet, not a puppet” whatshisname, the GOP leader.  If you have any doubt about the strategy of calling critical thinking into question being deliberate, look at this short fake news clip:

https://youtube.com/shorts/cOCe8yn85Sw?feature=share

We have Trump recently publicly asking Putin to take a pause in deNazifying Ukraine to give him some dirt on Biden.   And why not?  He did this without consequence when he withheld military aid to Ukraine in his perfect call to Zelensky (and Barr did his best to bury the verified, urgent whistleblower complaint).   He did this as a candidate when he said, spontaneously, during a nationally televised debate “Russia, if you’re listening…” and within a few hours Russia provided some dirt on Crooked Hillary (kudos to pardoned felon Roger Stone).  He did this regarding the over 100 acts of coordination between his campaign and Russian agents, documented for all-time in the Marco Rubio Senate Committee report.   He does variations on this every time he transactionally lies to gain some kind of political/personal advantage, including his Big Lie, (not the one about the disputed size of his dick) about a stolen election.  39%, we’re told, fervently believe this destructive whopper from the master of accountability-free obstruction of justice.

The Department of Justice, headed by the supremely cautious Merrick Garland, has given no sign it is investigating Trump’s now well-documented plan to sow the news cycle with outright lies about a stolen election, strong arm state Republicans into flipping electors, recruit members of Congress to repeat this lie, block the certification of Biden’s “stolen” victory based on the millions of Americans who pollsters showed passionately believe this lie, summon an angry mob to Washington D.C., use a crackpot legal theory to put a “constitutional” fig leaf on a last ditch attempt of elected Trump diehards to overturn the will of the American people as he whipped up and unleash an angry mob to hang Mike Pence, after putting out a false statement the night before wherein Pence “agreed” to hold up the certification.   We’re told it’s hard to show the former president had “corrupt intent” in doing all these things. There’s a puzzler for you, law and order fans.

The DOJ has, however, allowed Barr-appointed special prosecutor John Durham to finish investigating the “oringes” of the fake Mueller witch hunt, on the grounds that it would have seemed “political” to interfere with an openly political investigation launched by Trump’s gunsel to create more doubt about fucking Mueller’s totally “political” investigation.   Durham turned up very little in an investigation that went on longer than Mueller’s.   He found no deep state conspiracy to fuck Donald Trump.   Then we get this, today, from a long expose in the Washington Post about Hunter Biden using his father’s name and position to get millions of dollars from foreign oligarchs:

Hunter Biden’s overseas work has been the subject of heightened scrutiny. He has been under federal investigation as part of an inquiry into his taxes, with witnesses called before a grand jury as recently as last month. Federal prosecutors had been attempting to determine if he failed to account for income from China-related deals, The Post has previously reported, although it is unclear whether that is still a focus. Republicans, meanwhile, have pointed to the Biden family’s business deals in China, along with Hunter Biden’s past membership on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, as potential conflicts of interest.

Wondering why Congress’s contempt citation for Tea Party Jesus/Trump follower Mark Meadows has not been followed up on, in over three months?   The law, after all, requires DOJ to present the case to a grand jury.  Wonder no more.  Look, it’s all fake, OK? And now, a word from your rightful masters…

Recuse me, dear

Excellent discussion of recusal and judicial ethics (and lack of same) by James Downie at the Washington Post entitled Ginni Thomas text-message controversy is a symptom of a deeper rot.

Since news broke that Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent dozens of text messages to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows promoting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans have pooh-poohed calls for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the election and its aftermath.

“He’s a jurist who has a lot of integrity,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He’s going to make that decision and he has the right to do it.” Over on Fox News, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) argued, “I’ve watched Clarence Thomas for years and I’ve always seen him do the right thing.”

We shouldn’t have to guess whether Thomas will “do the right thing.” For far too long already, the justice and his wife have been allowed to play fast and loose with ethical standards.

source

Thomas will always “do the right thing” according to his far-right belief system, in which this innocent victim of a “high tech lynching” must do whatever he can to advance the cause of his deeply religious, yet always “transactional,” tribe.

GOP: Black female judge who ruled that presidents aren’t kings, “soft on pedophiles.”

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had the perfect opportunity last week not to act like a bunch of Nazi jackals. They simply could not resist the opportunity to rail at a black woman federal judge with overwhelming credentials to be the next Supreme Court Justice (including her temperament and demeanor, the opposite of petulant, hissing Boof Kavanaugh’s). They had the chance to demonstrate that they still have the capacity to make decisions based on things other than partisan zealotry . They blew it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/27/by-trashing-jackson-gop-magnified-right-wing-courts-legitimacy-problem/

Celebrity news March 28, 2022

Wake up and take a look at the headlines in the paper, if, like me, you cannot refrain from doom scrolling.  I also check youTube for a quick, surveillance capitalism-curated primer on what people who don’t read the paper think is important and whoa!, there’s Will Smith charging up to a comedian and smacking him in the face on live TV then threatening him if he doesn’t take Smith’s wife’s name out of his fucking mouth.  He angrily says this twice to make his point.   The comedian behaved with great dignity, after Smith, who initially laughed at the in-poor-taste joke (at the expense of his wife’s alopecia), lunged on to the stage, Jack Ruby-like, and slapped Chris Rock, hard.  Rock was philosophical “…that was the greatest night in television history” he said while managing not to rub his stung cheek.

Americans, of course, did not see this moment of TV history — you know how the fucking “f-word” can destroy a young life (it clearly destroyed mine).  You can see it here:

On a similar censorship note, Putin’s Supreme Court has closed down the Russian archive that documented all the atrocities of the Second World War.  That’s what you do when fighting Nazis.  Here’s Brook Gladstone with the story The Death of Historical Memory.  

Speaking of Nazis, the Washington Post had a long piece entitled Inside Ted Cruz’s last-ditch battle to keep Trump in power about hard-line Tea Bagger Lyin’ Ted Cruz losing friends after his ardent defense of the Big Lie (spread by Cruz who announced, on January 5th and 6th, that 39% of Americans believed his lie) and his pivotal, essential role in the January 6 insurrection conspiracy.   My first thought was — Cruz had friends?   One was J. Michael Luttig, the former federal judge, a movement conservative (as they call themselves) for whom Cruz, and John “Greenbay Sweep” Eastman, once clerked (don’t worry, Cruz and Eastman are still cool).  Cruz said of Luttig “he was like a father to me.”   Luttig was the author of a NY Times op-ed defending Barr’s decision to do Trump a favor in dismissing Mike “Lock Her Up” Flynn’s guilty plea (fucking Comey should’ve done the right thing), and his discretion in calling the lies Flynn pleaded guilty for telling “immaterial”.   He has since come out against Trump’s riot at the Capitol, advocates closing loopholes in the Electoral Count Act that Cruz attempted to drive a convoy of anti-vax trucks through, and had some unflattering things to say about Cruz, about whom there is little flattering to say. 

Unless, of course, you are Ginni Thomas, who used her protected First Amendment right to voice any opinion whatsoever, in this case in a series of texts to Trump’s chief of staff urging him to fight the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, the certified, recounted results of which horrified this apocalyptic right wing Christian extremist.   Ginni is famously married to movement conservative Clarence Thomas.   Thomas, always taking his cues from his master, the brilliant, evil Antonin Scalia, has refused to recuse himself from cases involving his wife’s high-powered political activism (among other things she’s on the board of the secretive non-profit that brokered the deal between Trump and the Evangelicals prior to the 2016 election [1]).   Clarence Thomas did, however, recently disclose that Ginni had recently  taken in over $600,000 for such work, as required when updating his financial disclosure forms.  Now she’s being politely asked by the January 6 Committee to come in and invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, over and over.  She will likely demand a subpoena, that she will refuse to obey, but presumably Clarence has her back if the case makes it up to his rarefied, unappealable court, the group of lifetime appointees that claims to enforce its own ethical obligations.

The Trump Six on the Supreme Court have been fairly loyal to the incompetent, insane fuck who appointed half of them, ruling (often on the Shadow docket, no debate, no legal reason needed) in a way sure to make America as great as it was in the era of de jure segregation, back alley abortions for the poor and homosexuals Biblically stigmatized, out of faithful loyalty to what the top preachers claim Jesus loves and hates, the only guide needed by these carefully vetted zealots.

Speaking of loyalty oaths, former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yavonovich revealed the other day that Trump’s goons, before smearing her reputation with lies and having Transactional Trump unceremoniously remove her from office, tried to get her to sign an oath of personal loyalty to the leader of the GOP.   A loyalty oath?   As we call it the Führer Oath:

“I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and People, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.”

Seriously though, Cruz had friends?

Cruz, with a damning placard implicating Ketanji Brown Jackson as a RACIST

[1]

Ginni Thomas sits on the board of directors for the powerful, secretive, right-wing political activist nonprofit Council for National Policy — here is their deal with Trump in 2016:

NELSON: . . . Cruz is a formidable intelligence and strategist. He was not a winning candidate outside Texas. So the fundamentalists convened something like a thousand leaders and representatives in New York City in June of 2016 at the Times Square Marriott. They brought Trump out to parade him before them, and they had a number of leaders from the Council for National Policy there on the program. And publicly, what that event was about was to sell Trump to this thousand fundamentalist leaders, many of whom had been Never Trumpers, and they were like, “This is going to be your guy. You need to go home and tell your flocks that this is the plan.” But the second part of that agenda involved meetings where they cut a deal with Trump. They said, “You don’t have a war chest, you don’t have ground troops for the election canvassing, you don’t have a strategy. And all indications are you’re going to get creamed.” So we have all three of those that we can put into your service. But in return –

GARFIELD: We have a shopping list. 

NELSON: We have a shopping list, and it’s basically got three items.

The first one was enact some of our policies by executive orders. So when suddenly the Republican platform has this new anti-trans, anti LGBT language that was literally written by the president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, Trump enacted the anti-trans policy for the Pentagon against the Pentagon’s wishes, which, you know, the Pentagon said, “This is disruptive of our operations and trans people are not a problem,” but Trump had to deliver on his deal.

The second part was to create an evangelical advisory council. Obama had a religious advisory council, but it included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims. This one was 100% Protestant, and none of these other religions needed to apply. The leadership of this council were in and out of the White House on policy discussions and photo ops on a weekly basis.

The third was by far the most important, far reaching, and devastating to our democracy. And that was when they got Trump to agree that any federal judges he nominated would be approved from a list that was submitted by three organizations run by members of the Council for National Policy. These were the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Now, what business the NRA has in recommending federal judge nominations? I do not know, but that’s how it played out, and after his first confirmation, he invited the representatives of these groups, most of them from the Council for National Policy, for a little victory luncheon at the White House.

the rest of the story

Rescinding endorsement for anti-recission incumbent

One of Trump’s most vocal lackeys in the run-up to the MAGA riot was Alabama’s Mo Brooks. Clad in a bulletproof vest, as he later admitted, he exhorted the January 6th Stop the Steal crowd to spontaneously surge down to the Capitol and “kick ass and take names,” to get back what was stolen from them, the greatest president in American history, a man who simply could not lose in an honest fight.

Predictably, the transactional Artist of the Deal was not going to take any shit, even from somebody who had so loyally serviced him. Brooks, who Trump had endorsed, is running third in the polls in Alabama and so the great man recently decided to rescind his endorsement.

Trump’s absurdist soundbite was that Brooks had become “woke”. But, of course, it soon came out that Trump had rescinded his endorsement, in large part (Brooks running 3rd in the polls also large) because Brooks, surprisingly a lawyer, told him a few months back that it was impossible to rescind Joe Biden’s presidency and reinstall the rightful loser, Donald Trump, as Trump had demanded. “Rescission” was the word Brooks kept returning to, a technical word Trump must have learned as courts applied recission to strike oppressive clauses from Trump contracts. Brooks clarified that Trump wanted him to rescind the election. How a congressman would do that is hard to say, but his refusal, obviously, was intolerable so Trumpie did what Trumpie always does when a lackey removes his lips from Trumpie’s ass , pitched a lying hissy fit worthy of his boy, Boof “Crucified by the Clintons” Kavanaugh.

Foof… the fucking Orange Polyp and his entitled ilk are exhausting…

Federalist Society orthodoxy

Irony is dead, yo. Justice Coney Barrett made this claim at the fucking Mitch McConnell Center sitting right next to McConnell until she got up to speak. McConnell who had saved her a seat on the high court as well, and ram-rodded her historically quick-stepped nomination through the recently non-filibustered (by McConnell) confirmation on a partyline 51-49 vote during the middle of the 2020 presidential election.

To think that a judge of great integrity would participate in a sprint for an illegitimate Supreme Court seat, during voting in a presidential election, well, that’s partisan hackery right there, that!

Anyway, as Mark Meadows texted to Ginni Thomas in the days leading up to Trump’s MAGA riot at the Capitol:

“This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

LOL!!!! 😃😂😀

Good op ed on Clarence Thomas, unprincipled culture warrior

Keep in mind that the legal standard for recusal (applicable to every American judge outside of the unappealavle top nine) is an APPEARANCE of impropriety or conflict of interest. From today’s New York Times:

Justice Thomas has paid lip service to this ideal. “I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” he said in a speech last year. “That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardize any faith in the legal institutions.”

Ginni and Clarence Thomas Have Done Enough Damage https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/ginni-clarence-thomas-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkS1UZBibSRdkhrxqAwvfOxro9w3T6JTKYTz1PivgVBI2J4ALRf7dmf50zwzGfDpdnAYMYecZTnKVZLlA_DE6huIeFk5AIZC5s-N3rB28_mp-RVut9rDG7YCywdbgugeDh4huMbmToWqfV1GYzZ1ow-esTflCs330PxqnHA7Q1joE4haF9c8g8ETQQZyCKvO3qCQF-P7iFZhLd7Ao0U4JJSG2Z3I7cu_9bLlIkWR-RR2h_4G089NpaJNocWa70JBQlc8L86q4DvsvRYyAg8AArys0pj1V5YQ

Extremists will be extremists, especially if they believe the entire world is against them and they have to fight by any means necessary, as these right-wing, USA! USA!!! chanting motherfuckers here always do, in their divine struggle.

Ginni Thomas, patriotic Christian soldier

From today’s Washington Post:

Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

the entire article is here

On a separate but related note, why hasn’t DOJ indicted Mark “Tea Partiers for Jesus” Meadows for his months’ old contempt of Congress? What the fuck, Merrick?

Oy, for Christ’s sake!

Ginni Thomas, wife of überconservative Supreme Court justice and victim of a “high tech lynching” Clarence Thomas, is an überconservative political activist who fancies herself an ardent follower of Jesus Christ.   She would follow Jesus anywhere, apparently, including the overturning of so-called democracy.  She worked closely with the deeply religious Donald Trump and communicated many times with his pious Christian final chief of staff Mark Meadows after the election was stolen by Satanists.  The two exchanged fervent texts in the days after the Donald’s loss to Joe Biden in an election that horrified them both.  Some of these texts were turned over to the January 6 Commission and written about in detail in today’s Washington Post.   The fervent Christian tone of many of these texts citing the intercession of the King of Kings and casting the middle-of-the-road Joe Biden as the embodiment of evil has ’em saying “oy, for Christ’s sake!”

At the center of those who supported Trump in 2016 were the thousand Evangelical leaders who were told by the Council on National Policy (the secret far-right nonprofit organization that Ginni Thomas sits on the board of) to hold their noses at the stench of the prolifically sinning spray tanned Flawed Vessel, in exchange for sacred promises that would advance their Christian fundamentalist jihad.   To cement this unholy alliance Trump swore to appoint religious Christian Supreme Courts justices who had been carefully vetted for conservative Christian values by Leonard Leo [1] at the Federalist Society (a Catholic, true, but we can’t always be choosy when fighting evil), appoint only Protestants to the president’s religious advisory council (created to promote interfaith dialogue and cooperation), to get rid of a poor woman’s right to abortion, cut taxes on the wealthy and the rest of the Jesus Agenda, all approved personally by the King of Kings.

It should come as no shock that the extreme right is full of messianic Christian evangelists who believe Jesus Christ wants the US to be a conservative Christian theocracy, the Framers’ so-called explicit First Amendment right of religious liberty in the be damned to hell.   Christian fundamentalists have long been associated with far right campaigns of all sorts, going back decades.   Why does every American president dutifully attend the Christian prayer breakfast where they can piously hobnob and pose for smiling pictures with far-right religious fanatics/lobbyists?   Only Jesus, and the secret donors, know.

Here is an excellent piece by Greg Sargent, commenting on the shock of the conservative Joe Scarborough on reading the Thomas-Meadows texts that cast Trump’s struggle to remain in power in messianic terms, in the black and white total war terms of America’s white Christian punitive version of Sharia law.

https://wapo.st/3tFhE17

God help us all.

Jesus apparently loves this asshole

[1]

Leonard A. Leo is an American lawyer and conservative legal activist. He was the longtime vice president of the Federalist Society, where he is co-chairman of the board of directors. Leo has led campaigns to support the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.Wikipedia

Racism 101

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the horror show of outraged GOP members on the Senate Judiciary Committee making fiery sound bites for MAGA nation by attacking a supremely qualified future Supreme Court justice (Manchin and Sinema permitting). I knew the Democrats would be unable to make these bigots shut up, improvisationally challenged corporate institutionalists that many of them are. Chris Hayes and his team assembled a nice, hideous little collage of angry white senators attacking the nominee about her race, a passion play that no doubt played bigly with their Trump-addicted fan base.

Clarence “Black Klansman” Thomas called questions about his ongoing sexual harassment of Anita Hill during his confirmation “a high tech lynching.” Now these Trumpists are going old school, making open racism (particularly against women of color) great again, no need for tech of any height: so you’re Black so you support CRT instead of Originalism, the Christian way; what about violent crimes committed by your people, rape and murder, and RAPE and RAPE; and what about this children’s book accusing babies of being racist, babies for Christ’s sake? [1] You fucking wrote it, didn’t you? Didn’t you, you fucking liar?

The clip, starting with Tennessee genius Marsha Blackburn (“tell us honestly about your hidden agenda to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our abortion jurisprudence”) runs just over a minute, and as you listen, try to picture any of these provocative, idiotic “questions” asked of one of the carefully vetted right-wing judicial activist ideologues appointed, filibuster-free, by Putin’s favorite totally exonerated American president.

[1]

Lyin’, Toadyin’ Ted, in prime form, like when he said to the dignified Attorney General “give me a break, Garland… You admitted that giving a Nazi salute is protected expression under the First Amendment and you’re making a big deal about a little Nazi salute, oh, my God, the guy did a Nazi salute! What’s America coming to, MAGA nation, when you can’t even give a goddamn Nazi salute to some know-it-all fucking metrosexual quinoa eating smart guy at a school board meeting?”

This turd literally has no idea what decency is, or good citizenship, or the American ideal.