This story snuck by fast, leaving barely a ripple, but coming on the heels of the Department of Justice appealing Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling that Bill Barr’s disingenuous “deliberative” Mueller memo must be released to the public, it is alarming. The Washington Post:
The American Civil Liberties Union of D.C., Black Lives Matter, other civil liberties groups and individual protesters accuse Trump and senior officials of driving the June 1 events. Military, federal and local police forcibly cleared the square using batons, clubs, horses, pepper spray, smoke and fired projectiles 30 minutes before a citywide curfew began. Images of violence drew a national backlash against Trump’s calls for “overwhelming force” to put down those he called “THUGS” and domestic terrorists. The nation’s top military official later apologized for walking with Trump before television cameras that day.
Lawyers for the ACLU said that despite legal precedents, the government’s defense would “authorize brutality with impunity” in the heart of Washington at one of the most symbolic spaces within the seat of the federal government.
DOJ lawyers argued a few days ago that the case must be dismissed. They argued that the ACLU’s lawsuit over the June 2020 violent dispersal of a peaceful crowd so that Trump could walk to a photo op must be thrown out because the President and Attorney General were acting within the scope of their authority, Barr exercising the “paramount” government interest of protecting the president when he ordered federal anti-riot police to use force to drive a peaceful crowd from Lafayette Park.
The Washington Post notes that right before Trump’s walk to the church to menacingly hold up a Bible:
Trump called on governors to “dominate your city and your state” in the hours before the crackdown, adding, “In Washington, we’re going to do something people haven’t seen before.”
Earlier, he tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” as protests raged in Minneapolis. Trump also threatened that if demonstrators outside the White House breached its gates, they “would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs and most ominous weapons I have ever seen.”
Finally, the suit asserted that even as police moved on the square at 6:43 p.m., Trump spoke a few hundred yards away in the Rose Garden, saying, “[If] a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”
The ACLU had the better argument, that peaceful protesters have rights that prevent the federal (or state) government from burning, beating, shooting or giving them asthma attacks with chemical irritants:
The lawsuits seek damages and a court order declaring that authorities conspired to violate civil rights statutes and the First and Fourth amendment rights of protesters injured after being burned, beaten, shot or put into respiratory distress.
As Trump told his riled up supporters during his #Stop the Steal rally on January 6:
“When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by very different rules.”
Presumably the same goes for lawful protesters, when they represent something as ugly and divisive as police accountability for the murder of unarmed, unresisting citizens — when they refuse to stand down in the face of concrete threats and ultimatums, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.
The DOJ, because, as it points out, the current president would never use violence against peacefully protesting anti-racists, moves to dismiss the case against Barr and Trump on those grounds, and on the grounds that Barr and Trump were acting completely within the scope of their duties when they used violence against a crowd, after numerous ugly provocations and threats by the president and the Attorney General, culminating in a calculated show of unconstitutional force to violently and “illegally” deprive citizens of their rights.
Compare Trump and Barr’s response to the peaceful protest on June 1 to the federal response to the January 6 riot, during which a violent crowd of excited normal tourists fought police, breached, overran and vandalized the Capitol to prevent the final certification of Trump’s loss to Biden. Because, when you’re with president Trump, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.
Nothing to see here. If you have asthma, don’t go to a peaceful protest that might be broken up by unaccountable government force including pepper spray, smoke bombs, stun grenades, tear gas and the armed charge of horse-mounted anti-riot police — in defense of the president’s unlimited right to provoke and order violence. You have to use common sense!
I am thankful that American court cases, however otherwise messed up and biased our system of justice is, are still decided based on the available evidence, facts proved in court, beyond a reasonable doubt. The ideologues on the Supreme Court can sometimes employ narrow legal theories to overturn a trial judge’s findings, invalidate or uphold a law, but judges in our trial courts are generally constrained by the facts in evidence in the case before them.
Some of our judges are heroic in this perilous moment when a Big Lie is better than the truth to millions of our countrymen. I think of federal judges like J. Nicholas Ranjan, appointed by Trump, who nonetheless took days to write a 140 page appeal-proof ruling dismissing Trump’s evidence-free voter fraud case as the seamless tissue of bullshit it was.
Another judicial hero is Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a trial court judge on the DC federal court. The trial judge’s first job is fact-finder, the court establishes the facts of the case before applying the law to the facts in evidence. Appeals courts review only alleged errors of law by the trial court. It is extremely rare for an appeals court to disturb the findings of fact by the trial judge.
Judge Berman Jackson’s fact finding sets out a great deal of detail in her rulings, she illustrates her decisions with vivid facts from the record. She recently denied the motion for pre-trail release filed for enthusiastic Trump rioter, Karl Dresch, after weighing the facts before her.
Here are few of the colorful facts she provided to support her findings, excerpted from many letters in support of Dresch’s motion for pre-trial release, from a long footnote of examples:
T.L. (pastor of a local church): “[Defendant and his wife] are not yet members of the church.” “We have shared a few meals together, and [defendant] has done some work for the church. . . . That is the extent of our relationship.” “[As] a fairly quick judge of character . . . I do not believe that [defendant] is any real danger to our community or government. I ‘think’ that [defendant] got wrapped up in a movement and made some very foolish decisions.”
A.P. (defendant’s longtime family friend): “While [defendant] may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and got swept up in the unfortunate events of the day, I cannot imagine that he had any intent to inflict injury to persons or property.”
P.L. (defendant’s longtime friend and local attorney): “[Defendant] has very strong political views concerning government, in particular the legislative and executive branches, and law enforcement.” “[T]o be candid, [defendant] has occasionally exercised rather poor judgement.” “I have never known [defendant] to be violent in any way nor do I believe him to be flight risk nor a person who would obstruct justice.”
S.F. (casual acquaintance of defendant for past two years): “I can vouch for [defendant’s] sincere friendly character, morals and integrity over the time I have known him.”
In laying out the facts that support her decision to detain Dresch as a flight risk, and a danger to society, she includes a few pages of his social media posts, here’s one, from January 7:
On January 7, 2021, defendant commented on an unidentified post that “Mike Pence gave our country to the communist hordes, traitor scum like the rest of them, we have your back give the word and we will be back even stronger.”
and:
Bro you shoulda been there . . . . the news is all fake . . . and just to correct shit . . we wasn’t violent but we took the capitol . . . . antifa didn’t do it they may have had some idiots undercover in the crowd but it was us that got in . . . and we didn’t fuck shit up . . . I seen a broken window . . . we picked up water bottles and shit cleaned up . . it was grand . . . best day ever . . . I think it was a good show of force . . . look what we can do peacefully, wait til we decide to get pissed.
Of course, there is also a detail like this. In his home in Calumet, Michigan:
Among other items, agents located several hundred rounds of rifle (7.62) ammunition, a Russian rifle, shotgun shells, a shotgun, and an Atlanta Braves backpack. The ammunition was located in multiple places throughout the house, including the dining room, the master bedroom, an upstairs hall room, and inside the backpack. Specifically, the backpack contained a Pilot gas station receipt from Hagerstown, Maryland dated January 5, 2021, a Metro SmartTrip card, and 8 boxes of 7.62 ammunition, containing a total of 160 rounds. The boxes matched the boxes of ammunition found in the house. The firearms were identified in the Michigan State Police Report as a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun and a Russian-made SKS 7.62 mm x 39 caliber rifle.
The Judge then turns to Dresch’s motion to set him free until the trial and analyzes the applicable law, in light of the facts.
Defendant argues that that government lacked sufficient grounds to move for his detention under the Bail Reform Act. Section 3142(f)(2) states that the judicial officer shall hold a hearing upon motion of the government or its own motion in a case that involves “(A) a serious risk that such person will flee; or (B) a serious risk that such person will obstruct or attempt to obstruct justice, or threaten, injure, or intimidate, or attempt to threaten, injure, or intimidate, a prospective witness or juror.”
Then she sets to work ruling that the section 3142(g) factors support detention on the grounds of dangerousness by clear and convincing evidence(and here, due to formatting limitations, I will not indent, but the following is all from the May 28 decision)
A. The nature and circumstances of the offense charged
The United States Capitol was not open to the public on January 6, 2021.
There was important business going on, though, because on that day, in accordance with Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, a joint session of Congress was convened to certify the vote of the Electoral College in the 2020 Presidential Election.
This was after every single one of the fifty states, including those under Republican control or with Republican election officials, had certified its own count, and after court challenges to those counts or certifications had been rejected by more than sixty courts across the country – by state judges, and also by federal judges appointed by Presidents of both parties, including former President Trump. Vice President Mike Pence, also a Republican, was present and presiding, as the Constitution required. See U.S. Const. art. II, § 1.
The United States Capitol Police, federal law enforcement officers surrounding the building, and the members of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department who were summoned to assist, were overcome.
Defendant was one of many individuals who made their way through the barricades and past the officers who were attempting to keep the crowd away from the building. He was one of the individuals who entered the closed building. And that day, the certification process prescribed by the Constitution was interrupted as members of Congress of both parties and the Vice President had to be spirited to safety or were forced to barricade the doors or hide.
(back to me) These facts are not in dispute. The “normal tourists” who forced GOP elected officials to flee for their lives and barricade themselves in safe rooms while these normal tourist crowds, after smashing their way into the tourist attraction, roamed the halls chanting “hang Mike Pence” and calling for “Nancy” to come out and face the music, had been whipped up by Trump and the most extreme members of his remaining extremist support group. Like this guy:
The judge quotes defendant again:
Ok all you conspiracy theorists . . . don’t worry I loves you all just setting the record straight. antifa did not take the capitol. that was Patriots . . . don’t give them the thunder, we the people took back our house, the news is all bullshit. and now those traitors Know who’s really in charge.
As to Dresch’s likely future actions, the judge cites the incendiary power of Trump’s ongoing lie:
Defendant’s promise to take action in the future cannot be dismissed as an unlikely occurrence given that his singular source of information, (“Trump’s the only big shot I trust right now”), continues to propagate the lie that inspired the attack on a near daily basis. See generally From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk (last visited May 27, 2021). And the anger surrounding the false accusation continues to be stoked by multiple media outlets as well as the state and federal party leaders who are intent on censuring those who dare to challenge the former President’s version of events.
She sums up, a few pages later, after reciting defendant’s criminal history, including a drunk driving high speed chase (he did an impressive 145 miles an hour crossing from Michigan to Wisconsin to evade police) that landed him in jail, he served prison time in both states:
Given defendant’s offer to return to Washington to engage in a similar effort to disrupt democratic processes again, his warning that authorities here cannot reach him at home, the utter contempt he showed for law enforcement and the safety of the community during the high speed chase, the threatening remarks directed at an individual who was reporting participants in the attack to the FBI, defendant’s other convictions for obstructive conduct, and his knowing possession of multiple weapons and a considerable supply of ammunition after two felony convictions, the Court has clear and convincing reasons to believe that defendant poses a danger to the community that cannot be alleviated by the imposition of any conditions.
The court of public opinion may contain tens of millions who sincerely believe that Tom Hanks traffics and rapes children, then kills them and drinks their blood, and that because of heinous freaks like the falsely smiling Hanks, our country is in mortal danger and only Donald Trump can save us.
The American court of law, so far, has been fairly consistent in requiring proof, beyond the sincerely, even passionately, held opinions of those who honestly believe that their violence is necessary to save us all from Satanist, pedophile, cannibal, socialist, fascist, antifa, BLM culture warriors, dangerous monsters like blood-drinkers Tom Hanks, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, George Soros and company.
Fair is fair, when dealing with uncompromising transactional extremists.
In fairness to the 35 courageous Republicans who showed up today to vote for the filibuster to block formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 riot, they and many close colleagues might well be implicated in the planned insurrection, or just as bad, forced to commit perjury if called to testify, so you can hardly blame them for objecting.
Some who voted “nay” today may well have career-related reasons for paranoia and legitimate concern, particularly those, like Lyin’ Ted Cruz [1], Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, Lindsey, who made fiery speeches about the millions of Americans who believe the election had been stolen from their leader, how they are entitled to a special commission to thoroughly investigate disproven claims of voter fraud to protect the integrity of the election process before Biden could be sworn in, and then, after the riot, voted to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Then amplified ridiculous claims to keep the lie that fomented the riot alive in everyone’s social media feed, on cable news and all over the internet.
There are many intriguing questions we don’t yet have answers to about Trump’s MAGA riot at the Capitol, basic questions of fact.
For example, how many of the rioters currently on trial for violently breaching the Capitol on January 6th were given guided tours of the building by radical new members of Congress, like the Jew-loving firebrand from Georgia, on January 5th?
How many then headed over to the torchlit rally headlined by fiery Q-Anon enthusiast Mike “Lock Her Up” Flynn and self-proclaimed Republican Ratfucker Roger Stone that night?
How many members of Congress, and their staff, were out in the ruckus on the streets of DC, excitedly whooping it up the night before the riot, fraternizing with the extremist “militias” and those ready to fight the Steal?
Many simple questions will require perjury to answer in a way favorable to Mr. Trump.
Was Kevin McCarthy’s colleague lying when she affirmed, in an affidavit introduced at the second impeachment trial, that Trump had told an agitated McCarthy “Well, Kevin, I guess some people are more upset about this than you are” and that Kevin responded “who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”
Yes or no question, Kevin.
Was your colleague lying when she swore to the veracity of those two quotes?
As Robert Reich wrote yesterday, on the eve of the rigged vote to further obstruct justice:
The 35 GOP zealots who gave the thumbs down on debate may have shot themselves in the demanding Trump’s dick today, though. A Democratic party controlled House Select Committee will be far worse for them than the bipartisan one they negotiated for, and then, after Democrats agreed to all their terms, voted to prevent debate on.
Showing as much character, integrity and artistry in deal-making as their leader himself. They filibuster because their dear leader can’t get over his temper tantrum about the election he insists was stolen from him, in spite of his muscular efforts to rig it in his favor.
That’s the real devilish ugliness of the filibuster — it prevents DEBATE, public discussion of the merits of the issue under consideration. In the legislative house where open debate is required before lawmakers decide what is best for our great nation, or, as today, with the prevention of any debate, what is in the best interests of an insane giant baby.
Paging senators Manchin and saucy Kyrsten Fucking Cinema…
How about Bezos’s recent Washington Post puff piece calling radical Trumpist Senator Josh Hawley “a fierce defender of the Constitution”?
As noted, the ongoing danger of a Big Lie is the culture of lying it brings about, many other lies must be told to support the Big One. The election was stolen (not true) therefore we have a right and responsibility to bring the thieves to justice (hang Mike Pence!) and no puny police force is going to stop us (Blue Lives Matter!) we love our flags (nothing wrong with our Confederate flag, “n-words”) and some of us will beat police officers with the flagpoles (“when you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules”).
Today the united position of the GOP is that any claim they ran for their lives on January 6 is a bold-faced lie, they were never afraid of the innocent, totally unarmed (virtually no firearms seized afterwards) law-abiding mob they barricaded the doors against and fled from in terror! They claim there is no need for any investigation — which could have dire political consequences for certain elected officials (like the firebrand from the state of Q) who may have aided the peaceful mob — unless you also investigate the claimed terrorism of Black Lives Matter, antifa and the treacherous machinations of traitor Republicans. You do remember the (rare) rioting Barr and Trump used to bring in federal riot troops night after to restore peace in the first of many “anarchist jurisdictions” that needed pacification after the totally justifiable murder of George Floyd and massive nationwide so-called “peaceful” protests by violent haters!!!
Then we have this sobering (and encouraging) poll about the apparently declining but still prevalent Republican belief that Blacks, antifa and disloyal Republicans stole the 2020 election for Biden (down from 70%, by the looks of it) and some eye-popping number crunching (from Heather Cox Richardson’s latest):
If that 14% contains the politically committed 0.01%, the group that has most of the money in America, well, we see the results every day. You get the “spontaneous” creation of the nationwide Tea Party, Election Integrity laws that make it harder to vote, Stand Your Ground Laws that make it easier to legally kill people you’re afraid of, Anti-Protest Laws that make it a felony to assemble while granting immunity to those who run over now felonious protesters in the street, and for religious types, a solid anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court to finally end government coercion and ensure maximum liberty, etc.
We’re in one heap of a mess, folks, but I like the direction things are going. With every new detail that comes out about the US under Mr. Trump and his gunsel Bill Barr (check out the Manafort stuff– his actual lies to Mueller are now laid out, un-redacted, in black and white [1]), things look a little better, justice-wise. It is inconceivable to me that honest investigations, grand juries and actual prosecutions will not change the face of GOP politics in the coming months. If only fucking Sinema and Manchin had the integrity of your average turd…
“You’re a turd, Widaen! You stink a mile, pal!“
[1]
O`DONNELL: And what was your reaction to what we learned in the newly- unredacted — well, we, the public, learned in these newly-unredacted documents about Paul Manafort dealing with the Mueller investigation and the ways he kept lying to them about Konstantin Kilimnik?
SCHIFF: Well, it`s pretty interesting because in two respects. First, you`re right. It shows Manafort was a bigger liar than we knew, and we knew he was a pretty big liar to begin with. But it also shows the degree of collusion between the campaign chairman for Donald Trump and Russian intelligence.
Here Manafort and Gates, his deputy chairman, are repeatedly giving an agent of Russian intelligence internal polling data, internal strategic documents about their efforts in battleground states and key demographics within those battleground states.
So, you know, this is going on while the Russians are doing a secret social media operation to help the Trump campaign. And so it`s hard to find something more graphic than that in terms of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians and the same Russian intelligence that`s working on the social media campaign.
But what`s also interesting about it is this is now the second federal judge in ordering these things to be unredacted, who has essentially said Bill Barr was misleading the country, misleading the country by saying there was no evidence of collusion, misleading the country by saying that he was compelled to conclude that you could not indict the president on obstruction.
And he`s also — the judge is also saying that essentially Barr has been dishonest with the court about what that memo is about. It`s not about just deliberations.
Apparently it`s about spin. And it`s for that reason, because it`s about how do they spin this pre-decision, this predetermination that they weren`t going to indict the president no matter what — how do they spin that? That`s not something that can be concealed from the public. So it`s interesting at many levels.
It is a scary thought, breathing out and never breathing in again. Anxiety often expresses itself in this image — I can’t breathe! — Oh my God! — the breath catching, a rising fear of no more oxygen coming in, not enough oxygen, drowning on dry land as the last bit of sand tics through the hourglass of the long soap opera that was, until a second ago, your life.
I saw only one last breath in my life. It was my father’s. A few minutes earlier he’d sent everyone else away, telling them I’d stay with him, that everything was fine. They went down to have a break, to eat dinner in the hospital cafeteria. My father waited until they were gone and then said “I don’t know how to do this.” I assured him that nobody did, that it would be fine.
The moment of his death, maybe fifteen minutes later, was perfectly captured by some poetic Jewish writer two thousand years earlier: like removing a hair from a glass of milk. His death was entirely peaceful, his breathing gently slowed and finally stopped. His last breath was gone a few seconds before I knew it for sure. One benefit, I understand, of dying from liver cancer, it just quietly shuts everything down, making you more and more tired until you simply…
You might think knowing that we all will die would bring out the best in us, our empathy, our higher nature. It is a humbling thing to understand that every life ends with a last breath, the humblest of us and the mightiest. Sadly, the fearsome inevitability of death leads many to indulge the worst side of themselves. Might as well take as many of these fuckers down as I can before I die in a glorious hail of bullets!
We’re living through a time as bad as any in human history. This is a time of vast human panic, irrationality, fear, rage and hopelessness. There are good reasons to be afraid, to be angry, to feel hopeless. Look at the facts. Heck, just look at the lies.
During a deadly, highly contagious pandemic we had autocrats in several large countries telling their nations that the whole thing was a hoax created by our enemies, only weak people believed it, only the pathetic died from it. It would be over soon. No need to worry. A few million died worldwide, continue to die, whose fault is that? Don’t blame the Strongmen!
Our own exceptional American Strongman, the orange one, simply told the nation it was not his fucking problem, that’s what States’ Rights are for, let the states fight it out, that’s what the Constitution was written for, the Civil War fought over.
A few months later, before and after another party-line acquittal in a “partisan” impeachment for doing nothing but speaking his angry mind, in a masterful show of his epic, childish will, he refused to accept the results of the election. He attacked the counting of the votes cast by the American people, denounced it as fraudulent, tried to convince state officials to change the certified vote tallies.
His case is pretty much air-tight, in his mind: a president who, according to the lying polls, had supposedly never cracked 50% in popularity during his time in office got more votes in 2020 than he did in his landslide of 2016. His vote tally, 74,000,000, almost 47% of the vote, set a record for votes cast for an incumbent, therefore– obviously– he won. He continues to insist he won, in a landslide.
His opponent tallied 81,000,000 votes, and there is no real question about those numbers, so Trump and his myrmidons kept reminding people that this corrupt, lying, sleepy, nefarious puppet of the Chinese Communist Party had stolen the election by nefarious means, exactly as he predicted his opponent would do when he himself was attempting to rig the election (in part by conspiring to limit mail-in voting, smug Louis DeJoy ruthlessly removing urban mailboxes and dismantling high-speed mail sorting machines in cities, backed by hundreds of lawsuits and aided in this anti-theoretical mail fraud campaign by no less than Bill Barr)!
70% of the former president’s steady 39% believe the election was stolen from their man, in fact, more than that — 70% of all Republicans. $50,000,000 was spent on an advertising campaign to convince the credulous that the election had been stolen from Trump, no matter what Republican state officials, and every court Republicans brought lawsuits in, kept saying. Finally, another $3,500,000 was spent to organize the rally the Capitol rioters attended to get fired up right before they marched down to breach the Capitol, like normal tourists, and Stop the Steal on the day the vote for the thieving Biden was being certified and made official.
Outside of the millions Trump milked MAGA nation for, all the dark money that funded this incendiary lie came from secret sources, like the money that funds “climate change skepticism” during a time when we are witnessing new instances of rapidly unfolding climate catastrophe weekly. Among these dark money funders, and possibly the smartest of them, is Charles Koch, an evil zombie who refuses to die. Koch (the surviving Koch Brother — Charles and David beat their other two brothers to a pulp in years of litigation) is the mastermind engineer of the radical right-wing long game.
Koch enjoys plenty of company and generous tax-deductible support among his well-born, fellow-traveler classmates. Their billions make sure the credulity of the masses of “low information” Americans serves the cause of liberty from government coercion. The autistic genius billionaire Robert Mercer, who supported Lyin’ Ted to the end, threw his money, expertise and support behind Trump, when the time came, and Mercer’s support– plus the campaign-saving introductions to Steve Bannon and Kellyanne “Alternative Fact” Conway — was critical to the Mercer family’s new candidate’s success. Their endgame is all the same. Pay no tax, preserve absolute liberty from “coercion”, have a strong, violent police force, and fuck the poor.
Men like these die only after inflicting tremendous suffering on as many of the rest of us as possible. It seems to me that the suffering they inflict means as much to them as the profit they reap from inflicting this harm. We had one of the worst of them, for four years, attacking almost everybody in the world, daily, on his hyperactive Twitter feed. It was quite clear from his angry, vindictive behavior, that no victory was complete for him without somebody he hated being publicly humiliated.
His America longs for the good old days, when a rich guy like him could hire goons to break legs, have a mob string up any charismatic opponent, call in a favor from the military, if things got really bad between him and the workers he was trying to screw out of their pay.
Those great lost days when America was great, before the “political correctness” that has made us a “laughingstock” are what MAGA is all about. A time (before women could vote, apparently) when bitches didn’t need $130,000 bribes to keep their big mouths shut about a great man’s innocent “side-action,” when angry Blacks (ungrateful for not being enslaved AND being allowed to vote) didn’t try to sell this horse-shit about their lives mattering, when politically correct losers didn’t suddenly become “woke” and believe that crap about “all men being created equal”.
Obviously that’s not true, they say, people were never created equal, the men who wrote that owned other human beings, creatures they regarded as inferior. There are such things as genetics, eugenics, blood, soil, glory, after all. Only a weak nation allows itself to be taken over by soft-hearted eggheads who think they know everything, feel superior because they arrogantly feel the “truth” is on their side.
This MAGA type dies, like anyone else, but the worst of them are prepared to do things, like participate in a violent mob to stop an election being certified because their enraged leader lied to them, that more thoughtful people wouldn’t do. They die, no question, as we all do. The only question is how many of us will breathe our last before they’re done fouling the air with misdirected anger, miscalculated vengeance and unquenchable desire for the illusion of total domination?
I don’t know what it will take for Sinema and Manchin to stop behaving like oblivious obstruction-enablers and recognize the filibuster for what it is and has always been– a tool of obstructionist racists, first slaveholders ably assisted by their public servant, and inventor of the Senate filibuster, John Calhoun, and later generations of Dixiecrat klansmen who used it to block all anti-lynching and civil rights legislation.
The filibuster does not encourage “bipartisanship” as these two asshats keep insisting. It promotes the opposite, particularly when one of the parties embraces the radical “alternate reality” of their enraged leader. As the filibuster is currently constituted, it allows one member of the minority party to block debate on anything not budget-related, with an email. Then it’s 60 votes or suck it if you want to discuss a bill on the Senate floor.
Here’s a point Schumer should make to those two holdouts, today — OK, you don’t want to abolish the filibuster, not ready to go there, fine. What’s your objection to changing the rule back to what it was just a few years ago — you stand up and talk and when you stop talking, if nobody else from your party immediately steps up, filibuster over? Why not put the burden back on the party filibustering, instead of the one trying to get on with normal Senate business?
And we add this second change to the filibuster rule — we’ve banned reading the phone book or Dr. Seuss, canceled Green Eggs AND ham, your standing, talking filibuster has to be speeches on the merits of your meritless objection.
Make those two changes to the filibuster rule and it’s game over for Mitch, Lindsey, Lyin’ Ted, Hawley, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin and their Big Lie embracing ilk. There is no merit to their positions on anything in the debate over voting rights, the violence of American policing, investigating the January 6 Trump riot, raising the minimum wage, doing everything that can be done to avoid climate catastrophe.
Their objections and obstructions are frequently based on demonstrable lies — as in the ridiculous and dangerous case of their now “peaceful” January 6 non-insurrection.The clown in Congress who recently dismissed the Capitol riot as a normal tourist event is on videotape screaming and crapping his pants as he frantically barricades the door against the peaceful MAGA tourists on that sunny January 6. Those 70 Capitol Police who’ve retired or quit since the peaceful riot? Faint-hearted alarmists who do not know a transformational lie when they see it.
I truly don’t get why that reasonable change to the out-of-control filibuster rules would even be an ask for Sinema or Manchin.
Then again, they don’t pay me the big bucks to suggest these kind of policy strategies. I hope this will be the issue that finally gets Democrats off their asses to pressure the two “moderate” holdouts to get the filibuster under control.
If not this issue — a bipartisan investigation to hold the lying propagandists and provocateurs responsible for the riot at the Capitol that stopped the certification of a fair election as members of Congress hid from the peaceful tourists (and later Kevin McCarthy announced that there’s no debate that Biden is the president), truly a matter of Superman’s “Truth, Justice and the American Way” — what issue would be important enough?
Manchin and Sinema could continue to enable Mitch and the slim minority to hold on to its unchecked ability to obstruct until one of the older member of the Democratic caucus finally has a debilitating stroke (as many of us often feel about to have when reading about Manchin and Sinema). Then, that day, hello Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and goodbye filibuster, motherfuckers!
A friend, depressed by the depressing political news that is fed to us steadily, asked me to only send her news items that contained a ray of hope. I mustered a little hope, which I will describe below.
It may seem only a small glimmer of a bright side, though all hope can be seen that way. This bright side could be the cusp of a political tipping point in our violent clash of cultures. It is nice to imagine that our Department of Justice will now pursue justice, cast a careful eye over the evidence of the Mueller and subsequent Senate investigations. A legal examination of a series of very openly transactional quid pro quos is certainly in order.
It is worth pointing out again, humans are not often ruled by reason or logic. If we were, it would be hard for nationalist racism and fascist logic to prevail in so many countries worldwide. There would be no debate, in a reasonable world, about the right of everyone to live free of terror and violence. In most places that’s a proposition you will need to fight about.
Of course, we have never lived in a calm or reasonable world, and those of us who hope for rational public debate that ends with more fairness for everyone will be waiting a long time. Here in the US we’re at the mercy of a no-compromise/filibuster political party that is anti-debate and has the means to stop any important political discussion before it happens. That we may not succeed in convincing adversaries this fierce of anything they don’t already believe doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to act.
We need to keep in mind that it is impossible to convince anyone of anything just by clearly presenting the facts. The facts never add up to much, if you already hold a strong opinion about the matter.
At a time when a lie carries as much weight as an indisputable truth, and Big Lies have often changed the course of history, we must be creative in how we present our accursed “facts.” We have to take care to avoid sounding smugly superior (as the rest of this sentence no doubt fails to do) to those who fervently worship at the altar of powerful emotion, low-information voters of unshakably held opinions, based strictly on faith, which they believe to be infinitely superior to fallible human “rationality”.
The biggest obstacle to convincing anyone of things that are otherwise true and urgent (like the need to take energetic action to avoid total climate catastrophe) is the ease of spreading even the most easily disprovable lies in siloed, algorithm-driven echo chambers on “social media”. One of our two major parties is now, officially, the Party of the Big Lie (Trump, the loser, actually won — in a landslide), at a time when spreading a lie to millions who will never see the lie contradicted has never been easier.
The most important measure to reverse this pernicious, increasingly deterministic trend, is holding liars accountable for spreading lies. There is currently no price to be paid for spreading even the most obvious lies. In fact, in Trump’s GOP, aggressively promoting a featured lie is a certain path to promotion. See how quickly anyone who calls out the lie is attacked and unanimously canceled by quick voice vote.
There is a simple test for weighing the value of absolute “free speech,” including demonstrable lies, against speech that should be actionable in court — the harm that the false speech causes. It is the same test applied to all other free speech [2].
Under our current law you can’t shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theatre when there is no fire, because a panicked stampede is predictable if you do. Free speech does not protect an American’s right to use words to inflame hatred in a way that predictably leads to violence. Violence-provoking lies should be treated the same way in the on-line world.
How about this for a single, absolute ground rule:
promoting, supporting or endorsing an incendiary lie over “social media,”
AND
refusing to publicly retract the lie when confronted with evidence that it is a lie, and called on it by the platform’s monitors, means that you forfeit your right to use the platform.
Period. Sounds fucking simple enough, no?
Of course there will be violent contention about what is “incendiary” as well as the definitions of “promoting” “endorsing” and any other words chosen.
It is often easier to see the incendiary nature of a lie after the fact, looking at events in light of the lie. That’s why Twitter banned Trump for life after his long, lie-filled speech on January 6th sent thousands down to the Capitol to violently interrupt the counting and final certification of Electoral College votes against Trump. When Trump eventually went on Twitter to disperse his mob, he told them they were right to be angry, that they’d been cheated, the election stolen from them all, that they were special, that he loved them, to never forget this day, but that it was time for them to go home in peace.
Twitter immediately did what it probably should have done years earlier — took away the platform Trump used on January 6th to remind rioters in the Capitol that Mike Pence had betrayed them. If they’d found Pence, and strung him up, would our discussion today be much different? Hard to know, though I think probably not, at least among Trump die-hards, now the dominant strain of the GOP.
The full damage of a lie is not when it is first told. The real harm sets in each time the lie is replicated, insisted on, every time someone else is converted to belief in something that is destructively false.
The predictable growth cycle of a lie is its most dangerous aspect.
Justifying the January 6 riot at the Capitol requires endless new lies — BLM did it, antifa faked it by posing as a MAGA mob, there was no riot, only Trump supporters died (so where’s the harm? That one trampled to death? shit happens) the cops were lying, only a few of the 140 “injured” were seriously hurt, the “lost eye” story is bullshit, the cop who was “killed” died of a natural heart attack, the videos of the rampage were fake, the protesters were law-abiding, nonviolent tourists, for the sake of our country we need to just move on, there’s no need for a Commission, radical Democrats are just trying to get revenge out of blind hatred of Trump, like they always do, and so on.
While we live in this Age of Trump, the age of wildly insane lies taken, literally, as gospel, the only good political news I see at the moment is the heavy shit storm gathering over the head of the defeated former president who insists he actually won in a landslide. The evidence of Trump’s lifelong pattern and practice of cheating and obstructing justice is rapidly mounting. His day of reckoning in several different courts of law approaches.
I don’t see how he beats the rap in the upcoming Georgia criminal case, where he violated the election meddling statute with great thoroughness and specificity– and is recorded doing so. His best hope may be a stand-off between Ron DeSantis’s Florida troops and federal forces in an interstate extradition battle.
A criminal conviction and more major losses in civil court (where cases are decided, 99% of the time, based on the evidence), plus the conclusions of the January 6 Commission, should loosen Trump’s death-grip on all but the diehard 39% of his cult of personality. Full public disclosure of the extent of Trump’s corruption and contempt for the law will give his many mostly silent, terrified enemies on the right a shot of courage.
Revelations from the likely Rudy Giuliani prosecution should have a similar effect, even in our arational nation. I think bad news in court for Trump could sway many “swing voters” away from his party. When he had an attorney general who would constantly fix things for him, Trump didn’t need to worry about the law coming down on him. Now he has great reason to worry about the law finally catching up with him, after a long life of getting away with whatever he wanted because he’s super smart, and a big star, and, when you’re like that, you know, they let you do it.
The pieces seem to be nicely lined up for an obstruction of justice case:
Former White House Counsel Don McGahn will finally testify under oath that Trump asked him to create false records of their conversation about firing Mueller. Having Trump’s first White House lawyer testify that Trump told him to create a false record is a firm building block for an obstruction of justice prosecution.
Trump’s most competent and accomplished enabler, Bagpiper Bill Barr, the AG who advised Trump to have his people defy all subpoenas and muzzle critics, is in the federal court record as a man judges found “lacks candor”. Three federal judges, in three different cases, concluded that Barr’s rationalizations were not credible and his legal reasoning was in the service of partisan politics. Barr was most recently found “disingenuous” when he tried to illegally conceal other records, falsely classified as “deliberative memos” drafted the day he misleadingly told America and the world that Mueller’s report had found basically nothing on Trump.
Barr’s demonstrated lack of candor, and his relentless. public re-election campaign-related criminal investigation into the the origins of the Mueller “witch hunt” require a DOJ re-examination, based on the actual documents. The same goes for Barr’s rationale for falsely announcing that the Mueller Report basically exonerated Trump for both criminal conspiracy with a foreign power and obstruction of justice.Barr’s conduct was an integral, and crucial, part of that obstruction of justice.
Barr’s repeated untruthfulness, including his lies about the secret Mueller “memo” he classified as supposedly used in his deliberations to declare Trump “exonerated” as he’d promised to do before Trump hired him, will come into play in the obstruction of justice case against Trump.
Add to that all the evidence that has come out since Mueller concluded he had insufficient evidence to find “criminal conspiracy” between Trump’s campaign and the Russians. We have more details about Trump’s corrupt quid pro quo pardons to Manafort and Stone, both of whom lied to Mueller for Trump’s sake, to cover up their closely coordinated work with the Russians. The secret internal polling data that Manafort gave Putin (via Kilimnik) steered Russian influence efforts toward American voters in close districts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three states that gave Trump his Electoral College victory [2].
There are a hundred other related details including Trump’s partially successful attempt to disrupt a joint session of Congress (mission accomplished) to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the election he still claims he won in a landslide (70% of Republicans polled believe Trump won in a landslide). How about his enlistment of Republican allies like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, each of whom made pilgrimages to meet with him in Florida in a show of loyalty, to promote his Big Lie and continue to obstruct formation of a January 6 Commission?
Truly sickening that it is taking so long, but such is life in a democracy hovering on the brink of extinction. It takes time for a prosecutor to make a strong, airtight case ready to be tried in court. Hopefully the rule of law will prevail, before it’s too late for law.
You people are such fucking losers.
[1]
outside of the unlimited dark money “free speech” of corporate persons, of course.
[2]Remember this?
The most important states, though, were Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she’d have won the electoral vote, too.
A purge is almost never a good thing, though in the sense of a good vomit after gross overeating or over-drinking, it makes a lot of sense. A new democratic government does well to purge diehard fascist members of the former government, but in general, purges are the work of autocrats who need to periodically weed out the disloyal and make terrifying examples of them. A frightful spectacle of vengeance deters those inclined to think for themselves instead of doing exactly what the leader demands.
When I hear the word purge I always think of the underground chamber where my favorite writer, Isaac Babel, was condemned, after a long stint in prison, one of millions of victims of Stalin’s purges. Babel pleaded with his interrogators, men who worked for Beria [1], Stalin’s chief of torture, to let him just continue writing. Babel’s mock trial was short, only a couple of minutes in that tiny, airless room, after which he was taken from that dark chamber and into a nearby courtyard for a couple of gunshots.A trunk of Babel’s unpublished writings, safeguarded by his friends, disappeared, never to be heard of again. That’s a purge.
Yesterday the GOP purged Liz Cheney from Republican leadership in a basement room at the Capitol, by a voice vote. This shouting out of “yay” or “nay” spared potential embarrassment for any individual Republican who would otherwise be on the record in favor of removing Cheney for the high crime of insisting that a violent riot, caused by Trump, watched worldwide on live television, had taken place on January 6, to support a lie that Trump had won the election in a landslide.
You don’t necessarily want your face attached to a vote to do that, since you can’t predict the future, so you meet in a large room in the basement, in a kind of lynch mob, and do it fast. The “yays” have it, Liz Cheney is purged. The whole thing took 16 minutes.
The problem with a purge that does not actually kill your enemy, as any good dictator knows, is that the opposition tends to organize around leaders who remain unbowed during a purge. Cheney, as hideous as her torture-endorsing right-wing politics are — and she is truly a chip off the old aptly named Dick Cheney — has taken a basic and principled position against perhaps the boldest single lie in American political history. Certainly the boldest lie ever told by a president who sent a mob to stop the certification of an election he lost, and, if they got lucky, lynch his vice president and decapitate the government by taking out the next two in line, Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Leahy.
“Stop the Steal”, in a nutshell, is the wildly counter-factual idea that Trump had the election stolen from him, by a bipartisan cabal of evil bastards, after four glorious years during which his ruthless enemies continually persecuted him for no reason except their radical hatred, that he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide, as he still insists he can prove.
How much courage does it take for a Republican to admit that the whole Trump thing, with its $50,000,000 ad budget to spread the infuriating lie (an ad buy that ended on January 6), with its $3,500,000 organizing budget to bring a massive crowd to Washington, DC to forcibly shut down Congress and “stop the steal,” is a lie? Trump’s claim that a rigged election was stolen from him is one of his trademark “transactional” lies, this one based on the paranoid fantasy of a former president who cannot accept the reality that he lost an election.
You would not think it would take much courage, but outside of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, you seldom hear a peep from the Red team to contradict the obvious lie of their vindictive strongman leader.It would be nice to hear from Reince Preibus, John Kelly, Mad Dog Mattis, Sessions, Barr, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Chad Wolf, former Trump cabinet members Elaine Chao and Betsey DeVos (both of whom resigned right after the January 6 riot) and many others, on this. The united cowardice and calculation of virtually all Republicans in support of America’s Greatest Lying Loser is hard to fathom.
We are balanced on the rim of an active volcano, all of us, along with our democracy. This is going to remain an ugly fight, but it is a crucial fight, existential.
I take a certain amount of consolation from the actual facts in evidence and from the general rule of actual proof in our legal system. Virtually every lawsuit based on a demonstrable lie must fail, as we saw over and over with the dozens of Trump/RNC election lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of their claims. There are very few cases where a judge has the discretion, by ruling narrowly along an ideological crevasse (a Boof Kavanaugh speciality), to rule in support of ideology and contrary to the facts. It must be done with skill to avoid being overturned on appeal (unless you write for an unappealable court, of course, as Kavanaugh now does).
Our legal system is in many ways brutal, openly favoring the rights and privileges of the wealthy, and corporation persons, over everyone else. Criminal justice is applied in a systemically unjust manner that routinely incarcerates small-time criminals (disproportionately “non-white”) while leaving the most powerful criminals free to ply their lucrative trade. There is no legal enforcement of “ethics,” a concept applied on a strictly voluntary basis by anyone with the power to decide whether to abide by ethics recommendations.
For all its flaws, our legal system is bound by rules that even the most partisan judge cannot simply ignore. For example, you can insist on your deeply held opinion that Hillary Clinton is a vicious criminal who needs to be locked up. To lock her up you will need actual proof of a crime.
In the case of Trump and his loyalists, their crimes are many, and now shown with more and more powerful evidence. Now that Trump is no longer a sitting president (even Kevin McCarthy admitted yesterday that Biden is the actual president [2]) he does not have the shield of that OLC memo about not indicting POTUS.
Trump and his followers have been brazen, and relentless, but not always very smart. Even the purportedly brilliant legal mind of Bill Barr was addled, and not always smart, while he served as Trump’s zealous gunsel for the second half of Trump’s term. The entire story of Trump’s seamless obstruction of justice (new chapters written daily, stay tuned!) is now fair game for prosecutors and juries, and more and more facts, previously hidden (as part of the obstruction) are coming to light.
To take one thread as an example:
Former White House Counsel Don McGahn, interviewed under oath by Mueller’s investigators, recounted a shameless attempt by Trump to obstruct justice, followed by an even more shameless attempt by Trump to have McGahn create a lying record, denying that Trump ever made the first shameless ask.
McGahn’s public testimony under oath would have been deadly to Trump during the first impeachment trial (had Pelosi had the wisdom to allow an additional article of impeachment for Obstruction of Justice based, in part, on the ten examples Mueller laid out).
Even though Republicans under McConnell had the power to prevent all witnesses from testifying in the first impeachment “trial”, as they did, after vowing to work closely with Trump’s defense team, no chance could be taken that would allow McGahn (a right-wing zealot in his own right, promoter of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for Supreme Court) to be deposed or testify. Barr suggested Trump invoke an imaginary all-encompassing presidential immunity that covered anyone Trump had ever talked to from ever testifying to anyone. McGahn’s subpoena to testify was held up in court for two years. Until the other day, when his long refusal to obey the subpoena ended with a deal for McGahn to answer a few questions [3].
We now have published facts that were hidden from Mueller, from the public, some key facts were zealously hidden by our disingenuous former Attorney General. It now is possible, for example, to prove that Trump’s then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had a direct channel to Putin in his long-time friend Konstantin Kilimnik, and gave the Kremlin important secret polling data that allowed Russia to help Trump most efficiently. The facts are going to continue crushing Trump and his myrmidons in court.
It is dangerous, of course, to underestimate the power of organized rage and blind obedience in human affairs. Our experiment in democracy faces a grave danger from the forces of enraged white grievance and a party that now speaks for that grievance in one voice, “the yeas have it”. This free-floating anger has found an avatar in Donald Trump, an unapologetic hater, a man who will never, ever stop fighting.
It would appear, looking over his public history, that Trump, an angry bully since childhood, lives to fight. This fight-to-the-death-and-beyond spirit appeals to certain underdogs who feel that fighting is their only option. It also appeals to all cynical Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham types who simply attach themselves to what they perceive to be power, in any form. The fight is waged amid the silence of the mass of GOP officials and absurdist claims by little known partisans like Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), who insist, during public testimony, that footage of the “riot” was no different than what could be shot of any tourist group, they were just there enjoying themselves!
By not actually stringing Liz Cheney up yesterday after the mob shouted its approval of her being stripped of her party leadership position, Trump’s followers in Congress may have made a huge mistake. If I had to bet on a Republican presidential candidate for 2024, my money would be on Liz Cheney over DJT. For one thing, it may be very hard, no matter how strong and organized the denial is, for Trump to run against the findings of the eventual January 6 Commission, and the verdicts in state criminal courts of Georgia and New York.Last time Trump had the indomitable Bill Barr fixing everything for him, this time, no such luck for Donnie Bonespurs.
[1]
Naturally when Beria, one of history’s most infamous sadistic torturers and rapists, was eventually arrested (in one of Stalin’s final purges, I think) he cried, screamed and whimpered like a terrified baby. I guess it occurred to him that if “what goes around comes around” is true, he had a horrible death waiting for him. Which he sure enough did.
[2]
“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters after meeting with Mr. Biden and congressional leaders at the White House to discuss infrastructure spending. “I think that is all over with. We’re sitting here with the president today. So from that point of view, I don’t think that’s a problem.”
The House Judiciary Committee and the Biden administration have struck “an agreement in principle” to resolve a two-year-old fight over a subpoena for testimony from Don McGahn, a former White House counsel to President Donald Trump, lawyers said in a court filing on Tuesday evening.
Trump has not signed off on the deal, however, according to the status report submitted to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The former president could try to take legal action to block any testimony from McGahn, but the filing from the House and the Justice Department — now under the control of appointees of President Joe Biden — seems to try to head off such a move by noting pointedly that Trump “is not a party to this case.”
As the battle for the “soul” of the Republican party (and our democracy) rages, let’s take a look at the sometimes subtle difference between a thing proven to be true and something widely believed to be true, although shown definitively to be false.
Let’s leave aside the contentious issue that is motivating the GOP’s energetic changes to voting and protest laws in so many states, The Big Lie. We can agree (hah, watch this NY Times move) that many see The Big Lie as the one about a rigged and stolen election, and constant violent rioting by protesterswhile millions of others, trusting in Trump, see The Big Lie as the one about the “rigged and stolen” election NOT being rigged and stolen and the liberal myth that police and right-wing militia violence is worse than that being constantly perpetrated by lawless Blacks and crazed antifa terrorists who are destroying our nation.
That kind of agree-to-disagree compromise, by the way, is the sort of meaningless question-begging truth-telling that minimizes truth itself.
The Big Lie seems too obvious a black and white, plainly true or clearly false wedge issue to resolve at the moment, beyond what each side insists is the case, no matter what objective facts exist. It’s like the controversy over the January 6 Trump-instigated riot at the Capitol [1]. We’d need an actual bipartisan (or better, nonpartisan) commission to get to the bottom of that one, and at least 39% of the population is dead set against that kind of thing. These investigations, they believe, are partisan witch hunts — like impeachments — designed to make our country’s greatest former leaders look weak and corrupt.
I saw a couple of items yesterday that struck me as good examples to look at when assessing what is actually true and what is the kind of exciting fiction that can be weaponized as propaganda. I will leave it to the reader to decide which is likelier true and which has a funny smell. The opinion silo you live in will play a large role in which way you go on these, but see if you can tell which of these counter-narratives are more likely true and which more likely propaganda.
On the perennial debate over whether unregulated gun ownership is a right or a privilege, American deaths by gun far outpace those of any other country (I think there is one Central American country, or possibly Sudan, in our league for gun deaths — oh, my! look, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela and Hondoras all beat us!). Simply a fact, we’re at the bottom of the pack worldwide for highest total killing by gun. We don’t include in our gun death statistics (at the insistence of the gun lobby) the tens of thousands of annual suicides by gun. Hear the familiar “guns don’t kill people, people kill people (including themselves, which doesn’t count)” mantra. Look at these two stories side by side:
Disapproval of Biden’s gun policies might well reflect a desire for a stronger stance. In April, a Morning Consult/Politico poll showed that 64% of registered voters supported stricter gun control laws. We have had an average of ten mass shootings a week in 2021, 194 in all. (A mass shooting is one in which four people are killed or wounded.)
You can see a nice example there of how definitions are so important in any discussion. If you only shoot three people and grievously wound or kill them, that’s no mass shooting. Fair is fair. Let’s contrast this permissive attitude toward gun homicide and mass shooting with this recent example from another country:
In Russia, at least nine people were killed and 13 others hospitalized after a pair of gunmen reportedly opened fire at a school in the city of Kazan. Russian media reported one of the shooters — believed to be a teenager — was arrested by police while another attacker was shot dead by security forces. School shootings are very rare in Russia. Immediately after Tuesday’s assault, President Vladimir Putin said he had ordered Russia’s government to immediately begin work on tightening gun ownership regulations.
Maybe Putin is lying when he says he ordered a tightening of gun ownership regulations, or maybe he actually did order it. Hard to know, but we’ll know by and by. When new Russian gun regulations are enacted it will be announced, and it will make world news.
Voter suppression to insure election integrity and electoral purity?All of the fire and fury in the lead up to the 2020 election was against the massive fraud that was predicted to result from mail-in voting and votes dropped into drop-boxes by people afraid of catching COVID-19 by showing up to vote in person.
The entire claim of a rigged election that could be stolen by Biden (the only way he could win, according to Trump) was based on the massive fraud that could be pulled off by voters not showing up in person to vote. That’s why Louis DeJoy removed high speed mail sorters and took mailboxes off the streets in Democratic leaning areas. Attorney General Bill Barr supported the unfounded claim, scoffing that the likelihood of such fraud was too obvious to need more than a snorted “it’s obvious” by way of explanation. A few months later, after all his thundering to the contrary, and threats of federal prosecution for anyone found guilty of voting fraud, Barr admitted that there had been no fraud on a scale that could have changed the results in any state. Then, a traitor to Trump, he quietly left the administration he had served so zealously.
The states that are making voter harder are all restricting mail-in voting, making dropping ballots into drop boxes harder, criminalizing giving water to people waiting on lone voter lines and enhancing the ability of strangers to challenge Black and brown voters, and the young (particularly hipsters), at the polls.
ADDISON, Tex. — Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.
At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.
Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a “white-hat hacker” identified himself only by a code name.
I know, the wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream has a very familiar ring, but let’s look past that. Ramsland lost an election for state office and was convinced he’d been robbed by fraud. Couldn’t prove it, but was still convinced that he’d been cheated by cheaters. Several of his lies about electronic voting machines wound up coming out of the mouth of Trump and his allies after Trump “lost” the election. Oh, well — voting machines, mail-in, drop box, fraud is fraud!.
The real reason Republicans are intent on making it harder for poor people, people of color and young people (all predominantly Democratic voters) to vote is much more likely (in the absence of any credible proof of electoral fraud or problems with “voting integrity” or “ballot purity”) this:
Another set of data from Catalist, a voter database company in Washington, D.C., shows that the 2020 election was the most diverse ever, with Latino and Asian voters turning out in bigger numbers than ever before. Black voting increased substantially, while Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters had a decisive increase in turnout. The electorate was 72% white, down 2% from 2016 and 5% from 2008. Thirty-nine percent of Biden-Harris voters were people of color (61% were white); only 15% of Trump-Pence voters were POC (85% were white).
Millions will be offended by the following paragraph, but I don’t think it will be for it’s lack of truthfully reporting known facts:
Indeed, it is more than a little odd that party leaders are bending over backward to tie their party to a former president who, after all, never broke 50% favorability ratings—the first time in polling history that had happened—and who lost both the White House and Congress.
The shit gets curiouser and curiouser, as Democrats Kirsten Synema and Joe Manchin continue to insist that the filibuster ensures bipartisan fairness in the crippled partisan Senate of Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.
[1]Here’s House Minority Leader, Trump’s friend “My Kevin,” Kevin McCarthy, on January 13 and April 25th:
Talk about unprincipled, one-trick, power-mad, right-wing piles of dreck ready to weaponize any lie, no matter how transparently dangerous, to keep the millions from big donors coming in, to fund campaigns nationwide to regain (with the help of Manchin and Synema) intricately gerrymandered Republican majorities in both Houses in 2022 and another Electoral College presidency in 2024 (we’ve had two of those, Dubya and Trump, since 2000).
“Frankly, we’d rather see every average American slowly choke to death, or shoot himself, and every child in poverty die of starvation, than work with the hated opposition and give them anything they could call ‘bipartisan’ or a popular policy victory. Those evil Democrat [sic] radicals only pretend to be bipartisan, so they can steal from us! If retaking power (and then immediately ending the filibuster) requires publicly gang-banging an implacable Liz Cheney, Daughter of Satan, on the floor of Congress, so be it. Whatever it takes — by any means necessary, as an infamous Black guy once said.”
Same position McConnell took while shamelessly hamstringing Obama, with the stated goal of making him a one-term president. In spite of his firm commitment to obstructing everything the evil Biden administration tries to do, Mitch is being attacked by hopping mad MAGA man, for being too weak to overturn the election results back in January:
For his part, the former president today attacked Cheney, and also Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump blamed for refusing to stop Biden’s election.
Far from abandoning the Big Lie, Trump doubled down on it, insisting that the 2020 election was fraudulent. If only Pence and McConnell had been stronger, he wrote, “we would have had a far different Presidential result, and our Country would not be turning into a socialist nightmare!”
He ended with words that proved right the concern that he will continue to back attacks on our government: “Never give up!” he wrote.
Thinking about another, much less historically consequential contemporary Nazi fuck, I’m looking forward to House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy perjuring himself when called to testify before the January 6 Commission. To remain consistent with all recent public statements McCarthy has to insist he never had the shouting match on the phone with Trump on January 6th that was witnessed and described by colleagues.
To support his current position, McCarthy will have to lie about the former president refusing to intervene to stop the riot McCarthy now claims Trump immediately stopped, as soon as McCarthy explained to him that what Trump was busy watching on TV was actually a violent riot-in-progress that had disrupted a joint session of Congress and threatened the legislators and staff hiding in terror from a violent, angry mob calling for the execution of various elected officials [1].
I will like seeing McCarthy, not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, squirm (assuming Democrats muster the resolve to convene this Committee very soon, as their window to do so is quite possibly closing) as he denies that Trump told him “well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are…” or that he ever yelled anything like “who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” at Mr. Trump, his not always truthful, sometimes disrespectful, commander-in-chief.
Call it hyperbole, if you like, but there is no difference in character between these spineless, power-mad, Big Lie embracing fanatics, and their lockstep willingness to sacrifice every virtue in demonstrating their loyalty to an insane, cruel and super-vengeful idiot, and any of the Nazi careerists that surrounded the equally brilliant, equally cool Mr. Hitler back in his day.
Our best hope today, which has been bolstered many times in recent years [2], is that Trump’s loyal, ambitious, terrified lackeys are, in the end, as vainly stupid as the ones who followed the hubristically triumphant Mr. Hitler to the very end.
[1]
From notorious Communist rag The Wall Street Journal:
“He’s getting reports of what is happening. He did not accept people doing this type of the behavior. I know he’s getting reports as well. I wanted to give him a first-hand report,” Mr. McCarthy told Fox News on Jan. 6.
But Mr. Trump initially claimed the protesters were linked to antifa, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R., Wash.) said in a statement Friday night, referring to the loose network of antiracist, antifascist protesters.
When Mr. McCarthy pushed back, saying that the protesters were Trump supporters, Mr. Trump fired back, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Ms. Herrera Beutler said in her statement, recounting the the conversation as described to her by Mr. McCarthy.
The call got heated and at one point, Mr. McCarthy angrily retorted, “Who the f—- do you think you’re talking to?” according to a person familiar with the discussion.
Mr. McCarthy’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the aftermath of the call, Mr. McCarthy wrestled with whether Mr. Trump was fit for office. He asked some GOP lawmakers whether he should press Mr. Trump to resign, according to someone familiar with the discussions.
One week after the riot, when the House voted to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy said Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the events of Jan. 6.
“The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack by mob rioters,” Mr. McCarthy said in a speech on the House floor, although he voted against impeaching [the vindictive, all-powerful party leader].
We are all, of course, following Kevin McCarthy’s defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal for reporting these baseless lies about a totally private conversation that was nothing like the one reported in the Wall Street Journal.
Plus, McCarthy has incontrovertible documentary proof that Donald J. Trump took immediate, decisive action to stop the riot, once McCarthy told him about it.
Not only did he post a one minute video on Facebook, thanking his righteous supporters, Trump also tweeted, in one of his final tweets, after federal law enforcement (whose deployment was delayed by three hours) had restored order at the ravaged Capitol, to call off any lingering violent MAGA rioters by tweeting this clear denunciation of the violence:
[2]
There are many good reasons for this hope, a partial list:
Trump’s bellowing, terrifying, essentially toothless threats against “Anarchist Jurisdictions,” his attempts to provoke nationwide riots by sending in troops authorized to use violence pursuant to his powerful Executive Order to Preserve American Federal Greatness and Monuments, sending armored riot troops against protesters during demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd, his threats to invoke the Insurrection Act and impose martial law on “anarchist jurisdictions”, liberal shitholes he’d also starve of federal tax dollars, during a pandemic Jared Kushner and Mike Pence were handling superbly, Louis DeJoy’s exhibitionistic attempts to hobble the USPS and disable mail-in voting for Democrats, federal judges finding Bill Barr’s rationale for misleading America about the Mueller Report, and his attempt to improperly classify and conceal documents to keep them secret, and dismissing the prosecution against and vacating a guilty plea by a close Trump ally, at Trump’s request, “disingenuous” (insincere, calculating, deceitful, underhanded, hypocritical, duplicitous, sly, dishonest, pretending that one knows less about something than one really does, being a lying sack of shit, etc.), the bungling of Trump’s many lawyers, increasingly less skilled and more crackpot, in literally hundreds of pre and post-election lawsuits, lawful application of the rules of evidence in those election cases, even by Trump-appointed judges, the distinct anti-Trump bias of fact-based debate, the many pending lawsuits against the most litigious winner ever to occupy the White House, including possible criminal prosecutions in Georgia and New York, the fact that even power-crazed, disingenuous culture warrior Bill Barr jumped off the sinking, criminal ship in the end — just days before Trump held a rally and called for violence to disrupt a joint session of Congress and prevent the peaceful transfer of power, etc.
gratuitousblahg 