Category Archives: January 6 MAGA riot

Lying liars lie, no lie

The great Heather Cox Richardson, reporting on a recent MAGA lie. It is worth noting that using bold, infuriating lies to influence public opinion was raised to an art form by the Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propogana:

The cowboy myth emphasized dominance over the Indigenous Americans and Mexicans allegedly attacking white settlers from the East. On Friday an impressive piece of reporting from Jude Joffe-Block at NPR untangled the origins of a story pushed by Republicans that Democrats were encouraging asylum seekers to vote illegally for President Joe Biden in 2024, revealing that the story was entirely made up.  

The story broke on X, formerly Twitter, on April 15, when the investigative arm of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which promises to provide “aggressive oversight” of the Biden administration, posted photos of what it claimed were flyers from inside portable toilets at a migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico, that said in broken Spanish: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” The tweet thread got more than 9 million views and was boosted by Elon Musk, X’s owner.

But the story was fabricated. The flyer used the name of a small organization that helps asylum seekers, along with the name of the woman who runs the organization. She is a U.S. citizen and told Joffe-Block that her organization has “never encouraged people to vote for anyone.” Indeed, it has never come up because everyone knows noncitizens are not eligible to vote. The flyer had outdated phone numbers and addresses, and its Spanish was full of errors. Migrants who are staying at the encampment as they wait for their appointments to enter the U.S. say they have never seen such flyers, and no one has urged them to vote for Biden.

Digging showed that the flyer was “discovered” by the right-wing video site Muckraker, which specializes in “undercover” escapades. The founder of Muckraker, Anthony Rubin, and his brother, Joshua Rubin, had shown up at the organization’s headquarters in Matamoros asking to become volunteers for the organization; they and their conversation were captured on video, and signs point to the conclusion that they planted the flyers. 

Nonetheless, Republicans ran with the story. Within 12 hours after the fake flyer appeared on X, Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Dan Bishop (R-NC) brought posters of it to Congress, and Republicans made it a centerpiece of their insistence that Congress must pass a new law against noncitizen voting. Rather than being protected by modern-day cowboys, the woman who ran the organization that helps asylum seekers got death threats.

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Why nobody does it better than Heather

Jerry Garcia is supposed to have said that you shouldn’t try to be the best at something a lot of people are doing. You should try to be the only one doing what you do. That describes Heather Cox Richardson, historian, writer and incomparable reporter.

She has the greatest gift for setting things in clear perspective, often with a historical analog, a haunting echo of the past, presenting the most consistently important contemporary reporting. Her May 7 account of American law’s current struggle to contain a brazen gang of determined maniacs cuts to the point, over and over.

It begins:


The past two days of former president Trump’s criminal trial for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, to silence her before the 2016 election have been illuminating in different ways.

Yesterday, witnesses established that the paper trail of payments to Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who forwarded the money to Daniels, had been falsified. That paper trail included invoices, checks, and records. Witnesses also established that Trump micromanaged his finances, making it hard to believe he didn’t know about the scheme. 

That scheme looked like this: Former Trump Organization employee Jeffrey McConney said that Trump’s former financial chief Allen Weisselberg, who has gone to jail twice in two years for his participation in Trump’s financial schemes and is there now, told him to send money to Cohen. Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 from a home equity loan in 2016 to buy her silence about a sexual encounter with Trump. Cohen received 11 checks totaling $420,000 in repayment, including enough money to cover the taxes he would have to pay for claiming the payments as income for legal services, and a bonus. 

Nine of those checks came from Trump’s personal bank account. His team sent the checks to him at the White House for his personal signature. 

A number of observers have suggested that the evidence presented through documents yesterday was not riveting, but historians would disagree. Exhibit 35 was Cohen’s bank statement, on which Weisselberg had written the numbers to reflect the higher payment necessary to cover Cohen’s tax bill for the money. Exhibit 36 was a sheet of paper on which McConney had recorded in his own hand how the payments to Cohen would work. The sheet of paper had the TRUMP logo on it. 

“It’s rare to see folks put the key to a criminal conspiracy in writing,” legal analyst Joyce White Vance wrote in Civil Discourse, “but here it is. It’s great evidence for the prosecution.” 

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Nazi logic American style

In order to have a smoothly running totalitarian state, absolute obedience to the will of the leader is essential. It is impossible for an army to efficiently carry out obscene orders if individual officers and soldiers are allowed to have their own subjective moral opinions about right and wrong. Authority flows top down and loyalty is rewarded, until a sacrifice is needed, in which case it will be undertaken willingly, in the name of protecting the infallible leader. If your leader is, God forbid, on trial for a specific set of illegal acts, shift the legal focus from the acts in question to a series of academic future hypotheticals. Why dwell on, or indeed allow discussion of, anything that will make the leader look as guilty as he appears to be? That would be self-sabotage of the worst kind.

There is a universe, offers Trump’s attorney, in an excellent impression of the insane Robert F. Kennedy Jr., where this would be an official presidential act entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution. I don’t recall Justice Sotomayor asking Mr. Sauer under what Bizzarro World situation this could be an official act. After all, if the guy is corrupt, there is a justice system in place, unless the corrupt political rival is somehow above the law…

As for the defense of murder of a political rival as an official presidential act, I guess Sauer’s argument would go like this: lets say, for example, that the defeated president truly and honestly believes the candidate who defeated him is an evil vampire who drinks the blood of innocent white Christian children while he diddles them.   After all, no less than the brilliant, respected Alan Dershowitz made the arguably not demented argument at one of Trump’s impeachment trials that if the president, or presidential candidate, truly, honestly believes something that nothing he does in connection with that truly held belief can ever be against the law.  After all, führerworte haben gesetzeskraft, as German legal experts used to say during the Thousand Year Reich.

The leader’s word, you understand, has the force of law. Every one of the leader’s farts, the force of prophecy. The leader’s temper tantrums — irrefutable directives from a higher power. Ask anyone who has been in the courtroom with Leader Trump, as he nonchalantly catches a few winks while his vicious enemies weakly flail away, trying to unfairly destroy him. Ask particularly about the prophetic farts…

Opening remarks before an illegitimate 6-3 extremist court

This is the brief opening statement by John Sauer, attorney for criminal defendant/movant Donald Trump,setting the stage for moving the court to create a new doctrine that would protect the criminal ex-president from prosecution for any of the many crimes he committed while in office.

I have rebutted each of his asinine talking points.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution there can be no presidency as we know it.  

This statement is a lie.   It is also called rhetoric or puffery, part of the lawyer’s art of persuasion.  At bottom it is plainly false.  Asserting that a right that never existed has always been essential is a cynical and ballsy opening move.  Claiming that a president’s preemptive and eternal immunity from accountability for criminal behavior is a precondition for preserving a centuries’ old institution is as perverse and audacious a lie as can be told.  

For 234 years of American history no president was ever prosecuted for his official act. 

That is because for 234 years, no American president, with the exception of Richard Nixon, was ever in danger of being prosecuted for any act, official or otherwise, committed while in office.  All were constrained by law and the fear of punishment after leaving office. Trump was the first lawless, recklessly criminally inclined president in 234 years.  

He insists now on his right to be an untouchable mob boss.  And as for Richard Nixon, he accepted a pardon  to shield himself from prosecution, even knowing as a lawyer that he was accepting the equivalent of a guilty plea in exchange for the pardon.   Even though Nixon never accepted responsibility for his criminal activity in the White House, he knew the law, his criminal exposure and likelihood of conviction and took the necessary steps to protect himself.  No previous president risked committing outright crimes because they knew they would be prosecuted for them, particularly by their political adversaries, once they were private citizens again. In Trump’s twisted little mind Nixon’s only crime was that his balls weren’t big enough to get away with whatever he wanted to do. If the president believes it’s right, it cannot be a crime. Dershowitz belched up that old Nazi chestnut one of the times they impeached Trump.

The framers of our constitution viewed an energetic executive as essential to securing liberty.  

The framers of our constitution viewed the American chief executive as the opposite of a Divine Right right king, the unaccountable tyrant they had overthrown to form the new nation, the world’s first democracy.  The crucial requirement for a democratic leader is being accountable to the constitution and the laws of the land. That would’ve been understood among the framers of our constitution as nonnegotiable. Nobody can make a coherent argument against that self-evident proposition,  dig up fucking Antonin Scalia and he’d say the same.

If a president can be charged, put on trial and imprisoned for his most controversial decisions as soon as he leaves office, that looming threat will distort the president’s decision making precisely when bold and fearless action is most needed.

There is no threat whatsoever to any president other than the single one, Trump, the man making the argument before the Supreme Court.  Only Trump openly employed criminal means to achieve illegal ends– in this case overruling the will of 81,000,000 Americans, and a robust Electoral College majority, to overturn their constitutional choice for president.  It was bold and fearless of Trump to spend $50 million promoting the lie that the election had been stolen from him. The Big Lie he vigorously promoted he knew very well was a lie, he had been informed numerous times that it was a lie, he didn’t care.   

It was bold and fearless of Trump to urge a mob of angry followers that he had stirred to violence, a mob directed from a war room manned by Bannon, Kerik, Giuliani, Eastman et al, coordinated with Roger Stone, Mike Q-Anon Flynn and the Proud Boys, among others, a mob it turns out Trump knew was armed, and sent to the Capitol to violently stop the certification of his electoral loss. These things are all indictable and very serious criminal offenses, part of an octopus armed conspiracy to violate the law and the constitution to overthrow the rule of democracy. They are bold and fearless crimes no sane president would dare contemplate.

Every current president will face de facto blackmail and extortion by his political rivals while he is still in office.

Also simply a lie.  Additionally, Trump is the only kind of politician who routinely blackmails and extorts his political rivals.

The implications of the court’s decision here extend far beyond the facts of this case.   

They will extend far into the future, and harmfully influence it. But as for the present and the past, they extend only to the facts of this case. The Nixon case is moot now. The only other case that is comparable to the hypotheticals in this case are the exact facts of the Trump case the prissy Nazis on the court are all dancing around daintily.  To my chagrin, from the extended excerpts I heard,  what I heard my most trusted legal pundits talking about, even the non-Nazi justices did not directly and thoroughly address the stinking 50,000 pound orange turd in the room. For some reason the underlying facts of the case that brought the controversy to the Supreme Court were barely alluded to in all the academic “hypotheticals”.

Could president George W. Bush have been sent to prison for instructing an official proceeding or allegedly lying to Congress to induce war in Iraq? Could president Obama be charged with murder for killing US citizens abroad in a drone strike?  Could president Biden someday be charged with unlawfully inducing Come on immigrants to enter the country illegally for his border policies? 

This Biden query, ostensibly added in fairness to the current president, is a particularly nauseating and gratuitous bit of Koch network “fuck you, Biden.”  The other cases pose legitimate questions for democracy and both should’ve been investigated as criminal acts, or at least challenged as things future presidents would be on notice were out of bounds for presidents to do.

 The answer to all these questions is no. 

Wrong answer, moron.

Prosecuting the president for his official acts is an innovation with no foothold in history or tradition and incompatible with our constitutional structure.

False and false.

The original meaning of the executive vesting clause, the framers understanding and intent and unbroken historical tradition, spanning 200 years and policy considerations rooted in the separation of powers, all counsel against it. 

They all counsel strongly for holding a criminal president to account, counselor. 

I welcome the court’s questions. 

We have no questions for you, nor will we hold your bald-faced lying against you, you’re one of us. We will give you everything you ask for because we’re all on the same team, buddy.  And you have to love a man with balls as big as yours going for broke, brazenly doubling down on transparent lies and sweating it out to be a real bare-knuckle brawl winner like our indomitable sponsor Mr. Koch!

Our first tabloid ex-president

In a real sense, Trump is the first tabloid president, the first National Enquirer president — as well as the first “reality TV” game show host president. His pronouncements are as credible as any National Enquirer headline, they always are and always have been, and as full of truth.  He is bigger than life and more full of shit than any supermarket tabloid, more real than any reality TV set.

Now he is on criminal trial in an anarchist jurisdiction, where his vicious enemies will unfairly prosecute him in an attempt to prove that he is a liar, which he has never been because they are the liars, he has never lied. They lie, they always lie, because they’re evil. And wiseass Rosie O’Donnell will be smiling out of the other side of her ass when she ends up in one of his righteous outdoor detention camps.

Those are not the kind of camps rich kids go to, let’s just put it that way. If things go badly, I’ll probably see you there, if you’re not careful. 

What, me worry?

Party of Putin

It’s hard to overstate how in-your-face the MAGA/GOP/Trump party is in their support of murderous war criminal Vladimir Putin. Putin and the 2016 Trump campaign, although not found to have left evidence of a chargeable criminal conspiracy, colluded in at least 140 instances, as documented by Robert Mueller. Trump loves the taste of Putin’s nether regions as much as Lindsey Graham loves the taste of Trump’s. As president Trumpie routinely took Putin’s side against US intelligence agencies. Why wouldn’t he?

At a news conference, a day following a secret personal meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Trump clarified his “I don’t know why Putin would” do anything to corrupt the 2016 election, by saying that, obviously, he’d meant the exact opposite. After all, how often do all of us accidentally say the exact opposite of what we mean and are then unfairly given shit about it?

Trump’s PERFECT CALL to newly elected Ukrainian president Zelensky in 2019 asked for help smearing Biden with a fake announcement about Burisma and, by the way, none of the weapons authorized by Congress months ago will be released to Ukraine until you go on US TV and announce a fake investigation into Biden’s criminal activities in Ukraine.

Trump instructed his loyal, Christ loving puppet MAGA Mike to hold up aid to Ukraine while Putin makes advance after advance in his war of aggression against Ukraine. MAGA Mike held up this aid for many months, along with aid to Gaza, Israel and Taiwan, until Democrats promised to shield him from removal as Speaker. Today MAGA Mike lied about it, of course, (doing it this way, he said, was the only way to get Democrats to support aid to Israel, among lies) because, presumably, that’s what Christ would have done.

Here’s Heather Cox Richardson on what MAGA was doing in the House right before MAGA Mike treacherously betrayed them by working with Democrats:

The extremist House Republicans were adamantly opposed to the plan because of their staunch opposition to aid for Ukraine. They wrote in a memo on Wednesday: “This tactic allows Johnson to pass priorities favored by President Biden, the swamp and the Ukraine war machine with a supermajority of House members, leaving conservatives out to dry.”

Extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) vowed to throw House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) out of the speakership, but Democrats Tom Suozzi of New York and Jared Moskowitz of Florida have said they would vote to keep him in his seat, thereby defanging the attack on his leadership.

So the extremists instead tried to load the measures up with amendments prohibiting funds from being used for abortion, removing humanitarian aid for Gaza, opposing a two-state solution to the Hamas-Israel war, calling for a wall at the southern border of the U.S., defunding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and so on.

Greene was especially active in opposition to aid to Ukraine. She tried to amend the bill to direct the president to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and demanded that any members of Congress voting for aid to Ukraine be conscripted into the Ukraine army as well as have their salaries taken to offset funding. She wanted to stop funding until Ukraine “turns over all information related to Hunter Biden and Burisma,” and to require Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to resign. More curiously, she suggested amending the Ukraine bill so that funding would require “restrictions on ethnic minorities’, including Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools are lifted.” This language echoes a very specific piece of Russian propaganda.

Finally, Moskowitz proposed “that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene…should be appointed as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” 

Many congress members have left Washington, D.C., since Friday was to be the first day of a planned recess. This meant the partisan majority on the floor fluctuated. Olivia Beavers of Politico reported that that instability made Freedom Caucus members nervous enough to put together a Floor Action Response Team (FART—I am not making this up) to make sure other Republicans didn’t limit the power of the extremists when they were off the floor.

The name of their response team seems likely to be their way to signal their disrespect for the entire Congress. Their fellow Republicans are returning the heat. Today Mike Turner (R-OH) referred to the extremists as the Bully Caucus on MSNBC and said, “We need to get back to professionalism, we need to get back to governing, we need to get back to legislating.” Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios:  “The vast majority of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives…are sick and tired of having people who…constantly blackmail the speaker of the House.”

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Putin is laughing his evil ass off

It’s hard to grasp the passionate MAGA embrace of dictatorial, enemy assassinating war criminal Vladimir Putin, except that their leader, a vain, compulsively lying orange-faced man with pale pink ears,  appears to truly love the taste of Putin’s ass.   Heather Cox Richardson, putting a few pieces together:

Under its new co-chairs, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Trump loyalist Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee last week sent out a robocall to voters’ phones saying that Democrats committed “massive fraud” in the 2020 presidential election and that “If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.” This is a straight-up lie, of course—Trump and his loyalists have never produced any evidence for their accusations and lost more than 60 court cases over it—but Trump clearly intends to make it a centerpiece of his campaign. 

While Republicans are pushing the Big Lie, in The Bulwark today, conservative commentator Mona Charen noted that Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky this week warned the U.S. that Ukraine will lose the war against Russia’s aggression if it does not get U.S. aid. 

“Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history,” Charen wrote. “If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the [Republicans] than anyone other than Trump…. [T]hey mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin,” she said, “must be pinching himself.”

Heather’s full letter

Muddled with a bit of unneeded ideology, but making a reasonable point Biden should think about

I read an interesting critique of Biden’s campaign speculating about why, in spite of his impressive achievements in office, he seems to be trailing, or at best tied with, the destructive Trump in a nation many (on all sides) perceive to be broken. The author of the op ed writes as a professional centrist with a seeming bent toward the myth of The Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan. Aside from some nods to the MAGA right (Trump’s economic policies the first three years of his administration were widely seen as a great success), he makes an excellent point.

In a moment when so many are angry and feel betrayed by our institutions, where even an historically strong economy leaves millions feeling screwed, Biden the Institutionalist needs to vow to make fundamental, transformational change to fix broken institutions and commit to using the government to make real fairness a core and long term goal of his next term.

Ronald Reagan was a bigot and something of a dunce, though he was indisputably a very effective front man for the interests of our greatest, if most avaricious, citizens, the 1%, the best of us, born booted and spurred, continuing the ride the rest of us. There was no reason, but an appearance of giving credence to both sides of the political spectrum, for the op ed’s author to mention Reagan in the paragraph about Biden committing to reform, or to cite with approval Reagan’s words about limited government, but the larger point makes sense. Biden should stress his commitment to making the necessary reforms to a system many Americans now see as badly wounded, if not already broken beyond repair (enter dictator, who alone can fix it). Democracy has not broken yet, but there are crucial reforms that will make it stronger against determined enemies, here and broad, that we now know are maniacally intent on permanent minority rule.

A few examples of desperately needed reform: an independent, nonpolitical system for lifetime judicial appointments in which party operatives and ideologically committed judicial fraternity members would be ineligible for office. A rebalancing of the Supreme Court with several additional law abiding new justices. An end to the filibuster and the Electoral College, two crucial instruments for minority control, both remnants of slavery. No more one legislator blocking of all appointments in the manner of ignoramus Senator Tommy Tuberville. An independent commission to rule on electoral maps and have new ones drawn and implemented quickly. An interbranch dispute resolution court to quickly decide all conflicts between the three branches of government. An expedited way to keep vexatious, frivolous, transparently delay-seeking legal motions out of our courts. There are many institutional reforms that need to be done, a commitment to do them would strengthen Biden’s appeal and inspire voters to sign on.

Otherwise the party that has carried out its long term goal of creating hostility against our own government, who has broken all of the institutions that protect the will of the majority in a democracy, gets to benefit from the broken system. By their disabling of government, MAGA/Koch vindicate the demented Reagan’s glib assertion, regurgitating a very old line and making it his own, that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” Here is a paragraph from the op ed I mentioned up top.

Even better would be an effort to develop a reform agenda: Mr. Biden could declare it’s long past time for America to put its house in order, to begin cleaning up the messes of the past two decades, to face our problems and return to our own best national self. He might even think of adapting and repurposing for the center-left a few lines from Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural Address: “It’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”

full op ed