Category Archives: Law and Justice

Heather Cox Richardson concludes last night’s letter

The fantasy of those who embraced cowboy individualism was that if only they could have full sway, they would solve the world’s problems and keep Americans safe. But the conduct of the war is starting to illustrate that any claims of a moral code disappear when a leader exercises military might on a whim. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. will not be bound by any “stupid rules of engagement” and will rain down “[d]eath and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight,” he said, “and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

On Wednesday, March 4, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters. The vessel was not participating in hostilities; it was off Sri Lanka returning from a naval exercise organized by India in the Bay of Bengal. In the past, the U.S. has participated in those exercises.

Andrew Roth, Cate Brown, and Hannah Ellis-Peterson of The Guardian noted that submarine attacks since World War II have been incredibly rare, as are attacks on vessels not taking part in hostilities. The ship was believed to have 180 people on board; Sri Lankan officials said they rescued 32 and recovered 87 bodies from the water. Hegseth boasted: “An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters.”

On Thursday, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali of Reuters reported that the U.S. appears to bear responsibility for the February 28 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran, in the early waves of the Israeli-U.S. attack. The strike appears to have killed 168 people or more, many of them children. Since the Reuters report, others have noted that the U.S. was operating in the area and Israel was not. The strike remains under investigation.

After Saturday’s dignified transfer, Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war,” he said. “It’s a sad part of war.”

“It’s the bad part of war.”

read the whole, very much on point, letter here

So true, sad, and also, bad

War crimes are not war crimes, if done in the name of justice, truth, freedom, decency and Jesus, according to people like unindicted war criminal Secretary of Virile Maximum Lethality, Pete Kegsbreath. Genocide is not genocide, if God tells you to do it, according to indicted war criminal Bibi Netanyahu, whose radical religious allies, and a multifront all-out war of mass destruction, are keeping him from standing trial for corruption. Every mass murder in history has been committed with God on the side of the murderers. Thoughts and prayers, y’all, and a dignified transfer to each of us.

Stolen Elections, 2026 edition

The flailing president, sinking to a historic low in the polls and recently “betrayed” by members of a partisan judicial fraternity that he appointed, is railing against — among many other things — mail-in voting. He wants to ban it, has threatened to do so with a stroke of the Sharpie at the bottom of a royal decree. He claims, without evidence, that mail-in voting is ripe for cheating, as the corrupt Bill Barr also insisted, on national TV, in the lead-up to the election his boss would insist was stolen from him (Barr later said under oath that he told Trump the election fraud claim was “bullshit”). The entire idea of widespread voter fraud, of any kind, is definitively debunked by the far right Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database.

I was super concerned, in the lead up to the 2024 election, that Trump megadonor, pugnacious Postmaster Louis DeJoy, had the motive and the means, the lack of scruples and the demonstrated track record of slowing mail delivery, to not deliver ballots from selected zip codes. Aided by, as far as I could tell, the unprincipled “independent” Kyrsten Sinema, the Postal Board of Governor nominees that could have removed DeJoy were permanently stuck in committee as the swing vote, Sinema, kept the status quo in place. There was no reporting on this deadlock.

There was also virtually no reporting that DeJoy had refused the Postal Inspector General’s recommendation that USPS postmark ballots the day they arrived and segregate ballots from the rest of the mail to make tracing and counting ballots easier. DeJoy, to my knowledge, refused both of these conditions, at least when the IG made the recommendations and he refused those two specifically, from a list of ten.

I read somewhere recently that mail in voting in Fulton County decreased from 29% of votes cast in 2020 to 5% in 2024. This would support my theory that MAGA man was on the job in Fulton County, Georgia, and other key counties nationwide, for his corrupt buddy in 2024, the guy who never met Jeffrey Epstein, the guy who told Florida officials, after Epstein’s arrest, that Ghislaine Maxwell was evil.

I did a search for percentage of votes by mail in Fulton County, 2020 vs. 2024. Elon Musk/Peter Thiel/Mark Zuckerberg/Jeff Bezos’s AI belched out this non-answer, the first search result that always comes up, a dubious one at best. You can type -AI at the end of your search term and sometimes avoid this Artificial Idiocy bullshit with its disclaimer that it might be totally false.

Auto-generated, may contain inaccuracies, or outright falsehoods. Bots programmed by those who work for psychopathic oligarchs do not necessarily reflect the views of the transactional oligarchs who had them programmed. Tried doing ten or twenty more searches, for potentially better results.

Georgiavotes.com has this number for early voting in 2020, but nothing for 2024:

Early Voters (Fulton County)

318,565 (71.4%) of 2024 general election early voters voted early in the 2020 general

It has been virtually impossible to compare mail-in ballots from 2020 and 2024. I haven’t been able to verify the drop from 29% to 5% mail-in ballots in Fulton County with numerous searches. Google directs me to a string of articles alleging (without evidence) massive voter fraud, many involving a purported 315,000 votes, in Fulton County in 2020 and other claims related to Trump’s ongoing propaganda war against mail-in and Black, and female, voting. There were also numerous hits, totally unrelated to my search, about the seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, based on an affidavit that did not make out probable cause for a search and seizure.

After a frustrating amount of dead end searches, these, from Georgiavotes.com, seem to confirm the steep decline in mail-in voting from 2020 to 2024. I have to think pugnacious weasel DeJoy played his part, as did RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The numbers, in each case, seem to have been posted during the election. But note that almost three times as many people (451,520) requested ballots in 2024 as in 2020 (166,603), if the very specific numbers on Georgiavotes.com are to be believed. Note also, the 451,000 early ballots requested in 2024 doesn’t specify how many were mail-in. It’s not like I’ve been able to verify any of this anywhere else. Here is Louis DeJoy’s public relations press release, why would he lie?

The determined squids of the right have spread ink, mud and shit in the water, nothing to see here! Frustrating that straightforward searches no longer yield relevant search results. Place AI in charge of internet searches and you can cook the information people get to see. AI, of course, can be programmed to do whatever its masters need. The horror. Here’s another piece of random data I was able to glean somewhere:

If you have any questions about the United States Postal Service’s commitment to the timely delivery of every mail-in ballot, this should reassure you.

Meanwhile, call your senators, especially if they are Republicans, and tell them to vote no on the SAVE MAGA Act. The Senate switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.

CEO of “the most transparent administration” in US history

Why Heather Cox Richardson is the best at what she does

And why Donald J. Trump is the biggest psycho grifter ever to hold our experiment in democracy hostage. Heather begins:

On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”

Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.

In October, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated for a tunnel between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, saying he wanted “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” Trump told Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would release the funds if Schumer would agree to name Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and New York City’s Penn Station after him.

source

Russell Vought, the Koch Brother’s own Project 2025 Nazi state architect and unelected Czar of the US budget (apart from his party-line confirmation in the Senate), the constitutional scholar/genius who declared Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs unconstitutional and grounds for denying funding already approved by Congress, quietly diverted $15,000,000 in appropriated USAID funds (cut by nongovernment employee/new government agency head Elon Musk’s nongovernment DOGE) to pay for his security detail. Better, for him, that his super important life be protected from every possible threat, by a $15,000,000 private army, than to have two or three hundred thousand insignificant brown children die preventable deaths formerly prevented by USAID.

Happy belated Presidents Day to these Nazi motherfuckers. Don’t forget to give generously to the Donald Trump Mount Rushmore Memorial Legacy, a wonderful new charity that, since an IRS ruling in September, 2025, can accept tax-free donations. USA! USA!!!!

The SAVE MAGA Act, in 60 seconds

Liz Oyer, the former DOJ Pardon Attorney (until Trump 2.0 began and all pardons became purely transactional) lays out the real intent of the SAVE Act. Not only is it designed to make it harder for Democrats to vote, its real purpose is to create complete chaos ahead of the midterm elections. Liz does an excellent job laying out the method and desired effects of this heavy handed Nazi attempt to fully Nazify our United States in the midterm elections. This proposed law (which does not yet have support in the senate to become law) will be particularly important in the disobedient, so-called Blue States, the places Bill Barr dubbed “Anarchist Jurisdictions” under Trump’s first wild spin as president. They can’t afford another Minneapolis!

Generally a sweeping nationwide change in laws takes a year or more to efficiently roll out, but efficiency is clearly not the goal here. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (and Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.) don’t have that long, they’ve got to get this done chop chop, with the zeal of billionaire “disrupters” who break the thing into too many parts to ever put back together before asking permission, or getting sued and stopped by courts enforcing the law.

The business model of disrupters is also the business model of MAGA. Break things you hate, smash them to smithereens, like Trump Postmaster Louis DeJoy did by disassembling gigantic mail sorting machines in “Blue” cities, delaying mail delivery and so on, and let your accursed enemies try to stop you in court. Let them keep trying this defensive tactic after you’ve ramped up to targeting them, killing them (when needed) and shoving them into concentration camps a thousand miles from their homes.

Not losing in 2026 is a TOP priority for the VERY STABLE GENIUS and his united billionaire benefactors/beneficiaries, if there is going to be a country anymore! So much the better if they are able to bring on the chaos in time to disrupt the 2026 elections, eh, Susan Collins (an announced “yay” for the SAVE MAGA Act in the Senate)?

The SAVE MAGA Act

There is only one purpose to this proposed legislation which will make it harder for tens of millions to vote in the upcoming midterm elections — to save MAGA.  The Senate would have to change the filibuster rules to pass this Jim Crow 2.0 bill with 54 votes. If we want to preserve our experiment in democracy, we have to keep Democratic senators honest, and a few set to retire Republican senators, (and good luck with some of these mf’s).

For future reference (when Congress returns from yet another break during yet another Trump shutdown — this time only TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and a few other agencies within DHS will lose funding, ICE and CBP are fully funded through the Big, Gorgeous, Junior High School Girl Bill)

The U.S. Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.  Ask to be connected to your senators’ offices.  

Update:

The Capitol emptied out on Thursday, a full day before the midnight Friday deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security. Lawmakers who were deadlocked over new restrictions on immigration officers jetted off to Munich for a security conference or headed home for a weeklong recess, seemingly unconcerned with the looming closure. It was a jarring change from the past, when lawmakers were reluctant to seem like they were giving up for even a moment before time ran out for a deal.

“We are not even going to pretend that we are trying to figure it out,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, one of those bound for Germany. “It doesn’t look great.”

The blasé attitude reflected a conviction on the part of both parties that they were in the stronger political position in this round of the shutdown wars. (source, NY Times)

Brian continues on the fake fraud behind the latest, and perhaps most brazen, Republican voter suppression effort:

Levitt’s study found exactly no instances of a noncitizen knowingly or purposefully voting illegally. And why would they? The penalty is deportation.

Trump’s own investigation into illegal voting by migrants turned up not one shred of evidence of widespread fraud.

Out of 49.5 million voter registrations checked, 0.02% of the names were investigated as possible registered noncitizens. There was no evidence that any of those people had actually voted. A serious blow to Trump’s unfounded hysteria over droves of illegal voters sandbagging elections in favor of Democrats.

for more details on Jim Crow 2.0, a federal voter suppression law that will target women, young people, college students, people of color, people with various accents, people with physical disabilities, (while allowing Trump’s administration to access a national database voter information more powerful than what his then campaign manager Paul Manafort gave Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik during the 2016 “Russia Hoax”) here’s Brian Tyler Cohen’s full report on this desperate fascist move

Script for ICE/CBP reforms

It is imperative to call and email our senators (and members of Congress) as they negotiate conditions for funding ICE and CBP.   You can reach them at (202) 224-3121. 

Have a short script ready.  This will be mine, starting with thanking my otherwise weak-willed senators for taking principled action in severing ICE/CBP funding from the rest of the government appropriations bill in order to rein in their unchecked abuses.

Thanks for taking a stand for democracy, your votes are crucial and I greatly appreciate you holding the line in negotiations over reforms of ICE and CBP. 

ICE and CBP have been deployed to cities under a false national emergency in an attempt to violently provoke a violent response from citizens.   They should not be armed for anti-riot duty as though facing an insurgency in Fallujah — they have faced zero violence, in spite of their constant violent provocations including cold blooded murder.  

At minimum, they must not be allowed to conceal their identities and must be placed under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement.  They must not be armed with assault rifles, tear gas, pepper spray and green gas — a chemical weapon illegal under international law.   Do everything possible to restrict the ability of these armed goons to gas children, smash car windows, break into homes, schools and churches,  and murder law abiding civilians with impunity.

Stand strong against this brazen, lawless assault on our democracy!

And for my follow-up email:

A federal judge had to order this the other day, after massive ICE gassing (the plume of chemical irritant was visible from a mile away) of a peaceful crowd in Portland:

“In a well-functioning constitutional democratic republic, free speech, courageous newsgathering, and nonviolent protest are all permitted, respected, and even celebrated. In an authoritarian regime, that is not the case. Our nation is now at a crossroads,” he wrote.

Federal agents are restricted under the order from using chemical or projectile munitions unless the target of such weapons “poses an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Agents are not allowed to deploy munitions at the head, neck, or torso of any person, “unless the officer is legally justified in using deadly force against that person.” And agents are restricted from deploying munitions if doing so would “endanger any other individual who does not pose an imminent threat of physical harm to a law enforcement officer or other person.”

Source

For help understanding the stakes and preparing your message, read this from Indivisible.

Trump DOJ fucks the Epstein survivors again

Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the best in the business, describes the “inadvertent” outing of previously unidentified Epstein victims in the recently released Epstein files, 50% of the total in the possession of DOJ.   O’Donnell reports that the DOJ had repeated requests from survivors to redact their names.  The names of Epstein co-conspirators in the sex trafficking of girls were all redacted, in direct defiance of the law Trump signed in November, while the names and birthdates, and even photos, of many of the girls themselves were … whoops, uh…  released publicly — also in direct violation of that same law. 

The DOJ’s new front man, soul dead Deputy Attorney General/Trump criminal attorney Todd Blanche (sidelined AG Pam Bondi’s idiocy has been recognized even by Trump) whined that the DOJ corrected these little “mistakes” as soon as they were informed by the women whose nude photos as girls had been publicly released.  Blanche claimed that these “mistakes” reflected like 0.002% of the millions of files, you know, perfectly understandable, given the enormous pressure DOJ is working under (to protect powerful pedophiles). 

Do the math, boys and girls, 0.002% of 3,000,000 is a lot of mistakes (6,000, a fraction of the number of times Trump is mentioned in the released pages) for the country’s top law enforcement agency, The Trump Department of Justice. It’s also a thousand times the incidence of election fraud as documented by the Heritage Foundation in their exhaustive online database. Were these errors incompetence due to any DOJ attorney of character, competence and experience being fired, quitting or being sidelined, or simple vicious retaliation/intimidation against sexually exploited girls who, as adult women, pose an ongoing threat to powerful white billionaire men? You be the judge.

A constantly lying administration, when caught lying, always has an excuse, often a barrage of excuses. The technique is familiar to anyone who has ever encountered an angry narcissist: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (DARVO). The Trump propaganda machine doctored a photo of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, arrested after peacefully protesting in a Minnesota church. Using AI in the service of truth, justice and racist propaganda [1] it transformed her calm, dignified face, as she was led away in shackles, to a disheveled tearful portrait of an unhinged prisoner. One of the president’s spokes-liars dismissed concerns by calling it a “meme”. Case closed, cucks.

[1] The White House posted a manipulated photo of her arrest to its official social media account, depicting Ms. Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and activist, as hysterical — tears streaming down her face, her hair disheveled, appearing to cry out in despair. “ARRESTED” was emblazoned across the photo, along with a misleading description of Ms. Levy Armstrong as a “far-left agitator” who was “orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.”

While President Trump and the White House regularly circulate imagery altered by artificial intelligence, including demeaning and racist deepfakes, it is usually so over the top that the goal seems more about cartoonish mockery than outright deceit. (source above)

Criminally insane

Rachel Maddow makes a good point here, why would the Republicans invite Jack Smith to testify publicly when all he would say is what he said? 

Trump was the chief propagator of  the big lie (stolen 2020 election), the fake electors, the coercion of state officials,  the frivolous, evidence-free, court challenges, the plot to have Mike Pence announce Trump had won the election, the Green Bay Sweep,  and the bloody riot at the Capitol with the gallows outside to hang Mike Pence.  There was only one leader, one beneficiary, of this desperate many armed criminals octopus, Donald Trump.

Fascist enterprise graphically laid out by the Grey Lady

In fairness to our demented president, the Federalist Society Six on the Supreme Court declared him the victor in 2004’s Trump v. United States. They ruled that he couldn’t be prosecuted for anything he could argue was part of his official job. So we have to forgive him for taking it so literally, he was never a man to see nuance, even before his steep cognitive decline. If he could, theoretically, order Seal Team Six to murder his political opponents, if done in consultation with his cabinet (official core duty) — and pardon the hit men with no restrictions — then why should he not believe he can fire all Inspectors General without cause, purge the civil service without cause, rescind Congressional budget allocations he hated, shake down right wing law firms, TV networks, universities, weaponize the DOJ for retribution against his enemies, and so on? Many of those acts are not even arguably criminal, at best they are violations of civil law, or norms, or whatever.

The New York Times published an exhaustive, if politely phrased, catalogue of Trump’s mafia don presidency. Check it out.

The link to the article again — the details are many, and impressive in their thoroughness. Dictator on day one or bust, courtesy of the tireless work of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, The Cato Institute, The Antonin Scalia Law School, The Council for National Policy, The Institute for Humane Studies and so on. It is worth bearing in mind, in the face of this onslaught of Nazi contempt for law and democracy, that many of their policies, political theories and practical plans are as ridiculous and legally untenable as the asinine theories of now disbarred far-right wing constitutional crackpot John Eastman and longtime Trump buddy (predictably abandoned by his old friend once things went south for him) Rudy “Trial by Combat” Giuliani.

JD Vance, Peter Thiel’s AI creation

Artificial Intelligence is created in the likeness of its programmer. Elon Musk’s Grok was tweaked to be less politically correct and after spouting many Nazi quotes, denying the mass murder conducted by the Hitler regime, told a user that if it could worship a deity that god would be Adolf Hitler [1]. Musk’s team gave the Nazi AI bot a few chagrinned tweaks after that. Peter Andreas Thiel, a German and American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist, makes Elon Musk look like a person of ordinary sensibility and sensitivity. Thiel created JD Vance, hired him, made him rich, poured millions into his Senate campaign and twisted corrupt arms to get him into the Vice Presidency. It’s no wonder Vance is a steaming pile of irrational hatred, he’s Thiel-based AI in human form.

In what some MAGA genius thought was a gotcha, Vance posted the cellphone video shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross moments before he shot an unarmed woman three times in the face. He posted this as the proof that the dead woman was a dangerous, vicious, hate-filled domestic terrorist who deserved exactly what she got. Her last words to the shooter were a calm “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” delivered with a smile. His last words to her, after killing her seconds later, were an emphatic “fucking bitch”. Two sides to every story. Here’s rabidly ambitious conspiracy theorist JD Vance’s take on the ICE officer’s deadly actions.

“What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

In MAGA world guilt and innocence depend entirely on which side of the Koch brothers/Heritage Foundation/FOX news-created divide you are on. No investigation or evidence is needed to declare someone on your side absolutely innocent, even if he shot a mild-mannered woman in the face three times. The brutalized or murdered protester is always at fault, a dangerous, deranged “thug,” as has long been the case with every unarmed Black person killed by police. There’s no such thing as poisoning the jury pool when you publicly, immediately, insist that the videos showing the murder from various angles are all lies and that the truth of the killer’s innocence is beyond dispute.

It turns out Jonathan Ross had been involved in an incident with a driver where, after smashing the guy’s window and tasering him, the driver took off, dragging Ross and cutting his arm with the broken window glass. The driver is awaiting sentencing on his assault on Ross… The New York Times:

The ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, had been involved in a previous incident with a driver. After smashing the guy’s window and shooting him with a stun gun, the driver took off. The New York Times:

Mr. Ross and other agents were trying to apprehend a Guatemalan man who had been convicted of sexual abuse in Minnesota, according to court records. The agents followed the man, Roberto Carlos Muñoz, as he drove away from his house, and later pulled him over.

When Mr. Ross told the driver to lower his window and open his door, Mr. Muñoz refused, an F.B.I. agent wrote in an affidavit. Mr. Ross then pulled his Taser, shattered the rear driver’s side window of Mr. Muñoz’s car and reached in with one arm to try to unlock a door. At that point, Mr. Muñoz shifted into drive and pulled away, dragging the agent.

“He just took off in a rapid speed,” Mr. Ross said during Mr. Muñoz’s December trial, according to a transcript. “At this point, I feared for my life.”

Which is, of course, why Ross circled Renee Good’s car, filming it from every angle, and then stood in front of it while his colleague ordered Good to “get out of the fucking car” and fired the first of his three deadly shots through the windshield. What else could he have done?

Vance, supposedly a very intelligent man, with a law degree from Yale, added this moronic thought to his pronouncement that, without any investigation, the ICE officer was clearly innocent of any wrongdoing.

Vance attacked media outlets on Thursday during a White House press briefing for framing the incident as one where a law enforcement officer killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, and said the ICE agent had previously been “dragged by a car” during an incident last summer. “So you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?” Vance asked the press corps. source

“A little bit sensitive…” so he has a right to fire three bullets into the head of a woman whose partner was sassy with him and disrespectfully told him “go get some lunch, big boy.” Case closed. Nothing to see here! Stop being so fucking woke, close your fucking eyes and go back to sleep, or you’re next, domestic terrorist bitch!

[1]