Flashback six years
Category Archives: Law and Justice
Rule by the best, the best
Trauma schmauma.
Thankfully, there were no long lasting psychological, health, or political effects of a deadly, highly contagious disease that had portable morgues outside of hospitals to deal with the overflow of American corpses. Americans are by nature (and national myth) too healthy and optimistic to let something like a plague stop us from doing the work of America. This is what we have now, the answer to all of our prayers…
Trauma schmauma. Make polio great again! Bird Flu, Turd Flu, fake flues!
Inspector General Joseph Cuffari successfully oversaw permanent deletion of all Secret Service/DHS texts and phone calls from J6
You can read about this creep, appointed by Donald Trump, and wonder why, after covering up the destruction of all January 6 Secret Service texts and phone logs, and those of other key DHS officials, and paying out over a million to settle suits related to his “official acts” as Inspector General, he is still serving, and ready to do his master’s bidding again on January 20th. Read about him here.
Here’s a disgustingly flavorful chunk of that article, which notes Biden has taken no action for months since getting the report, stating:
The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s integrity committee found that Cuffari provided wrongfully inaccurate and misleading answers during his nomination process to become DHS IG, spent $1.4 million to hire a law firm likely to retaliate against three OIG senior executives who questioned his qualifications and attempted to influence the firm’s independent investigation into those employees.
Cuffari, who was appointed by Donald Trump, was also accused of diminishing and delaying reports about sexual harassment at DHS, not informing Congress in a timely and adequate manner that the Secret Service deleted text messages related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and deleting his own work-related text messages.
I never believed for a second that Joe Biden suffers any age-related dementia. He’s slower, he stutters, he’s always been famous for being a gaffe machine, but he’s sharp and coherent every time I hear him speak. With the glaring exception of his glassy-eyed cold medication addled zombie imitation disaster (don’t get me wrong, his zombie imitation was impeccable) during the first half of the infamous debate against Trump, which only confirmed to the live audience what corporate media had been saying the whole time: Biden, unlike Trump, is not fit to be president.
That said, what the fuck, Joe? Why is this openly corrupt Inspector General still in office, four years after covering up the destruction of all evidence of what happened, from the Homeland Security point of view, before, during and after the MAGA riot on January 6th? You can’t blame Merrick Garland for this one, Biden, or the Senate committee that needs to vote out USPS Board nominees to get rid of equally abhorrent fucking Looey DeJoy. Cuffari is an executive branch employee, directly accountable to you. He is untrustworthy and has taken direct action to protect your criminal predecessor/successor. What the fuck, Joe?
Seriously, Joe, what the fuck?
Looey Fucking DeJoy hearing, LOL!
click on it and you get this:
Pages 49-52 of the smirking, corrupt postmaster’s prepared statement address the USPS credo about transparency and accountability. Those policies amount to 403 Error, suckers. There is no such thing as transparency and accountability in a pay to play corporatized democracy where secrecy is essential for corrupt business as usual.
There is no available public information about committee vote deadlocks that stall things like a meaningful hearing with DeJoy BEFORE the election (to ask him why, for example, he refused the IG’s request to post mark mail-in ballots the day they are received or segregate mail-in ballots from the millions of other undelivered letters in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election) or why, and how (and by whom, Kyrsten Sinema?) the confirmation of any of Biden’s three picks for vacant USPS board of directors positions was stonewalled until Trump won the election?
You know what would be nice? A tally of how many mail-in votes were cast and counted in 2024. Would anyone be surprised to see the lowest rates of delivery of Democratic voter ballots (by zipcode) in the seven swing states (all won by DeJoy’s candidate by virtually identical margins)? There is no information anywhere on the internet, outside of recent updates like this one.
If you can do the calculation you’ll find out how many mail-in ballots were cast:
88,380,679 mail-in and early in-person votes cast nationally
48% of these were by mail. Making the total over 40,000,000. How many did DeJoy leave in the sorting houses, mixed with all the other late delivered and never delivered mailings? Nobody seems to have reported on any of that. Though the poor fucker was put through the wringer by House and Senate Committees 40 days before his benefactor is peacefully sworn in as the first felon who incited a riot to disrupt government and stay in power ever legally elected president of these United States.
In the 2020 election, 43% of all votes cast, more than 66 million ballots, were cast by mail (per US Census Bureau — which has no information on 2024, of course). Why the big drop off in 2024 when mail-in voting has increased in every presidential election since 2008? Until 2024, of course when it precipitously dropped by over 40%.
Ballotpedia.org was a decent source for this kind of info. Click.
Hah, what are you going to do? Democracy dies in darkness, boys and girls. LO fucking L!
What does this describe, besides a psychopath?
Certain stories have only one reasonable response
We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.
Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.
I think of the daughter who accused her father of wanting to fuck his son’s girlfriend, after he defended the girl as a good match for his son who made his son happy, in spite of what the daughter thought of the girl. The father was pissed off, felt disrespected, gave his twenty four year-old daughter a piece of his mind. Afterwards his wife told him he was out of line, that their daughter was just trying to be funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has agreed with the wife’s assessment that the girl was joking and believed the father had no reason to feel hurt by the remark.
There are some stories that simply don’t have two equally compelling sides or a lot of nuance. Sometimes a story has one demonstrable truth — for example, a three hour violent riot filmed and broadcast in real time, with more than a hundred injured police officers taken to the hospital. There is of course a counter story, in this case that the riot we all watched was, actually, “legitimate political discourse.”
The second story, to be remotely true, must discount the violence that injured outnumbered law enforcement, the breaking and entering, mass criminal trespass, vandalism, the necessity of heroic actions by a few policemen to allow lawmakers to flee the threats to their lives, the gas masks, the gallows and all the rest. One can’t believe the second story without dismissing a huge trove of evidence we all witnessed.
We can, of course, discuss which of these stories is closer to true, and millions will be compelled by one side or the other, but what actually happened is the deciding factor in which story is closer to true. You can spin a story, as the studiously both-sides New York Times has become so adept at doing, but that is not the same as presenting an intelligible story that doesn’t make both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side is, seem equally plausible. During legitimate political discourse, for example, people are rarely, if ever, injured en masse or taken to the hospital with grievous injuries.
Here are two nice headlines for illustrative purposes, from our beloved journal of record
Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.
A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation. A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure. The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading. I was relieved.
A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have. There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy. As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up. Here’s what the device looks like:
I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans. The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low. I needed to talk to my doctor. The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor. My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.
This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response. Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon. It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question. It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.
It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk. There aren’t multiple sides to this story. If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story. You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is. It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.
Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.
You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.
Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.
The best people, the best people!
History lesson from Heather Cox Richardson
I have to say, Jefferson’s words (which, of course, applied only to wealthy white men) get to me every time. Who can reasonably argue with the idea that the ideal government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed? Informed consent can only be given based on knowledge of the alternatives. This remains true today, when tsunamis of deliberate disinformation can drown all reasonable discussion among those who must give their consent. Here’s Heather:
The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Why Biden can’t do it (or can he?)
Horrifically enough, Biden can’t legally order FBI vetting of Trump’s mad cabinet picks.
Donald Trump, as transgressive a psychopath as we’ve ever had running this country, is doing what he does best, the thing he shares with angry South African superfreak Elon Musk and their proudly stinking ilk, saying a loud, saucy “fuck you!” to the law and the norms it rode in on. His minions love him for his transgressiveness.
The law in question is The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022. This law was designed to fix flaws in the previous laws to make sure a lawless, insane fucker like Trump couldn’t run roughshod over the law to, say, try to get his minions, and an enraged lynch mob, to overturn the lawful results of an election., while refusing to put his estimated $700 trillion dollar brand into a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest while president.
This law provides that the incoming president must sign papers submitting to the provisions of this orderly transition law, allowing his administration to smoothly flow from the one before it. Trump being Trump is doing what he did when Mueller found his final answer to written questions “inadequate” or however the ultra-polite Mueller put it. Trump left his answer to the final, incriminating question completely blank. Nada. Ain’t signing it. Fuck you, pedophile commie cuck losers!
Biden can’t legally order FBI vetting of any of the incoming corrupt incompetents Trump has nominated until, and unless, Trump signs the paper ensuring an orderly, legal transition of power without obvious conflicts of interest.
This would be a perfect test of the absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts the Federalist Six put into place recently to protect their criminal benefactor. It is clearly an important part of Biden’s official presidential duty to ensure a peaceful, legal transfer of power. If he has to break a law that his successor refuses to obey, in order to enforce the law and protect the republic, why the hell not? What are they going to do, prosecute him?
As for why Trumpie is not obeying the law? As Trump said when asked, after a secret, private meeting with Putin in Helsinki, if Putin interfered in the 2016 election “I don’t know why he would.” Trump ain’t signing Jack Shit, Jack Smith! Also, there is no legal way to enforce the law against him, given that the law smashing turd is firmly in charge of the enforcement of all laws and norms, given his huge, 49.9% electoral mandate and the abject sycophancy of his spineless henchpersons and handmaidens.
I take back what I said up top. Do it, Joe Biden.
Pete Hegseth, part 2
Timothy Snyder:
[Trump nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete] Hegseth does not need to know early American history, though, since he disavows the American republic. He is a Christian Reconstructionist who believes that God’s law should prevail. The Constitution has to be understood, Hegseth claims, as subordinate to a broader unwritten Covenant with God, the meaning of which is of course known to him personally. He thus opposes the constitutional structure of the United States as it figures in the actual text.
Hegseth denies the rectitude of the First Amendment, which separates church and state: “without God, America is not America.” He says explicitly that “the diminished role of Christ’s Kingdom in America’s founding” is to blame for the malaise that followed. Switching his metaphysics for a moment, he claims that the separation of church and state opened “the gates of Mordor.” Constitutional patriotism is not a good thing, since it can “untether us from the timeless truth, from the Bible.” Of course, as is always the case, God’s law turns out to mean what Hegseth and his friends say that it means.
The enemy within, broadly defined as “the Left,” is presented as already having a plan to annihilate everyone else. This is, of course, what fascists always say: it is legitimate to destroy the other side, because however invisibly and conspiratorially and secretly, it is planning to kill you first. Thus for Hegseth, the Left has the goal of “erasing America’s soul, culture, and institutions. We are the ones standing in their way—and have been targeted for annihilation.” Hegseth does not dwell, for some reason, on the actual countries that actually want the American system to break.
Only the “enemy within” captures his imagination. Hegseth enjoins his readers to “remember the plan the Left has for you—utter annihilation.” And again: “In more ways than you can imagine, leftists have surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism. The only option for survival in a near ambush is to charge; to close with, and destroy, the enemy.”
Trump’s nominee for the position of secretary of defense seems to believe that we need a cleansing civil war. He instructs us that “we are not only fighting a battle against foreign enemies.” “Sometimes,” he writes, “the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies. Those who would violate the Covenant that binds us as a community of faith and that grants us blessing.”
Deus Vult — God wills it.
Tattoo on Pete Hegseth’s strong right arm. A man of unquestioning faith, only God knows how much Hegseth knows about His eternal, awesome, incomprehensible, all-merciful, terrifying will. Deus vult, baby.
gratuitousblahg 