Category Archives: Law and Justice

Lying is cool again in MAGA-land

If you want something badly enough, and have no scruples about lying, it must be exhilarating to land your dream job after lying your ass off. Lying in a public service setting is only a crime if it can be weaponized against an enemy of the current president and cost that hated enemy tens of thousands of dollars, or more, defending herself in court against baseless charges. Isn’t that right, Pam?

The other day Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a business partner of Jeffery Epstein well after his 2008 conviction, flanked on his way to his closed door non-sworn testimony by a dozen big, imposing men (to protect him from the press) apparently lied his corrupt ass off while sweating through his suit. This putz is the same guy who, while publicly supporting Trump’s unconstitutional tariffs, also bet millions that the tariffs would be struck down, and made millions for himself and his sons, when the Supreme Court eventually ruled Trump’s tariffs illegal. So what if he lied about his close association with a blackmailing sexual predator he claimed he hadn’t seen since 2005, so fucking what?!!! What about TRANSEXUALS and caravans of raping, murdering, disease-infested, blood-poisoning, pet dog and cat eating brown ILLEGAL ALIENS?!!! What about BLACK VOTERS?!!!

Look at Justice-for-Life Boof Kavanaugh, a poster boy for anything goes while under oath, if you’re loyal to your winning team. FOX news was despondent after Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford got done testifying about the inebriated teenaged Kavanaugh tackling her, feeling her up and trying to get his hands inside her bathing suit before he apparently passed out, rolled off her and she was able to get away from him. The talking heads on FOX, and I remember watching it in real time, concluded that the Kavanaugh nomination was cooked. It certainly looked that way to me too.

Kavanaugh, a longtime rightwing Federalist Society partisan (most of his partisan legal writings while a legal advisor to Dubya, whose election he’d helped to secure in Florida, and even his later legal and judicial writings, were withheld from the Senate Judiciary Committee/American people [1]) had been a zealous young advisor to highly principled right wing activist/special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. He had strongly advised Starr to give Bill Clinton no break during his under oath deposition, so that they could eventually trip Clinton up when he got tired, and get him on perjury. After melting down under hard questions himself, when Kavanaugh flashed entitled rage and snarled at one of his questioners, Senator Amy Klobuchar, his allies on the Senate Judiciary Committee quickly called for a time out.

Boof presumably cried it out behind closed doors, was comforted by Lindsey Graham and others, probably spoke to Trump during the break, The president would presumably have asked him if he was a “fucking pussy” or a “real man” and how much he really wanted the job, if he was a pussy. When the hearing resumed, Graham came out wildly attacking the commies who were trying to defame and destroy this good, Christian man, this churchgoing father of girls.

Meanwhile, the lies Kavanaugh told under oath were quickly turned into truth on the internet. When asked what “boof” meant, next to his Georgetown Prep yearbook photo, he lied. Boofing is when your frat bros put a tube in your upturned anus and pour vodka or another pure spirit directly into your colon. Apparently produces quite the buzz. Kavanaugh replied, lying, that it was a reference to his flatulence. Embarrassing, yes, but not as bad as being nicknamed Boof for taking a tube of whiskey up the ass to impress your friends and get shitfaced in the exclusive $60,000 a year high school he attended.

Kavanaugh also lied about the term Devil’s Triangle, claiming it was a “drinking game” (for underage drinkers…), when it was an apparent reference to his desire to have sex, or claim to have had sex, with a young woman named Renata, known to be amenable to such things. Operatives, from an IP address in the same building where Kavanaugh was being questioned, instantly updated the Wikipedia entry for Devil’s Triangle to indicate it is, indeed, just what Kavanaugh said it was — an innocent, uh, drinking game he liked to play while underage at Georgetown Prep — and not a claim, probably also a lie, of youthful sexual conquest.

Judge Kavanaugh’s lies were deemed immaterial, just like his lie that Roe v. Wade was “settled law” supported by strong precedent, until he voted with Alito, Gorsuch and Coney Barret to overturn it, based on the learned wisdom of a seventeenth century British witch hunter. Literally. (Note, Mike “Lock Her Up, Q-Anon, I Take the Fifth” Flynn’s lies about his undisclosed work for foreign governments and illegal contact with the Russians were also deemed “immaterial” by master rightwing piece of shit AG Bill Barr.)

Which brings me to corporate balls and strikes umpire Chief Justice John “Arbitration Clause” Roberts, longtime enemy of Black Americans’ right to vote. Callais , and its unprecedented shadow docket enabled immediate effect, was Act III in destroying the Voting Rights Act (VRA) once and for all, legislating unappealably from the bench. Talk about “activist judges.

Act I was a 2013 case involving racist Shelby County, Alabama (suing the nation’s first Black AG), in which Roberts struck down a unanimous 98-0 vote in the Senate, a 390-33 vote in the House and President George W. Bush calling the VRA, at a signing ceremony, “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” Roberts thus substituted his judgment for every elected representative of the People, ever senator and member of Congress, along with the president who appointed him to the court. With four fellow corporatist rightwing justices, he ruled, 5-4, suck it, y’all, the Court hath spoken. Roberts also lied in his decision, claiming the vast majority who voted for it in Congress, after looking over a record 16,000 pages of current data, had relied on 40 year-old data to reauthorize the law that fixed a century long problem. A pox on this smiling corporatist shithead:

Speaking of shitheads, here’s some AI by the guy who flew an AI fighter jet, maskless at high altitude, to dump an endless river of his AI excrement on a large crowd in New York City who had marched in a No Kings protest. Fuck that puto.

[1] Let us only focus, for a minute, on the historically liberal classification of Kavanaugh’s written record as a lawyer and judge.   90% of his legal writings were withheld from scrutiny during the disgracefully partisan confirmation process.   Classified, top secret, like his president’s financial information — and like which rightwing billionaire paid off Kavanaugh’s jumbo credit card debt, or the massive ad buy to get him confirmed, right before his confirmation hearings started.

This shroud of secrecy over Kavanaugh’s partisan record, dating back to his law student years as a hard drinking Federalist Society zealot, and the mysterious wiping of a large credit card debt, contrasts starkly with the full records disclosed for every previous nominee, for each of  Obama’s recent appointees.    Kagan and Sotomayor’s full writings from their judicial and legal careers were given to the Senate Judiciary Committee (and Obama had a terrible record on transparency, in spite of his many inspirational speeches about it).   Less than 10% of petulant partisan Kavanaugh’s record was available for scrutiny by the body rubber stamping the zealot’s rushed confirmation by a one vote, party line majority.

source (citing himself…)

The personal is political

In these bitterly divided times, the chasm intentionally created by far-right profiteers who blame the lunatic left, Antifa, unfair, ungrateful colored people, college students, lying, vote rigging, corrupt, crime supporting commies, “illegal aliens”, bloodthirsty baby murdering abortionists, city dwellers, godless feminists who want to castrate all white, Christian men while they’re innocently tanning their testicles, transexual pedophiles, etc. is widened and deepened 24/7 by the corporate media.

The Republican “Culture War” is a supremely cynical, lie-based, profit-driven corporate distraction, curated and promoted by the insanely greedy to divide people and turn us against each other, instead of the unthinkable — a united movement for fairness and government by consent of the governed. Such a movement would be … (shudder) … Class Warfare… so unfair to our best and wealthiest citizens! Many billions in tax breaks, government contracts and subsidies to the wealthiest individuals and our most important corporate “persons” would be lost if “inequality” was seriously addressed — talk about totally unfair!

The personal is political. You can either support injustice and inequality, based on a series of emotionally satisfying but rationally empty conceptions, or you believe in fairness, and do your best to act on that belief. That’s as personal as it gets. Nobody likes to be treated unfairly, although perhaps 250,000,000 of us routinely are in this pay-to-play democracy.

If you are OK with institutional injustice, the justification is generally either “well, I personally benefit from it” or, more commonly, for the masses, God wills it, Deus Vult! Who are we puny humans to question the unknowable will of almighty God and those vessels He fills with His spirit to carry out His divine impulses? That was the impetus for the Crusades, for every organized religious slaughter in history, faithfully serving an omniscient, all-loving, all-merciful god.

Speaking of God and his vessels, lately the president of the United States, an objectively crazy, criminally insane person, openly attacks the pope after launching a cynical, senseless, illegal war of aggression, a war that is already starting to cause great global suffering, to protect himself and his privileged “friends” from the evidence of their sexual predations being made public. How dare the pontiff contradict the will of the Leader?!!! Even the devout Catholics in the orbit of the Leader dare not speak up for the pope’s right to quote scripture to advance the cause of world peace and stability. They know the Leader will smite them, righteously, madly, humiliatingly.

I’m thinking about this fairness/unfairness business as my blood pressure has been surging lately with the aggravating news cycle (the Callais decision foremost among them– ruling, essentially, along “ideological” lines, that blacks are racists, not whites — and that equal protection of the law under the 14th amendment was meant to protect persecuted whites, not angry blacks and giving the persecuted majority emergency permission to immediately redraw all maps for maximum “partisan” advantage). My own health challenges walking, even standing, without pain, three years after an unsuccessful knee replacement, don’t make me any more cheerful or relaxed in the face of this KKK pleasing 6-3 fuck you to democracy. The former Confederacy has rushed to remove all “minority/majority” districts and end representation of Black voters. Makes me wanna holler.

Yesterday, by US Mail, I had a note from an ancient old friend of my long departed mother’s asking “whatever happened to rachmunnis (mercy, compassion) and forgiveness?”

This after I explained to her many times, on the phone and in writing, over the course of several years, why it is impossible to forgive someone who can’t acknowledge they’ve hurt you and continues to do it. Her neurotic son, a childhood friend, is an aggravating person, as she herself conceded a couple of years ago when I was recovering from the knee surgery, undergoing treatment for kidney disease and in the throes of a prostate emergency induced by a psychopathic urologist. “With all the aggravations in your life, you don’t need to deal with him,” she told me, in what seemed a very loving gesture. Since then she’s been on a relentless campaign to force to me to forgive her passive aggressive asshole of a son, no matter what my high horse might have to say about it.

It’s a question of basic fairness — If I give you the benefit of the doubt, over and over, and you, feeling comfortable, are increasingly aggressive in making unreasonable demands of me, how is that fair? If you can’t acknowledge fault, as her son can’t (and he learned it from the mother he hates, who learned it from her unbearable mother — I’ve known four generations of this family), then there is never a reason to do anything differently, let alone apologize. The status quo in that kind of nonmutual relationship is irremediably sick, no conflict can ever be resolved fairly and must continue to fester and escalate. I’ve finally learned the only healthy response in this situation is a quiet sayonara. Here is the old woman’s “final” (I’ve had a few more calls and two note cards since) attempt to make amends:

This is my very last call to you, but since I received your letter yesterday I’m just going to say you know that you write very well. Throughout that letter, which I understood not all of it, there was never the word forgiveness. You don’t forgive anybody anything. So, at any rate, I just wanted to make that last statement.

I’m about to say my prayers, you’ll always be in my prayers, for your operation and for the two of you, you’re both good kids. And this is the last call you’ll hear from me. All right, I won’t bother you anymore and I’m sorry that you can’t forgive me for whatever it is I said, or did, or thought, or whatever the hell it was. At any rate, whatever it is, I’m sorry that you can’t forgive me. Have a good Passover and take care.

This message is beautiful in so many ways, in addition to how succinct and reductive it is. Talk about getting the last word. Since I can’t forgive her son, who has never acknowledged doing anything hurtful to anyone, and now her, for insisting I have to forgive him, no matter what I may feel about it, I never forgive anybody anything. Case closed. Pretty categorical. I’m a monster because I can’t forgive, maybe crazy too, certainly terminally enraged. Also, her apology is a beautiful example of blame shifting, her sorrow perfectly calibrated for the occasion: I’m sorry that you are such an unforgiving asshole.

I gave the old lady the last word, as I have learned to do with this type.

Then more calls from her that I didn’t answer and two antique note cards, weeks and months later, challenging me again to be a human being, to stop being ‘uncourageous’, a hypocrite, to get off my high horse, stop overthinking everything, being oversensitive, taking everything as a personal insult, being petty, unforgiving, merciless and so on.

In hopes of ending this relentless cycle, and because writing focuses and relaxes me, I replied to her note card by highlighting sections of the last note I sent her. That last note made the same basic, simple points I’ve made every other time. If someone hurts you, angrily insists they didn’t, and keeps doing it, there can be no apology and no reason to forgive. You have to just get away from this type.

I printed my previous final note to her, including the two paragraphs about forgiveness. I put them in red so she couldn’t miss them. Having the words highlighted in red makes it harder for her to pretend I hadn’t given the subject she claimed I never mentioned careful consideration. I added a few explanatory notes, with just a couple of ugly details to illustrate what I’d already written to her, since she’d told me she hadn’t understood some of my previous letter.

The eternal stickiness of this type is exhausting. Hopefully she’ll be wounded enough by the clinical precision of my explanatory notes to finally stop fucking badgering me. If not, I’ve already promised her silence after this, and, as she knows, my word is my bond. For good measure, by way of a final kick in her almost hundred year-old ass, I ended by telling her she’ll be in my prayers.

Nazis don’t care how much they need to humiliate themselves in the fight to ruthlessly dominate everyone else

It is an abomination, in a democracy (or anywhere else, for that matter) for masked, heavily armed “law enforcement” agents to use violence, including deadly violence, against civilians for any reason, or no reason. Totalitarian regimes rely on heavily armed, unaccountable goon squads, often in disguise, ignoring all law in their pursuit of the regime’s enemies, real and imagined. Every such regime has had its Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, Death Squads, Secret Police — American slavery had its well-armed slave catcher militias, and later its Ku Klux Klan, those brave defenders of southern white women’s virginity wore masks, and outnumbered their unarmed victims ten to one, just like today’s ICE agents.

Under Trump 2.0, ICE, armed for military engagement and funded up their masked wazoos, is that violent goon squad. They can murder American citizens, on video (sometimes ones they shoot themselves while firing bullets into a woman’s face through her car window) with no consequences for themselves. They are protected because they are carrying out the will of the Leader. The vast majority of Americans are appalled at this shit, particularly the murderous variant on Trump’s constant bullying of ordinary citizens and others. But Nazis always double, triple and quadruple down. They intend, by doing this — in your fucking face! — to break the will of their victims to resist. Here’s Heather Cox Richardson:

In February, G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers crunched the polls and found that reforms to ICE are extraordinarily popular. Ninety-two percent of Americans want ICE agents to wear body cameras, for example, and 80% wanted an independent investigation in the killings of Good and Pretti. Morris noted that between 60% and 90% of voters—a supermajority that includes Republicans and a majority of Independents—say they want “transparency, accountability, rules, and oversight” for federal agents.

Today, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump’s White House advisor on border security, Tom Homan, assured Republicans that mass deportation is coming and that the administration will flood immigration officers into jurisdictions that aren’t cooperative. Michael Williams of CNN reported that Homan told Republicans angry that the administration is not deporting enough people: “You ain’t seen sh*t yet. This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming.” He added: “You’re going to see more ICE agents [than] you ever seen before.”

The administration’s disregard for the will of the American people also shows in its approach to its war on Iran. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters: “The operation is over. Epic Fury, as the president notified Congress, we’re done with that stage of it. We’re now on to this Project Freedom,” the attempt to open the Strait of Hormuz. The 1973 War Powers Act required the president either to get congressional approval for the war or to withdraw the troops within 60 days of notifying Congress of a military action. That deadline was May 1.

Now, according to Rubio, the war is now in a different phase: opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before Trump’s military adventure.

But Iranian officials have responded to Trump’s Project Freedom with military strikes against both the vessels attempting the transit and other Gulf countries. This afternoon, Trump backed down.

source

The invertebrate lickspittles who serve their demented, compulsively lying leader must resort to counterfactual narratives and bark threats and absurd justifications to stay in their precarious positions of power. Good Catholic Tom Homan “we’re going to round up MILLIONS, y’all ain’t seen shit yet!” and Little Marco Rubio “Epic Fury is over, we rebranded, like the corporate ass-rapers we base our company’s policies on, to Project Freedom, so we get to restart the 60 day clock on the War Powers Act, psyche!”

They are vomiting the quiet parts out loud, because to Nazis, there is no means too humiliating if the end is possible absolute power, revenge on all critics, the violent silencing of dissent and, ultimately, severe, humiliating punishment for all enemies. Anyone, like myself, for example, who routinely compares these fucking Nazis to the German Nazis who were forced to fight a war they insisted the Jews started, with terrible results for everyone involved.

On social media, Trump’s account continued to whipsaw between pressing for an end to the war and threatening apocalyptic destruction if Iran doesn’t agree to U.S. demands. “Assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption,” he wrote, “the already legendary Epic Fury will be at an end, and the highly effective Blockade will allow the Hormuz Strait to be OPEN TO ALL, including Iran. If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The administration’s shifting justifications and claims about the Iran war are “dizzying,” Ben Finley, Matthew Lee, and Farnoush Amiri of the Associated Press wrote today. Yesterday, after calling the war “concluded,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent the day selling Trump’s Project Freedom to open the Strait of Hormuz, only to have Trump call Project Freedom off with a post on social media.

source

The evil we are all facing

Although I resisted believing in the existence of evil for many years, today its existence is undeniable. Evil walks brazenly among us. It is embodied in a system where basic human rights of citizenship, won only after a century of sacrifice and bloodshed, can be taken away at the stroke of a pen by six true believers, their unappealable decision perversely disguised as a constitutionally protected take on human equality. There is nothing wrong with cheating, and violating laws, they rule, if it keeps your party in power, no matter what the inferior majority wants.

The evil we are up against in 2026 is impossible not to see, and like most evil, it depends on constantly lying in order for its blinding truths to prevail. To a malignant narcissist who will say whatever is necessary to never be wrong, always be perfect, and have everything they claim taken as infallibly true — constant lying and righteous rage are necessary to prop up the grandiose vision of those who are damaged beyond repair. Insistence on the reasonableness of incoherence is necessary to force incoherent decisions on others. If you can do it with an affable smile, so much the better for your side.

The Age of Reason was an aspiration, a return to the pursuit of classical wisdom abandoned, during centuries of Christian intolerance and a slavish devotion to blind faith in God’s unknowable will, the long sleep of Reason known as The Dark Ages. The light of Reason, it was believed by those enlightened few who embraced the notion of a world guided by knowledge based on shared human experience and demonstrable facts, would soon illuminate the darkness and lead mankind to a better destiny than irrationality, oppression and death by sword and fire to all “heretics”.

Those who have much, and want everything, insist violently on their right to it all. They will not tolerate any of this Reason shit, if it conflicts with their need to dominate and control everything, and to be exempt from all law. For most of history these literal motherfuckers have ruled the rest of us. And to rule without being pitchforked by those they screw, they must peddle an irrational, counter-factual narrative, destroy the critical faculties of the populace (defund the Department of Education, for example) and cancel the right of expression of those who would expose their fundamental, destructive incoherence.

Burn the books, burn the libraries, burn the satirists, burn those who object to torturing our enemies, our neighbors, burn, baby, burn — Jesus loves a good fire to purge sin from the world (according to his most determinedly perverted followers). Burn the law enforcers, if they threaten you or your allies. Burn anyone who objects to burning people!

This insanely punitive pro-conflagration politics will not go down well with most people, unless they are already insane with rage. All this burning of our neighbors makes no sense, except through the lens of violent fury. That’s what advertising/propaganda is for. Keep them enraged with constantly repeated inflammatory lies and they will cheer the burning of those they hate, or, equally good, they will tune out entirely. Incoherence, insisted on, is the message. Lying is essential to the selling of every ugly enterprise.

I get PTSD from something like the Federalist Society Six declaring the other day that the party they belong to, and the power-crazed ideological movement they believe in, may stay in power by any means necessary, and by every means available. What is the legal rationale for striking down a law that finally brought a measure of justice to millions of citizens denied the right to vote for a century? We have the power, The End. Can the recent decision to finish off the Voting Rights Act be rationally justified? Who cares? We have the power, we finally struck down the last of that hated law that gives inferiors the right to elect their representatives, there is no further appeal and fuck you, what are you going to do about it, cuck?

I get PTSD because I have lived the personal version of this kind of politics. Throughout my childhood, in the little nuclear family I grew up in, I was generally blamed for the anger of parents who couldn’t control their anger. Almost five years ago I watched our closest friends, at each other’s throats for days on end in a beautiful rented vacation house, and afterwards, it was all my fault.

It was my fault because instead of saying, during a particularly insane moment close to the end of our holiday, after tensions between this long married couple escalated to an unbearable level, “goddamn it, fuck.. are you all insane?” I stopped myself and said instead “goddamn it, fuck… face,” while looking at my own partner, who although she’d just annoyed me, was as helpless as I was in that moment. I had utterly shocked them by violating their sacred marriage contract never to call each other names — prolonged silence, glaring, passive aggression, making nasty comments about each other, threats of violence were all fair game — but name calling? That was intolerable! They both agreed about that 100%.

Nothing unites enraged people like a common enemy, and that enemy was now me. My name calling in a moment of frustration, even if I immediately apologized for it, even if my apology was sincere, was something they could never forgive, as was my inability to forgive them for blaming me for something that was entirely my fault alone — and the way I had destroyed a beautiful vacation near Woodstock.

I see our political moment the same way.  A compulsive liar is the Leader and anyone on the right who wants power must get it through him (in the original German this was called the Führerprinzip — all power flows directly from the Führer).  To be eligible for power the applicant must demonstrate the ability to lie, to attack anyone questioning their lie, to be eternally brazen and always on the attack.   Nothing can ever be the fault of someone who can never be wrong.  What is hard to understand about that?

That, in a nutshell, is the evil we are up against in this perilous moment. An unreasoning need to be superior that yields to nothing, not reason, mercy, common decency or any humane impulse. The pure, unfiltered will to dominate, no matter what the cost, is the engine of evil. To this end they use lies to turn benefit of the doubt into suspicion, friendship to enmity, love to hate, a willingness to empathize into a desire for violent retribution.

How well will we swim through the sea of blood these fucks have no hesitation to flood the land with?  I am breathing deeply today, writing, refining, remembering to relax my breath, as the top of my head feels ready to blow off.  We must remain cool and rational for the grim fight ahead.  At this point, there is no doubt that we are fighting evil and we have no choice but to continue.

86 47, yo

fourth assassination attempt against Mr. Trump!!!

War is (lucrative as) hell

War is hell, except to those happy few who profit from the atrocities.   It takes billions of dollars a day, as we learned recently, to bomb the shit out of a far away land, to destroy its civilian infrastructure, kill its leaders and make it submit to our demands, whatever they may be.  

The Nazis were the first modern regime to target civilians for death and terror, to demoralize and torture the population to advance its war aims (he says, pulling this dramatic factoid directly out of his ass and qualifying it with the hazy word “modern”) [1].   The Japanese did the same in places they invaded, with swords, to hellish effect, as did the Americans in that horrific world war, mostly by air.  The targeting of civilians is a war crime under the international laws enacted to prevent another World War Two style mass murder event.  Killing an unarmed civilian, a surrendering soldier, blowing up a hospital, a school, a water treatment plant, bridges, power plants, any non-military target, threatening to do any of these things, all war crimes. The devil, as always, is in the details.

What happened after the US violated international law, (its president also defying the US Constitution, in contempt of Congress and the electorate) and rained unprovoked death and destruction on Iran?   That remains to be seen, but since the US withdrew from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (Reagan — he didn’t want to take shit for illegally mining the harbor of the new communist state in Central America) there will be no enforceable criminal sanctions for the American killing of 160 girls at an Iranian school targeted by AI, blown up by the world’s most sophisticated Air Force.  

Likewise for the people Trump and Hegseth lethally droned on boats in the Caribbean, people who were eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets!  Wait, those are Haitians in Ohio JD Vance lied about…  The people we murdered in those boats a thousand miles from our shores, over a hundred of them now, are TERRORISTS, yes, that’s right, narco-terrorists who were, in fact, killing Americans by the millions, literally, as Pam Bondi testified, tens of millions, an invading army, and under emergency anti-terrorism powers, the US president can legally order their murder. 

Maybe not legally, but who is going to stop him?  Obama did this to a US citizen (and his son, a week later), under the Dick Cheney Doctrine, on the president’s sole determination, based on the best available intel, designated the father a terrorist, a pirate, hostis humani generis, outside of the realm of law of the civilized nations, reduced them both, by armed drone, to chopped meat. No need for criminal charges or due process of any kind for either of them.  The killing of the boy was said to have been a mistake, but there was never an apology to anyone about it.   “Fun fact”:  Trump’s special forces killed the boy’s little sister, Nawar, a few years later, in a controversial, illegal raid in 2017. Nawar was eight when she was shot to death [2].   War and its horrific excesses continue in a straight line, soon to be drawn by robots. The history of war is always written in the blood of the meek, the ordinary and the decent, for the benefit of the profiteers, folks untroubled by torturing some folks, or seeing them slaughtered.

You have Israel mass killing in Gaza, letting their “settlers” murder with impunity on the West Bank. Israel is not the only nation doing this in the world right now, but Israel is doing it. Now they are bombing southern Lebanon, fighting a terrorist menace. A matter of national survival, Israel says. On the other hand, you have more than a million innocent Lebanese civilians, driven from their homes, many of those homes destroyed by bombs, countless injuries and many deaths. Blowing up the bridges they need to cross to return to the rubble of their homes is a war crime. As my grandfather used to say, when I caught him being a hypocrite, “call me ‘pisher'”.

Israel has not been prosecuting anyone for killing non-Jewish civilians, though they’ve passed a law allowing Palestinians to be executed in Israel for certain crimes. This law doesn’t apply to Jews because Israel is not, no matter what its antisemitic and arch Jewish detractors (such as myself) might say, an apartheid or otherwise racist state.     

Damaging a statue of Jesus while depopulating southern Lebanon will not be tolerated by the world’s most moral army, the army of the sole democracy in the region, America’s beloved ally. It makes Israeli soldiers look anti-Christian, which is not a good look for an army of Jews supported by faithful. well-funded Christian Zionists. Depopulating southern Lebanon is a different matter entirely, as is the killing of unarmed Palestinian paramedics coming to the aid of the injured, murdered and buried in a mass grave, along with their ambulance, by an Israeli bulldozer.

As is the use of the passive voice to describe what happened when at least one Israeli shot two Palestinians to death near a school in the occupied West Bank. Got to admire how this shit is done, and how deftly the Grey Lady turns those headline phrases.

[1] I “stand corrected” by robotic intelligence:

[2] Nawar al-Awlaki, the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed during a U.S. military raid in Yemen on January 29, 2017, which was the first military operation authorized by President Trump. The raid resulted in the deaths of several civilians, including Nawar, and raised significant controversy regarding its execution and the loss of innocent lives. Wikipedia NBC News

Civilian deaths

The U.S. military initially denied there were any civilian casualties, but later declared it was investigating if they occurred.[37] The Pentagon later confirmed that civilians, including women and children, were likely killed in the attack.[47] A Yemeni government official in Al Bayda Governorate said on January 31 that at least eight women and seven children (ranging in age from 3 to 13) were killed.[48] Human Rights Watch reported on February 24 that at least 14 civilians, including nine children, were killed in the operation.[10] The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), a London-based NGO, found that the operation went “dreadfully wrong” and that, according to local villagers, 25 civilians, who were not members of AQAP, were killed; this included nine children under the age of 13, with the youngest being a three-month-old baby. The BIJ listed the names and ages of the dead children. Beside the nine children killed, the BIJ reports that one pregnant woman was also killed.[36] The civilian deaths appear to have been a result of the aerial gunfire from U.S. support aircraft, according to a CENTCOM statement.[49] source

Total exoneration

Donald Trump has never been totally exonerated in his long life of being endlessly, unfairly persecuted, no more than he has ever been held accountable for any of his various crimes and misdeeds. He has defeated justice many times, by delay, bribe (e.g. Pam Bondi in Florida, $25,000 to her campaign if she’d drop case against his fake university) obstruction, vexatious litigation, using government resources to prosecute vendettas, making threats against judges, jurors, witnesses, calls to violence, getting others to cover up his many crimes.

The second most corrupt Attorney General of modern times, Bill Fucking Barr, lied when declaring that the Mueller report “totally exonerated” Trump when Mueller wrote, in his report:

Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment [that Trump did not act with corrupt intent and did not commit felonies]. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. . .

. . . The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of the office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.

I know we live in a post-fact age, but consider this:

Any president who leaves office, illegally taking with him with boxes of classified and top secret papers, although presumed innocent until convicted, is a criminal suspect until investigated and exonerated of wrongdoing. Especially if, like Trump, he claims he can declassify them with his mind, that he doesn’t have them, that he returned them all already, that he’s willing to show the government that he doesn’t have them, then gets one of his lawyers to lie that no more classified documents are in his possession, and so on, rope-a-doping the authorities for a year and a half. When a federal judge signs a search warrant, specifically describing the evidence of crime being sought and the exact places where they are likely hidden, that’s not an “illegal raid”. There is nothing more legal, under our law, than the execution of a search warrant adhering strictly to the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

The punchline; they find some of the classified documents the president illegally took when he was dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. They find boxes of the documents he claimed he didn’t have, in a bathroom, in a ballroom, in his sock drawer, the ones he lied about having (or selling to Putin, Mohammed bin Bonesaw, et al).

He got away with clear violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice because he had a corrupt judge, appointed after he lost the election he claims was stolen from him, throw the case out, on the shabbiest of legal theories (tip of the cap to Clarence Thomas) after dragging her feet for over a year ruling on routine motions.

Consider Trump’s long campaign to reverse the results of the 2020 election, an election he was told, and knew, he lost (‘how did I lose to that piece of shit?’ he asked one of his lackies after losing the election). 60 baseless law suits, pressure on various state officials, a lying $50,000,000 ad campaign (payments for ‘Stop the Steal’ ads stopped on January 6, don’t you know?), slates of fake electors, threats to state officials, an illegal plan to get the DOJ to contest results in states he lost, a plot with his “friends” in Congress (“The Greenbay Sweep”) to throw the final certification into the House so he’d be declared the winner, increasing madness unto epic fury leading up to the passionate Day of Love on January 6, 2021, when he whipped up a crowd he knew to be armed to go to the Capital for a bloody riot the RNC later rebranded as “legitimate political discourse”. We all saw that legitimate political discourse unfold on TV, along with the president who sent the mob to disrupt the joint session of Congress and watched the assault on TV for over three hours, and how it led to 140 Capitol and D.C. policemen hospitalized with grievous injuries sustained during the legitimate political discourse. That he beat being prosecuted for his multi-tentacled treason and shitting on his oath to defend the Constitution, by delay, obstruction, threats, violence, etc. does not mean he was exonerated for jack shit.

Now Trump’s fully weaponized, selectively prosecuting DOJ, led by his criminal and impeachment attorneys, has fired everyone involved with either prosecution against their boss. At a far-right event the other day, Nazi consigliere Todd Blanche proudly announced this purge was complete. Fair is fair. Come to kill me, I kill you, how you like that, asshole?

Here’s one of the “righteously” fired DOJ attorneys, J.P. Cooney, with a short summary of how guilty Trump was of both of these disqualifying criminal conspiracies. Cooney is now running for Congress in Virginia.

Coherence in the face of brutal, incoherent force

In a habeas corpus case last month, a district judge in West Virginia, Joseph Goodwin, granted the release of a poor devil illegally rounded up, denied due process, rendered, and unlawfully imprisoned for a civil immigration violation in a privately owned detention center by Stephen Miller and ICE. The judge wrote this crystal clear condemnation of the lawless behavior of DHS, and freed the illegally detained man. The writing is beautiful and the legal analysis is consistent and completely coherent.

Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening. Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government—masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind—are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process. The systematic character of this practice and its deliberate elimination of every structural feature that distinguishes constitutional authority from raw force place it beyond the reach of ordinary legal description. It is an assault on the constitutional order. It is what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. It is what the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids.

The Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus filed by Petitioner Anderson Jesus Urquilla-Ramos, [ECF Nos. 1, 26], brings just that circumstance before this court as a discrete case and controversy. This court will decide it as such. But I will not pretend, through careful procedural language, that what is at issue here is a technical question of statutory interpretation. The overarching issue is whether the federal government may deploy anonymous agents to seize persons on American streets and highways for civil violations, without warrants, without identification, and without any process before or after. The Constitution does not permit that. The remainder of this opinion explains why.

In our constitutional republic, governmental force derives its authority from the Constitution. But that authority is not unlimited. The Government’s power is legitimate only because it is derived from the People and exercised through law by identifiable public officers answerable to the public and to the courts. The structure of the Constitution guarantees visibility. Both the officer and the force he employs are traceable to authority delegated by the People and subject to the limits imposed by law. When the Government uses force against the public, the citizen can recognize the officer as a lawful representative. The public can evaluate the act. The judiciary can later review it. Every stop, arrest, detention, and use of force can be tested against the Constitution’s protections. Not so here.

For these reasons and the reasons that follow, Petitioner’s Amended Verified Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus (“Petition”), [ECF No. 26], is GRANTED. The court FINDS that both his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as well as his Fifth Amendment right to due process have been violated. Immediate release is the only relief sufficient to remedy Petitioner’s unlawful detention.

The judge grants relief to the illegally imprisoned man in no uncertain terms:

Therefore, the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, [ECF No. 26], is GRANTED. Petitioner is ORDERED released immediately from civil immigration custody. Respondents are PROHIBITED from re-arresting and detaining Petitioner absent significant change in circumstances to justify detention or subject to the determination of a neutral and detached
decisionmaker.

The court DIRECTS the Clerk to send a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to counsel, any unrepresented party, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of West Virginia.

The court further DIRECTS the Clerk to post a copy of this published opinion on the court’s website, http://www.wvsd.uscourts.gov.

Judge Goodwin’s entire decision is here, well-worth a read. Thanks to Hawk for pointing this out on youTube.

Be fair, any powerful war criminal would make the same demand

For starters, a bully always looks to provoke others, weaker than him, to fight back. This gives the bully the righteous excuse to rightfully retaliate. Trump sought, by unleashing masked, untrained goons, in full riot gear, to rough people up, break car windows and deploy tear gas on peaceful protesters, to provoke a violent response that would enable him to dominate the streets with the military. His attack on Iran, as illegal an act of unprovoked war as Cheney’s war on Iraq, likely has the same larger aim. Get Iran to retaliate with terrorism in the US, then, bingo, September 11, a new Patriot Act (probably already waiting at the Heritage Foundation) and soaring, intoxicating new emergency powers for Trump. Toward that end, he seeks preemptive immunity from the International Criminal Court for war crimes he’s busily committing now.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize recipient (he got the winner to give him her prize), Donald J. Trump, is threatening the International Criminal Court to back the fuck off and stop trying to accuse righteous Christian Americans of committing war crimes in various completely necessary excursions to ensure world peace. If the ICC had existed in their time, both Hitler and Stalin would have done the same, rest assured. Trump is just the first US president with the massive balls to do this, (hence the need for the 2,000,000 square foot Trump-Epstein ballroom where the East Wing used to be — finally a place where he can feel comfortable spreading his legs with those unfeasibly gigantic balls).

After the atrocities and massive death toll of World War Two (estimated at 70-85 million– including 40-50 million civilians), and widespread war crimes committed during that war of mass murder, idealists around the world pressed for and created the International Criminal Court. Those who massacred civilians would now be held accountable for crimes against humanity, under international law. Mass murderers of civilians selected by ethnic group would be prosecuted for the newly coined crime of genocide.

Not long ago (when I was in law school, during the last years of the twentieth century) many international law experts were optimistic about the rule of law prevailing among the nations of the world. They believed this even though Reagan had already rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction over Americans and Israel and a few other countries had done the same. Modern day Nazis had other ideas about this so-called rule of international so-called law. Look what our boy Trump has to say about this stupid court:

War criminal Pete Hegseth [1], Secretary of Indiscriminate and Absolute Lethality (not pansy-ish “legality”) keeps bellowing about the right to execute enemy combatants, or suspected drug smugglers, or anyone else deemed a danger, or a potential danger, even if they’re wounded, disarmed, incapacitated or surrendering. (See, nobody has prosecuted the agents who executed Alex Pretti while he was restrained face down on the ground… so, what are YOU going to do about it, bitches?) Hegseth said the US will not be bound by “stupid rules of engagement” and will “give no quarter to our enemies” (it’s also a war crime to kill people who are surrendering) so murdering like it’s a video game is cool again. The Department of Lethality posts video game-inspired little movies about the glorious war in Iran, with mad respect to the American service members who may, theoretically, be dying as a result — “as often happens in war” as POTUS sagely notes.

And while we’re talking about complete immunity, total impunity, pre-emptive exoneration, here’s POTUS:

Last night, Trump posted on social media: “We are totally destroying the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and otherwise, yet, if you read the Failing New York Times, you would incorrectly think that we are not winning. Iran’s Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer, missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth. We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time—Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” source

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today.”

[1] See, for example, his order for a “double tap” strike to kill South Americans clinging to the wreckage of their sinking boat after a drone strike destroyed it, killing everyone else aboard (and sending any evidence of the crime they were never charged with to the bottom of the ocean). See also his recent U-boat torpedo sinking of an Iranian vessel returning from the Indian Ocean, and then letting the survivors drown. The Tomahawk missile that made a direct hit on an Iranian middle school, killing 170 girls the same age as Epstein’s victims? Not his problem. He’s not going to be restrained by no stupid rules of engagement! He’s maximally lethal, yo. No quarter for the godless enemies of Christ! Like it says on his arm: Deus Vult.

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