Category Archives: Law and Justice

Implacable hostility in an atrocious cause

This is John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, one of America’s foremost advocates of slavery. Decades before the Civil War, he argued (anonymously) that South Carolina had the constitutional right to nullify any federal law that affected its rights regarding its profits from slave labor (no tax, no tariff). Andrew Jackson, a great psychotic in his own right, and also a heavy drinker, flew into a murderous rage when Calhoun anonymously published his nullification argument, precipitating the Nullification Crisis (1832-33).

One of the great regrets of Jackson’s presidency, Old Hickory said at the end, is that he didn’t follow up on his threat to go down to South Carolina and hang fucking Calhoun with his own hands. Not that Jackson, who killed several men in duels and carried a bullet around in his chest after a near fatal duel for him, also hadn’t become wealthy trading slaves or had anything against the Peculiar Institution, but on general principle.

Calhoun was also the guy who, while in the Senate, developed and perfected our beloved filibuster, which, of course is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution though it has always been slavery’s, bigotry’s and anti-democracy’s biggest friend in government.

Right piece of shit, John C. Calhoun, as far as I can tell . But quite an “I am an eternally hostile, implacable motherfucker who will fucking destroy you” glare on the politician’s face, isn’t it?

Federalist Society Endgame

The Federalist Society, a rightwing judicial fraternity, was created and is funded by ultra wealthy, right wing privilege holders. It was established to use the law to better protect the privileges of our best citizens, which is to say, inheritors of vast wealth, and those who join their ranks through their own efforts. It is devoted, by strict doctrine, to giving their political benefactors political wins in every possible case. Their judges often do this, especially in cases otherwise lost, by going well past what they need to find in order to make their rulings.

Their style of activist judging always includes a political victory for their agenda, to dismantling the regulatory/administrative state, limiting “majoritarian tyranny” (will of the voters) and ensuring full rights of citizenship only for our best citizens, corporate and human, regardless of the facts, the law, a 98-0 vote in the Senate.

For example, the Supreme Court Federalist Society contingent went much further than necessary to overrule the Colorado courts where Trump was disqualified as an insurrectionist. Without touching the facts of his insurrectionist plan and shameful, criminal behavior they made a ruling that allows every elected federal official who aided Trump in his insurrectionist plan to overturn election results forever immune from disqualification under the constitutional clause designed for that purpose by the framers of the 14th Amendment. The Federalist Society Six effectively wrote one of the most important democracy enforcing clauses out of the 14th amendment. In the name of demented Originalism, or some other Federalist Society endorsed doctrine pulled out of their collective, doctrinaire ass and protected not only Trump but his wide circle of elected insurrectionist henchmen and henchwomen.

In Georgia, Federalist Society member and political appointee Judge McAfee ruled correctly that there was no actual conflict of interest between the DA prosecuting Donald Trump and his criminal co-conspirators, and anybody else involved in the case. He did this after a long delaying circus in which the DA was asked extensively about her sex life and her father was interrogated about it too. The Klan itself could not have staged a more amusing spectacle than the one McAfee allowed.

Then after ruling properly, so as not to be overturned on appeal, he went out of his way to besmirch Fani Willis by writing of her “unprofessional” demeanor on the stand , a “stench of mendacity” and recommending a host of ethical and disciplinary remedies for her uppity attitude. He made these disparaging, jury poisoning remarks in dismissing an unsuccessful attempt to smear the district attorney, who, it turns out, had no conflict of interest of any kind. The Federalist Society spin, smearing a political opponent he could not legally remove from the case, is perfectly permissible among these endgame motherfuckers. McAfee gave his team the smear the frivolous motion was intended to create, after providing team Trump with a healthy and distracting delay.

Take Federalist Society member and former DOJ official MAGA Robert Hur. The finding of his report was that Joe Biden did not have the requisite intent to commit the crimes that Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated, as proved by his many attempts to cover up the crime and his repeated obstruction of justice. Hur distinguished the behavior of the two presidents to make the contrast and show that Biden lacked Trump’s clear criminal intent. That was the take away, Biden has not committed the crimes Trump stands accused of and that was all Hur was appointed to decided.

But a report stating that Biden was innocent of the crime Trump is a criminal defendant for was in no way helpful to the MAGA, or as I think of it, the American Nazi, cause. Hur therefore made the focus of his report, and the Breaking News headline takeaway, Biden’s cognitive feebleness. Based on lies? Going well beyond the scope of your appointment? Call me pisher!

The Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida (who assumed office after Trump lost reelection, talk about letting the voters decide), Aileen “Loose” Cannon, who, giving her the benefit of the doubt, is probably too stupid and inexperienced to handle a high profile, politically charged espionage case against her benefactor regarding his illegal retention of top-secret government documents, at least has experienced, brilliant Federalist Society counsel available to her.

This allows her to endlessly delay a trial that Trump will 100% lose with little risk to herself or her already damaged professional reputation. By not making any final orders about anything, Cannon has been able to spin this straightforward case out with no end in sight. And arguably because she has made no final orders of any kind, she has not given DOJ grounds for an appeal. Things she has done, no matter how stupid (inviting amicus briefs from the likes of Stephen “Death to immigrants” Miller and Citizens United), how biased toward one party (and against the federal government) or how clearly designed to give a criminal defendant the delay he always demands, are protected under her discretion as the trial judge.

If you had any cause to wonder whether allowing the widespread appointment of members of a doctrinaire right wing extremist judicial fraternity could cause any problems for democracy, the rule of law or the fair administration of justice, look no further than the loyal judicial fraternity members referenced above.

Nazi adjacent spin

Turns out that MAGA former DOJ official, Robert “Ben” Hur, appointed Special Counsel by Merrick Garland (and coached by Trump’s team before he testified), actually lied in his 300 page hatchet job on well-meaning, doddering, forgetful old Joe Biden. The transcript of his interview with Biden, released the day Hur resigned from DOJ, shows that Biden told him the exact date that his son Beau died yet all of the headlines afterwards quoted Hur’s report as saying Biden couldn’t even remember the date that his son passed away.

This lie was repeated week after week, regurgitated in The NY Times and other legacy media as often as the unfounded, inflammatory headline that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 atrocity. As authoritatively and widely embraced as the alternative fact that Joe Biden and the Democrats, in coordination with commies, RINOs and other lying traitors, stole the 2020 election from the real president.

Now American Nazis are in full spin cycle, whirling like demented dervishes to preserve their holy mission against “the Biden crime family”, in the face of zero evidence. Their smoking gun witness a Putin asset, in prison and apparently paid by Putin/MAGA? Not a problem. A Biden impeachment will prove to tens of millions that Biden is just as corrupt as Trumpie.

Presumably, once they impeach Biden twice, to even the score, all of the corruption of both will become a wash. Since public lying is now perfectly acceptable political speech in the USA, particularly by devotees of Mr. Chrump, they say all this with a completely straight face, secretly praying for the day Rosie O’Donnell and her filthy ilk finally wind up in one of Trump’s for-profit death camps.

Capitalist tool goes full Nazi-style propaganda
from Robert Hur’s scrupulously non-political report, MAGA will not be happy!
crawling out from under his tenured at UC Berkeley rock, torture memo man checks in

Gray Lady offering “context” to Hur’s report declining to prosecute Biden but emphasizing Biden’s supposedly feeble mental state

The Grey Lady, with one of her more mealy mouthed pieces of spotty reporting:

Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for including what some have described as disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state might come across to a jury as relevant and proper to discuss. . .

. . . Still, at several points, Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania induced Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like, “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.”. . .

. . . The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-scrutinized line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller made no decision on whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, only writing, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice. . .

. . . Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest person elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters from both parties. He and his allies have rejected those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.

No mention in the New York Times report of lines in the recently released transcript, spoken by Robert Hur, that directly contradict false assertions he made in the report. For example, at one point Hur noted Biden’s “photographic” recall of the layout of a house. Hur also claimed Biden didn’t even know the month or year of his son’s death. The transcript shows that Biden said “oh, God, May 30th…” and agreed when a staffer added it was 2015.  No mention in the New York Times of this rather glaring bit of partisan Bill Barr/John Durham-style lying. Making inaccurate or false statements is New York Times-speak for lying, but there is no note of even false or inaccurate statements by Hur in their article.

The Times also doesn’t report that one of these recorded sessions took place during the international negotiations immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel October 7th.

Nor does the Times include this fairly important fact for assessing Hur’s candor and his agenda, (or allude to anything like an immolation of former Trump DOJ partisan Robert Hur):

House Republicans asked Hur to testify before the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan (R-OH). Hur prepared for his testimony with the help of Trumpworld figures, and he resigned from the Department of Justice effective yesterday, so he appeared before the committee today not as a DOJ employee bound by certain ethical guidelines, but as a private citizen. . .

. . . Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote on social media: “I think Biden’s State of the Union address last week and Hur’s immolation today will go down in political history as Reagan’s ‘I am not going to exploit…my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment…only on steroids.” Conway was referring to Reagan’s response in a 1984 presidential debate to a question about his own age; Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.

Heather

This is another more intelligent assessment of what happened at the hearing, immolation or no.

No hint about any of this is given to readers of the New York Times report on the latest backfired attempt by MAGA diehards to magnify their wild claims that, unlike very stable genius Donald Trump, Biden is a feeble, stuttering old dotard who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, even when he is handing MAGA hecklers their asses on a platter in front of a live national audience.

Federalist Six working for their fraternity and benefactors

As Boof Kavanaugh’s mother taught her snarling, partisan son, when judging a controversy use common sense to decide what makes sense, what smells funny and who has the most to gain by claiming what smells funny. Now consider the stench her boy and his judicial fraternity frat bros (with apologies to Amy, a woman’s woman and also a Federalist Society member) have been busy creating since he became an unappealable lifetime ruler on what is justice and what sucks ass.

When it was time for the Supreme Court to rule on a state’s right to kick an insurrectionist off the ballot, for, at minimum giving aid and comfort to Capitol-sacking rioters who stopped the certification of an election Trump lost, the rightwing frat boys quickly rewrote the 14th Amendment (writing section three out of the law) and hurried to release their ruling in time for the big primary day called Super Tuesday. No quid pro quo by the three Trump appointees, no conflict of interest for Clarence and Ginni, they’re all on the same side, with our greatest secretive billionaires!

Trump one, Constitution and the rule of law zero.

When it came to Trump’s absurd Nixonian/Dershowitzian claim that if a president, or even a former president, does it — no matter what it is — it can’t be prosecuted as a crime, the same six extremist fraternity members decided to delay the hearing from December, when Jack Smith asked for it and they kicked it to the DC circuit court of appeals (who took their time writing an unappealable decision), to the end of April for a ruling by the end of June when they break for the summer. Criminal trials for the big orange turd? Not if the Federalist Six can help it! Only a bit of a lie was needed to make their delay holding Trump has no such right fly. Trump two, Constitution and the rule of law zero.

The Fourteenth Amendment was put into place to ensure rights for newly freed Black citizens. It was written to guarantee federally enforceable rights against state governments seeking to re-enslave or otherwise abuse certain citizens under color of law. Its purpose was to ensure that no state could give a citizen rights less than the federal ones protected by the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights. The fourteenth enforces the Bill of Rights against encroachment by the states. It guarantees equal protection under the law and a right to all the privileges and immunities of US citizenship. It was soon put into a 90 year judicial coma by a series of sickening Supreme Court decisions, relying on dirty tricks (like limiting the privileges and immunity to an irrelevant three or four and leaving the rest up to the states) but that is another story for another day. Section three, disqualifying insurrectionists and those who give aid and comfort to insurrectionists, like the rest of the fourteenth amendment is self-executing (as the Supreme Court conceded in relation to candidates for state office only.)

When I read Shelby County v. Holder, the case where John Roberts and the boys did away with enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, I saw easily, once I read RGB’s brilliant dissent, that Roberts had lied. His strongest argument, that the Act had worked to correct historical racist voter suppression and that Congress reauthorized the Act based on forty year-old data, was pulled completely out of his impeccable corporate/Federalist Society ass. There had been many hearings in Congress, reams of current data studied, including documentation that the ‘plaintiff’, Shelby County, Alabama itself had recently engaged in racist voter suppression highjinx, not to mention that 98-0 reauthorization vote in the Senate. Days after the decision dozen of new racist voter suppression laws were enacted, or resurrected, in various states.

In Anderson, the recent case from Colorado that wrote the disqualification section out of the 14th Amendment for candidates for federal office, the Roberts court engaged in the same outright lying and judicial deception. Section five, held the court — without any support in law, history of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment — means that if Congress does not make a specific law to enforce a specific provision of the 14th Amendment, courts may not enforce it. This is a plain and easily demonstrable lie.

Cases are brought by the dozens every day in federal courts all over the country based on violations of clauses of the 14th amendment, equal protection, privileges and immunities, and so on, with no federal enabling statute in existence. Section five was included to make sure that if a specific law was ever deemed necessary to enforce the rights under the amendment, in some unforeseeable way (like the Ku Klux Klan Act, for example), Congress was specifically authorized to address it. Balls and strikes umpire Roberts turned the Constitution on his head, no doubt in the spirit of Originalism, or perhaps in the name of the supremely flexible, Federalist Society tweaked Political Questions Doctrine.

Don’t take my word for it. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse does a great presentation on this very issue, the Supreme Court’s ability to rely on false statements in unappealable decisions, which I saw yesterday. He refers to these ongoing decisions based on false premises, decisions that are not later overturned or corrected to address their failure of truthful analysis, as zombie decisions. His talk is easily digestible, super informative and highly recommended.

MAGA’s got priorities…

“Thank you for your service. Now go shoot yourself.”

Republicans were able to wrest this small victory out of the temporary postponement of their ongoing threat to shut down the government.

Republicans were able to use the spending legislation to curtail a policy instituted by the Veterans Affairs Department that aims to prevent veteran suicides by flagging to a federal gun background check system when veterans are found to lack the mental capacity to handle their own finances.

Under language the G.O.P. insisted on, the V.A. could not do so without a court order. Republicans contended that the current practice relies on an overly broad definition of incompetence and could infringe upon veterans’ Second Amendment rights.

source

God forbid veterans who are facing extreme emotional and financial challenges aren’t able to continue killing themselves in the ungodly numbers they do every day, by any means necessary. If there’s one thing guns are particularly great for, it’s suicide.

Chuck Chuck BoBuck Grassley and the Grey Lady

It’s shocking to me that a newspaper like the New York Times can print a sentence like this with a straight face (see below). Either their editorial standards have slipped, they truly don’t give a shit about the facts, they are trying to please people on the extreme right, as well as their more distracted liberal readers, or they truly have a Nazi bent somehow.

Read this bit from a recent article about MAGA reliance on a now debunked informant statement in their rush to find a crime or misdemeanor to impeach Biden for and let me know what you think about the word choice “payback for Democrats’ treatment of … Trump” rather than something about partisan retribution for the impeachments brought to try to hold a rogue president, now doing his damnedest to dodge criminal trials for 91 felony counts in four jurisdictions, accountable.

By the way, former DOJ States Attorney Scott Brady, the Trump loyalist who brought the form 1023 to the attention of the public, a guy who resigned one month into the Biden administration, (as he had previously refused to serve under Obama), appears to have knowingly lied to Congress not long ago about the reliability of what turned out to be Putin’s propaganda fed through an informant now in prison and under indictment for lying to the FBI about millions in bribes supposedly paid to Hunter and Joe Biden by a Ukrainian oil company.

Wake up Merrick Garland, a six-year investigation into Hunter Biden’s dick, in the interest of appearing scrupulously fair, means that you have to at least investigate the complicity of fucking MAGA asshole Scott Brady. You already have the letter from Jerry Nadler of the House Judiciary Committee asking for the investigation. Just fucking do it.

Clarence Thomas casts deciding vote to protect MAGA Congress (and J6 rioters) from being ineligible under the 14th Amendment (sec.3)

The four female members of the court, while joining the 9-0 vote against a state’s right to disqualify an insurrectionist from the ballot — if that insurrectionist is running for federal office — wrote that the five men (and I use the term very loosely) had gone too far, had overreached.

Then the court ruled 9-0 that no candidate for federal office can be disqualified as an insurrectionist unless the MAGA-crippled Congress enacts a constitutional law to enact the disqualification section of the otherwise self-executing 14th Amendment.

The court also scrupulously avoided any discussion of the Colorado Court’s finding that for purposes of the 14th amendment Trump is an insurrectionist, and as such rightfully disqualified under the second Civil War Amendment (and arguably the single most important one in the Constitution for modern democracy).

Doing the math we realize that the 9-0 judicial overreach (to once again favor a Republican, in this case also a Nazi) hung by one vote, that of Black Klansman and corrupt disciple of Antonin Scalia (being on the Supreme Court places me above ethics, you contemptible fucks), the billionaire-funded husband of Ginni, a powerful far-right player in Trump’s insurrection.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was watching the influential, super-secretive right wing non-profit Committee for National Policy right up to the time they selected Trump for the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. Ginni was intimately involved in brokering the deal between Trump and Evangelicals (which included appointing Federalist Society only to the Supreme Court), and remained a regular visitor to Trump’s White House throughout. See also

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the unethical, unimpeachable Clarence fucking Thomas, the well-paid swing vote in the decision that holds every member of Congress who participated in the plans to overturn the election on January 6, 2021 (as well as the rioters themselves, should they seek federal office) immune from any consequences under the Constitution, unless the Congress Trump currently controls makes a new law to enforce an amendment that never needed a law to enforce it before. Mazel tov, Nazis and Klansman, you have a lot to celebrate today.

example of random MAGA projection porn