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.
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.
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.
If your ideas are unpopular, because they represent only one percent of the population’s interests, you cannot count on democracy to implement these ideas. You have to think outside of the democratic box. You propagandize through supposedly non-partisan “think tanks” that you fund, support extremist candidates, create an extremist judicial fraternity and stack the courts with well-trained judges steeped in your unpopular worldview. Then it is simply a matter of having these courts impose your values on everybody, as long as these courts have the final word on what is law and what is justice.
Heather Cox Richardson, as usual, nails it:
Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
As he did in striking down enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act simply by ignoring inconvenient facts, like many sessions of vigorous debate in Congress, thousands of pages of data considered, ongoing attempts by states with a history of racist laws to disenfranchise voters and suppress the vote, the unanimous Senate vote to re-authorize the Act, the near unanimous vote in the House, and the Republican president’s warm public embrace of the Act as he signed it into continued law, Roberts made the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment a matter of Federalist Society opinion about whether an insurrectionist is eligible for federal office, absent a specific, constitutionally sound law passed by Congress.
In the Voting Rights Act case the holding was 5-4: the Voting Rights Act worked beautifully to eliminate racially discriminatory voter suppression and no longer needs enforcement. In this Colorado decision to disqualify an insurrectionist, textualists and liberals apparently agree that Colorado had no right to remove Trump from their ballot, no matter what their factual findings may have been, and therefore that no state may remove Donald Trump, or any candidate for federal office, from the ballot, absent Congress passing a new law to enforce section three of the 14th Amendment.
Leave out a few key facts, ignore the central one (Trump planned, advertised, aided and gave comfort to participants in a riot that shut down the government in a violent attempt to keep him in power), reframe the narrow issue that you are looking at, et voilà, you can pull any politically expedient holding you would like out of your corporate “balls and strikes umpire” ass. You can even broker a deal to make it a unanimous 9-0, including the spouse of a powerful participant in the attempt to overthrow the election of 2020.
The Court declines to intervene in many cases because of their Political Question Doctrine and professes, under federalism, to defer to states on abortion, criminal law, family and business law, voting rules and procedures and many other matters, but reaches the conclusion, without touching the finding that the candidate in question, at minimum, aided and abetted insurrection, or Colorado’s evidence-based finding that he did, that this political question is one they can unanimously decide, bindingly, on behalf of all fifty states. The plain text oftheirsacred originalist Constitution, and the expressed, well-documented intent of the framers, be damned.
What I don’t understand is how this dog shit decision was 9-0. This time nobody on the Court has a word to say about the stench?
A great one by Paul Krugman. We can talk about yesterday’s vote by at least four unaccountable, craven, fake Christian, extremist judicial fraternity member lockstep fascists later, this one is much more fun to consider.
OK, I have to admit it: I’m enjoying the spectacle of Donald Trump begging for a delay in the $454 million fine he’s required to pay for fraudulently inflating his net worth, for two reasons.
First, his inability to come up with the cash basically confirms the charges: He isn’t as rich as he claims to be. Second, his evident inability to get anyone to lend him the money is poetic justice for a man who has a history of bilking gullible investors.
One small addition to the Trumpenfreude: A GoFundMe set up to help Trump pay his bills has so far managed to raise about a third of 1 percent of the amount he owes.
You do have to wonder about how this will affect his psychological state. Trump’s speeches have become increasingly incoherent lately — a trend that has attracted sufficient attention that a few days ago he felt compelled to respond, telling an audience: “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”
Project 2025, written by the far-right ideologues of the influential Heritage Foundation, sister think tank to the rightwing judicial fraternity the Federalist Society, The Institute for Humane Studies, The American Legislative Exchange Council and dozens more funded by Charles Koch and every fascist billionaire in the country, begins with these words:
It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.
see footnote
Winning elections, at this apocalyptic moment in human history, against the “Radical Left” already in control, due to the irreversibly rising tide of ignorant majoritarian hordes, is simply not enough to preserve their sacred values of unlimited wealth and uncheckable power for the privileged.
Also, they cannot win honest elections anymore and they know this very well. Hence, Project 2025, a plan to go for all the marbles, once and for all.
Charles Koch learned in 1980 that his “libertarian” beliefs could not win elections, at best, his brother and his presidential running mate were barely able to get one percent of the national vote, which was appropriate since those were the only interests they represented. The far right’s project, seeing they could never prevail through fair democratic elections, became to capture the religious extremist vote, and the vote of every angry, lost soul, to make the vote look competitive, and to seize power by extra-electoral means.
Brilliant, privileged, covetous men like Charles Koch understood their ideas would never win elections, being of benefit only to a tiny fraction of the top 1% of Americans. So they began the long game of Making America Great Again (for Robber Barons, Monopolists and families of inherited wealth) by funding strong rightwing candidates in local elections, taking control of state houses, gerrymandering to keep control of state legislatures, churning out political philosophy and propaganda from “think tanks,” generating model legislation like Stand Your Ground and other gun protection laws, anti-voting, anti-labor, anti-environment and anti-abortion laws and bringing carefully constructed ideological lawsuits that would be heard in captured federal courts and ultimately decided by graduates of their far right, religious extremist judicial fraternity, the Federalist Society.
Their bigoted, polluting, oligarch-empowering ideas cannot win democratically, so their project is to destroy democracy with a very firm-handed minority rule, enforced by carefully vetted loyalists to a strong leader. They are authoritarians, or, as I always see it, regular ambitious folks always ready to go full Nazi on the citizenry.
Heather Cox Richardson lays out the connection between Putin, Trump, the forces of global authoritarianism and its angrily righteous partner, religious extremism, tying together recent events and a little bit of recent history, which is worth noting again, including this:
The use of Russian disinformation to destabilize democracy in the U.S. looks much like the information warfare Russia has used to establish Ukrainian leaders that worked for the Kremlin. It was the ouster of one of those leaders, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2014 Maidan Revolution ten years ago that prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine later that year. Yanukovych won office with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort, who advised and, briefly, chaired the Trump campaign in 2016, when it weakened the Republican party’s platform plank that supported arming Ukraine against Putin after his 2014 invasion.
Seeding lies about corruption that came from Russian-linked Ukrainians was central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment: his phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky demanding Zelensky announce an investigation into Burisma and Joe Biden’s son Hunter was part of an attempt to create dirt on the Bidens. That call happened after Trump’s advisor Rudy Giuliani went to Ukraine, where he talked to “an active Russian agent,” according to the FBI. FBI agents warned Giuliani that he was a target of Russian disinformation.
That poison has now spread from Trump’s rogue team in the White House to the Republican Party itself, which has apparently been carrying water for Putin at the very center of our government.
The whole piece is here, very much worth reading in its concise entirety, and thinking about as we prepare to preserve democracy and prevent Project 2025, the billionaire funded plan to make Bill Barr’s theocratic worldview the permanent government of our nation of immigrants.
Trump was impeached the first time for making an improper political demand as he held up American arms and extorted the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He told him on a perfect call that many people heard, and that Bill Barr subsequently tried to hide, that all Zelensky needed to do before Trump would release military aid to Ukraine was announce an investigation into Biden corruption, and that he and his allies in Congress would do the rest. No need to actually open an investigation, America’s Greatest Liar assured Zelensky, the main thing is just to announce it, on American television, so we have a big Benghazi-type scandal to run with before the election.
Zelensky turned out to be a man of principle and a skillful politician with a bit more mettle than Trumpie counted on. Barr was still Trump’s most ardent and capable legal enabler and, after trying unsuccessfully to bury all records of the perfect call, he appointed a diehard rightwing DOJ official (who had refused to serve under a Democrat but came back to be appointed by Trump) to dig more deeply into the scandalous sounding matter that Rudy, Igor and their crew were trying to stir up in Ukraine.This DOJ investigation led to FBI informant Smirnov (now in prison awaiting trial for peddling Kremlin lies to the FBI), who took the bull by the horns and planted the entirely false Russian story that both Putin and Trump wanted out there about Biden’s corruption and bribe taking from corrupt, lying, Nazi Ukraine. Then they could let Trumpie’s myrmidons in Congress do the rest. And they have been doing the rest relentlessly. Incoherently, much of the time, but with characteristic blustering Nazi-style vigor.
Recall that after losing the election in 2020, incessantly transactional Trumpie told the DOJ just to announce that the election had been corrupt and leave the rest to him and his henchmen in Congress. You remember that one, right?
WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump sought inside help from the Justice Department to execute his campaign to reverse the 2020 election, according to evidence presented by the House Jan. 6 committee Thursday.
“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump implored top Justice officials in a Dec. 27, 2020, conversation memorialized in then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue’s contemporaneous notes.
Counting on the disgusted exhaustion of people of average intelligence to prevent them from keeping a thousand hideous details in mind and the angry credulity of people of below average intelligence, the Nazi machine grinds on, doing exactly what it always does — marching behind the insane, iron will of the infallible narcissistic Leader who believes that he alone has the right to decide who gets rich, who gets lynched and who goes to the death camp with Rosie O’Donnell, Mike Pence, Bill Barr and the rest of the gutless pigs who have defied, insulted, betrayed and misunderestimated [1] him.
[1] With a tip of the yarmulke to eloquent language stylist George W. “Dubya” Bush
65,000 forced births, and counting, in 14 MAGA states, by women and girls impregnated by rapists, since the June 2022 Supreme Court decision striking down a female’s constitutional right to reproductive autonomy.
Gavin Newsom goes off, beautifully, on the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision stating that Jesus Christ decreed that a fertilized egg is a human being and that mishandling such microscopic humans can subject the offender to prosecution for wrongful death.
Alabama, of course, being #3 in the nation for highest infant mortality rate…
The sordid history of the ignorant yet calculated movement of bigoted political domination by America’s most militant white Christians (sometimes called Christian Dominionism) is laid out here by the great Heather Cox Richardson . I’m just adding a few telltale stats that should be noted in relation to the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that a fertilized egg that is then frozen is human life and anyone who destroys such a human life maybe held criminally liable, essentially for murder. If a state like Alabama leads the way in enforced so-called Christian morality, heaven help us!
Alabama ranks third in the nation for highest infant mortality rates. The only two states with higher infant mortality rates are number two Arkansas, and America’s greatest state, Mississippi, in the number one position as far as most deaths of newborns. In fairness to both sides, it must be said, of course, that this is according to the CDC, a government agency that Jesus Christ himself long ago warned is full of lying commie cucks, who will do anything to make good Christians look bad. infant mortality rates US states
Alabama ranks fifth in the nation for highest rates of child poverty.Once again, Mississippi leads the pack.child poverty by state
In terms of education, Alabama does much better, coming in at #44 out of 50, a respectable sixth from the bottom. In this case, Mississippi, at #41, beats them, being nine from the bottom. Education by state
Per capita murder in the state of Alabama, which is double the rate of rootin’ tootin’ Texas, is the third highest in the country. Once again, Mississippi makes them look a little better by comparison. Murderby state
In terms of executions, Alabama kicks Mississippi’s ass, by a margin of two to one!Executions by state.
A word to out of state men visiting Alabama: avoid jerking off in your motel room. While killing a spurt of sperm cells might not technically qualify as murder, it could be seen as assault with a deadly weapon.I would advise you to consult with a pious Christian expert like MAGA Mike fucking Johnson about this before randily reaching for the old johnson. Peace out.
gratuitousblahg 