Category Archives: Law and Justice

Both sides

Another very short reminder, if one was needed, that there are at least two sides to every story.

This doesn’t mean that both sides of a given conflict are equally true, equally based on what actually happened, equally easy to defend.  It just means that for every truthful statement of fact there are a thousand less truthful ones that can be made.  Among these less truthful versions are outright lies, motivated by malice and designed to convince people of “alternative facts” which, they argue, are just as good as those old fashioned verifiable ones captured in actual recordings, especially when deployed in an existential war between good and evil.   

Here is today’s 15 second example, from people who try their best not to lie to their viewers.   Your opinion on which people I mean will vary according to the devoutness of your faith in your deepest beliefs about reality.

“I am your retribution”

As Lyin’ Ted Cruz angrily argued the day before the January 6th MAGA riot that disrupted the certification of Biden’s electoral victory, if 25% of the population believes something, even if it’s a demonstrable lie, that’s grounds for a pause on all constitutional activity.   Common Sense, snarled Lyin’ Ted, as he announced that he would contest certification of Biden’s “victory” the next day and demand the formation of a special commission to investigate whether the soundly debunked, evidence-free lie of a stolen election was actually a lie or not.

A couple of years ago, at CPAC, the faithful wheeled out this cartoonish idol, a plastic looking golden calf, an item of worship for those who believe Christ himself anointed the cracked vessel Trump to save the unborn and fight the undead.

At a smaller than usual CPAC convention the other day Trumpie took the stage for an ominous one hundred minute speech.  He told his faithful:

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution [1].”

Heather Cox Richardson adds:

He claimed that he and his followers are “engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it…. We are going to finish what we started. We started something that was a miracle. We’re going to complete the mission, we’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. We’re going to make America great again.” After listing all the “villains and scoundrels” he and his followers would “demolish,” “drive out,” “cast out,” “throw off,” “beat,” “rout,” and “evict,” he continued: “We have no choice. This is the final battle.”

Two sides to every story, First Amendment, blah blah blah.  Let’s hope this is the final battle.

[1]

Remember this fuck?

The Democrats on Jim Jordan’s House committee to prove that the Democrats are actually the lying traitors who have weaponized the government against decent, good Americans (like the innocent political prisoners who legally protested at the Capitol on January 6th and were viciously treated as rioters) wrote a report on three sketchy whistleblowers, all former FBI employees, who seem to have received some payments, or employment, from Trump-related entities in exchange for their candid, partisan whistleblowing. The New York Times reports:

The Democratic report includes excerpts from depositions and evidence of conspiratorial social media posts.

It also details the ties between Mr. Trump’s inner circle and the witnesses. For instance, Mr. Patel found Mr. Friend his next job, working as a fellow on domestic intelligence and security services with the Center for Renewing America, which is run by Russ Vought. The center is largely funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is run by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

source

Yes, Russ Vought is the current advisor to the MAGA House on how to use the debt ceiling to hold the country hostage (see previous post). He is Trumpie’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget. The guy who oversaw a $1 trillion increase in the national debt in his first great year and another $4 trillion in his second.

Or as they say in MAGAland — FUCK YOU!

MAGA intellectual firepower, batteries not included

Republicans, now MAGA (they virtually all vote with MAGA, every time, out of “fear of the base”) have been trying to cut back the hated government “entitlements” that protect many tens of millions of vulnerable Americans, at the expense of the corporate bottom line and vast, untouchable hereditary wealth. 

The entitlements of the superwealthy, of course, are never on the table, since the table is owned by the rich and powerful.  As God and Jesus both intended. The drive to limit, eliminate or “privatize” programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Affordable Care Act, public education, regulation of toxic pollution, has been a constant in conservative politics, and vocally, ever more loudly expressed, since at least 1980 (“The Reagan Revolution” — it’s cool to be greedy as sin, if you’re filthy rich).

The theory is that government spending is exactly like a family’s spending.  You have to prioritize and budget, to spend every one of your hard earned dollars wisely.  If you need, say, an extensive arsenal of deadly weapons to defend your home, you may have to cut back on things like medicine and a slightly more expensive healthy diet, even if the doctor has prescribed it.  If, the analogy goes, the country needs the largest military budget in human history every year, well, poor people and old people who can’t afford their own things have to suck it up and tighten their belts a bit more.

Also, key to this pisspoor analogy is the denial that raising income — for government spending tax revenue, something an elected majority could increase at any time by imposing a fair tax system — has anything to do with a family’s ability to buy things, (except, in the case of government spending) things that poor people or old folks might need. 

Because the US is the only civilized country that requires a 50+% majority to vote to fund allocations made the year before (the “Debt Ceiling”) a tiny majority of say five in the 435 seat House can hold the US credit rating, and the world’s economy, hostage by making big demands.   

What is the razor thin MAGA majority demanding, in return for this generally automatic bipartisan approval to increase the “debt ceiling” to cover current financial commitments?  At first it seemed to be cuts to the social safety net.  Biden called them out on it during his State of the Union, and they have squirmed away from that obvious plan of attack. Their latest “proposal” in the hostage standoff is reported by Heather Cox Richardson:

Now that Republicans have committed to taking cuts to Social Security and Medicare off the table, Vought has a plan to cut $9 trillion from domestic programs over the next ten years by cutting more than $400 billion from food stamps, cutting hundreds of billions from education, cutting in half the State Department and the Labor Department, and cutting $2 trillion from Medicaid and more than $600 billion from the Affordable Care Act.

“America cannot be saved unless the current grip of woke and weaponized government is broken,” Vought says in his proposal. “That is the central and immediate threat facing the country—the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish…. The battle cannot wait.”

source

Russell Vought, Heather informs us, was Trumpie’s former budget director.  Of course he was.  Heather continues:

But, as Jeff Stein, Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post point out, Vought’s stand is a little awkward, since he oversaw the explosion of the national debt as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. In his first year as director, the debt grew by $1 trillion; in his second, by $4 trillion. Now he claims that the Biden administration is abusing its power by arresting people who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and so must be reined in.

Vought’s proposal promises to balance the budget in ten years, but it also predicts the number of working people in the U.S. will increase by 14.5 million more people than the Congressional Budget Office says will enter the workforce. That surge—if it were to come—would push the economy to grow faster, thus reducing the deficit by an additional $3.8 trillion. But where the people will come from is a mystery.

Who says MAGA, who always unconditionally protects its own (until they need to be thrown under the bus to protect their loyal leader) is not led by the nation’s greatest intellectual giants?  You act like lying and magical thinking are bad things, you egghead, elitist prig!

In four years Trump and his appointees appear to have increased the national debt by 25% [1]. So?!

Yet Heather Cox Richardson continues to quote Biden, a president who 25% of Americans believe was illegitimately inserted into office by a powerful secret cabal of cannibalistic child abusers who hate our freedom and everything white Christians stand for:

Biden noted that Republicans have voted more than 50 times to change or repeal the Affordable Care Act since it passed 13 years ago. He also pointed to the fact that the chief budget consultant for the House Republicans is Trump’s former budget director Russell Vought.

Biden lies!!!

[1] Given the current debt is just over $31.4 trillion, Jolly’s self-described “rough” 25 percent figure claimed by Jolly is imprecise based on Treasury data; it is actually 22.3 percent of the current total. source

The political is also gruellingly personal

It is not novel to observe that the personal and the political are closely related.  In my case, the present political situation is also a grim, constant magnification of my personal experience. For those of us who are personally susceptible, who find constant hideous echoes of our personal experience in the political landscape, following the news produces a form of PTSD.  

Gabor Maté made an interesting point about PTSD.  Apparently of 100 soldiers sent into a hellish war zone, like house to house fighting in cities in Iraq where it is impossible to even know who the enemy is, only a certain percentage will emerge with PTSD (I think it was something like 15%).  Every one of the soldiers who wind up with PTSD have childhood trauma that makes them susceptible to it.  Not to say that the other soldiers are happy about the hell they’ve been sent to, or don’t have the occasional nightmare about it, but the exact re-experiencing of the original pain and terror happens only to a select few.  So it is with the news.

The personal is political:  there is a progressive personality type and a repressive personality type, an authoritarian personality type (that can go either way politically) and a type that embraces differences.  There are inquisitive, talkative, collaborative types and close-minded, taciturn, competitive types. It’s easy enough to observe that some types are prone, by personality and life experience, to be liberal, others lean conservative.  Some believe in harsh punishment, support the death penalty and others abhor the thought of a possibly innocent, usually poor, person being executed (as happens frequently) and embrace policies like restorative justice initiatives.  

We have seen a deliberate, massively well-funded project (to be fair, engineered by the far right, guys like Charles Koch, Rupert Murdoch, and their highly effective network of morbidly wealthy fellow traveler influencers) to divide these types into uncompromising partisan camps that must fight the other side’s evil to the death.  Who does this simplistic, eternal, total war benefit?  The people who already enjoy every benefit.  It comes at the expense of everyone else.

On a grand scale we see the triumph of selfishness, greed, heartlessness, corruption and flagrant lawlessness among the powerful and the hypocritical application of harsh law, even spontaneous death sentences for powerless citizens suspected of minor crimes.  It can all be explained in an anodyne, New York Times style way that makes the status quo look less grotesque.  

For example, economists of capitalism have a neutral term for the human cost to making vast profits — like babies born deformed and clusters of cancer near runoff from a chemical plant — externalities.  You have to pay these poor people a certain amount in legal settlements, so your profit is slightly offset by the expense, but in the name of raising stock value to shareholders, externalities are an acceptable and unavoidable part of doing business, if the profit is otherwise high enough.   Some would say that decision makers who factor such “externalities” into the cost of doing business belong out of business and in prison, but that’s a political view, incompatible with the “freedom” we all enjoy here in the free market.

When millions marched, during a pandemic, to protest the intolerable injustice of ongoing police killing of unarmed civilians for minor offenses — or none — they were met with teargas, tanks, helicopters, horseback charges by police, batons, handcuffs.  The protesters were treated like an insurgent army, a force the right-wing administration claimed were a deadly, terroristic threat to national security that had to be neutralized with superior force.   What’s up with that?

“If you are angry about something you claim gives you the right to be angry, then FUCK YOU! You want to protest so-called state violence?  We’ll give you some violence you can take back home with you, when you get out of jail, asshole.”

This is the predictable reaction of a narcissistic psychopath.  They will unleash the full force of whatever they’ve got to defeat anyone who has a problem with how they need to do things.

I learned, only very recently, at 66 years-old, that I’ve been shaped by and fighting narcissists my entire life.   A few months ago I described the gruesome parade of many of my closest longtime friends as highly intelligent, darkly funny, prone to anger/angrily denying anger, deeply damaged, unable to compromise, determined to win no matter what the cost, etc.  I did not yet know that this constellation of traits also describes the narcissist.  I guess what made me finally understand what I was actually up against was suddenly being confronted by a series of outright lies, desperately, brazenly spat into my face in an attempt to make me submit.

Narcissism can be very subtle, as I also learned.  The fact that my narcissistic father never needed to outright lie to “win” our arguments early on hid the cardinal trait of all narcissists from me: falseness.  Without that lying piece I could see my father as disturbed, a jerk, an asshole, a tragic man, etc. but his overarching personality type, narcissist, was until very recently hidden from me.   

Now it is all I can see, when I doom-scroll the news, hear George Santos angrily rebut the true charges that he’s a lying sack of shit, the passionate calls to impeach Biden, (details of charges to follow), a strutting donkey of less than average donkey intelligence calling for a national divorce, a spineless political worm’s defense of the “transparent” move of handing all January 6th security footage to a propagandist for autocracy and on down the list.

Narcissists rule, yo, as they were born to do.  They always have the same answer to every concern you might raise “FUCK YOU.”  They may say this harshly, or politely as can be, but the answer will always be a close variation on that staunch proposition.   “You want to know why I have nothing but contempt for you, asshole? How about FUCK YOU, that fix the boo-boo?”

“And have a very nice day.”   

Cucker Tarlson

Heather Cox Richardson puts Kevin McCarthy’s craven, nasty, dangerous deal with the MAGA fringe into grim perspective.

Carlson has repeatedly challenged the official accounts of the riot, blaming the federal government for launching the attack and claiming that FBI agents were behind it. Carlson is also one of the key conspirators in the Fox News Channel promotion of the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, even though they dismissed that notion privately. The expectation is that Carlson will hack whatever videos he can into a version of the Republican narrative. 

But there is more: McCarthy is fundraising off his release of the videos to Carlson, claiming he is delivering “truth and transparency over partisan games” and asking “patriots” to “chip…in” to help House Republicans.

Heather Cox Richardson

American Exceptionalism: Health care for seniors, episode 71

Medicare for all, baby.  

Just spent 45 minutes on the phone with a very nice receptionist at Medicare who reviewed my last few payments.  I’d made all of them, had not missed one.  I was calling to find out why they had threatened to cancel my Medicare health insurance with a delinquent premium notice and why I’d been billed an additional $510 (that I promptly paid, just to be safe) when the record showed I had paid it already, three months ago.   

The woman was very nice, but helpless.  She confirmed that I hadn’t missed a payment and that I shouldn’t have been sent a delinquent account notice, but, after placing me on hold several times, was unable to verify that the delinquent account notice had been sent in error, though from what she and I could tell, based on my payment record, it certainly had been.  Mistakes happen.  In 7-10 business days I’ll hear back from Medicare, if not, I should call again, and have a very nice day.

Need a colonoscopy, old man?    The Medicare.gov website tells you everything you need to know, or need to find out, or need ask your doctor, or research with a competent financial advisor who is schooled in the intricacies of the gold standard of American health insurance (not healthcare, that’s for godless commies and people in less exceptional nations) for old people who don’t have better health insurance.  Here you go, from Medicare.gov:

Medicare covers screening colonoscopies once every 24 months if you’re at high risk for colorectal cancer. If you aren’t at high risk, Medicare covers the test once every 120 months, or 48 months after a previous flexible sigmoidoscopy. There’s a minimum age requirement of 45.  (note, Medicare does not cover anyone under 65, does it?)

If your doctor or other qualified health care provider accepts assignment, you pay nothing for this test. However, if your doctor finds and removes a polyp or other tissue during the colonoscopy, you pay 15% of the Medicare-Approved Amount for your doctors’ services. In a hospital outpatient setting, you also pay the hospital a 15% coinsurance. The Part B deductible doesn’t apply. If you initially have a non-invasive stool-based screening test (fecal occult blood tests or multi-target stool DNA test) and receive a positive result, Medicare also covers a follow-up colonoscopy as a screening test

Note: To find out how much your test, item, or service will cost, talk to your doctor or health care provider. The specific amount you’ll owe may depend on several things, like:

Other insurance you may have

How much your doctor charges

If your doctor accepts assignment

The type of facility where you get your test, item, or service

Note: Your doctor or other health care provider may recommend you get services more often than Medicare covers. Or, they may recommend services that Medicare doesn’t cover. If this happens, you may have to pay some or all of the costs.

Ask questions so you understand why your doctor is recommending certain services and if, or how much, Medicare will pay for them.