So much for the “presumption of regularity”. Courts are starting to notice that extending the presumption of normalcy, assuming, unless there’s serious evidence to the contrary, that the Department of Justice is acting in accord with its long established principles and practices, is a game for suckers.

Federal Appellate Judge for life, Emil Bove III, a smirking weasel who makes Bill Barr look highly principled, earned his bones during a brief stint at DOJ by overruling career prosecutors and arguing to a federal judge that the substantial corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams should be temporarily dismissed, held over his head, contingent on the Black Trump’s agreed to cooperation with illegal ICE activities in NYC. While at the DOJ Bove told prosecutors to be ready to tell the courts “fuck you” if they opposed the boss’s priorities. His proud tradition at DOJ continues with the abrasively defiant Pamela Jo Bondi, eternally aggrieved Alina Habba and the highly inexperienced and unqualified, but undeniably good looking, and loyal as a dog, Lindsay Halligan.

In the past, public evidence of a president ordering the Attorney General to go after his enemies would be a major scandal, covered by the media for weeks and grounds for impeachment. Particularly if he publicly whined to her that not doing so makes him look bad for threatening something his DOJ is not following through on. It’s hurting his reputation and credibility, wrote the man with a reputation for fraud and sexual assault and the credibility of a compulsive liar lying about proven fraud, a deadly riot he incited, serial adultery, sexual assaults he committed. Then he adds, to make his vindictive intent crystal clear for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury: They impeached me twice and indicted me (5 times!). OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED NOW!!! President DJT.

Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt, that it was dementia that caused him to send this private order over “social media”, any other president in US history would have been investigated and impeached for this “unprecedented”, “irregular”, “unethical,” illegal order to the head law enforcement officer in the US. If Joe Biden had dinner with his AG, Merrick Garland, once, the anti-woke forces would still be screaming about the unpardonable corruptness of it. Trump constantly surrounds himself with his debased sycophants, heads of “independent” agencies who compete for his attention and favor by their willingness to demonstrate their capacity for depravity. Bondi’s outraged response to a photo of her at a recent dinner with Trump, right before the Comey indictment, was to defend herself as being two seats from the president, not right next to him as a commie senator falsely claimed.

Imagine this was written by Joe “Autopen” Biden and it urged his AG to immediately go after Steve Bannon, American Eichmann Jeffrey Clarke, Peter Navarro and John Eastman (as Garland legitimately should have).

Or as the amoral servants of the bottom line in corporate media frame the flimsy indictment of NY AG Letitia James, a “second major achievement”…

When dealing with compulsive liars who fervently believe every lie they utter, understand that truth has no place in the conversation. They will say, as they did yesterday as part of their Nazi talking points “Biden sent 274 FBI agents provocateurs to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to start a riot to blame on the innocent Trump!”. You might say “The innocent Trump was still the president on that date, the riot after his rousing speech was to prevent Biden from being certified as the winner of the election, how did the president-elect order the FBI to do anything?” They will say “fuck you, you hate America, and you’re anti-fascist, and are suffering from woke mind virus and Trump Derangement Syndrome, cuck.” The rest of the discussion will be, as they say, academic.

No Kings.

It’s hard not to be distracted by the constant tantrums, threats, rage tweets, flashes of madness, impulsiveness, dementia flights, war on the constitution, criminal abuse of his office, obstruction of justice, contempt of courts (all now legal for him, as long as done in conjunction with a cabinet member, see Trump v. US, 6-3, cucks) searches, indictments, arrests and brilliant AI internet trolling of his enemies by the very stable genius, President Project 2025. Behind him is a trillion dollar network of American fascists who make most of the big decisions, as laid out in detail in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The blueprint for American fascism Trump lied about knowing anything about as a candidate, though he claimed to disagree with some of it (“the weave”).

Thousands of these true believers (they’ve gone by ‘movement conservative’, ‘alt-right’, ‘neo-con’, ‘John Birch Society’ and many less flattering names) are well-paid political operatives — lawyers, legislators, judges, influencers and lobbyists — acting on behalf of what Sheldon Whitehouse calls the “creepy billionaires” (creepy, in part, because mass death for others is a negligible price, in their collective opinion, to pay for the permanent protection of their vast privileges). There is an entire major political party now in thrall to their united will. Presumably there are also millions of enraged young white men, neither wealthy nor politically sophisticated, ready to follow their charismatic TV star leader into battle, as thousands did on January 6th. For a moment, let’s forget about Trump and look at what the network he works for is having him do.

Just as there was a long game by the American far-right to reverse the limits on presidential criminal audacity imposed by law after Richard Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace, just like the myth that slaveholding states didn’t start the Civil War, or fight for the cause of slavery, MAGA represents a return to the good old days when Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, Women, Voting Rights Advocates and others, innately inferior to white Christian men, “knew their place”. Ultimately, MAGA/Project 2025 is a return to the world the “Originalists” (an infinitely supple legal theory created by the same folks who brought you Project 2025) fondly imagine — a just constitutional order based on the judicious compromises that allowed certain rich people to own others they could treat however they wanted to.

So, while it’s despicable, it’s no shock that President Project 2025 has appointed a pliable puppet/”DEI hire” to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development who will roll back enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, the law that Trump and his landlord father violated for years (before and long after its passage in 1968), in the name of fighting what would later be called DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion– among their tenants. Trump and his father, Frederick Christ Trump, eventually settled DOJ’s discrimination case against them, after a rip-roaring public legal battle in which they were represented by the monstrous Roy Cohn. In the settlement the Trumps agreed not to continue their racist violations of the Fair Housing Act without admitting they had ever violated it. Now, the NY Times reports (read article by clicking on image below):

Got to love the look of the sycophant Trump appointed to head the agency, superficially perfect casting:

HUD Secretary Scott Turner apparently believes, along with Trump, the Heritage Foundation, Charles Koch, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jared Kushner and MAGA world (not to mention the Ku Klux Klan), that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a sickness, like the vaguely defined yet highly contagious “woke mind virus”, that must be eradicated. DEI, we are told, is an anti-American commie myth perpetrated to place unqualified inferior non-white, non-male people in power to bring down White America. To believe this requires a few leaps of faith, or leaps of idiocy.

First you must believe that there is no need for diversity in hiring, that everything is already equal between white men, women and so-called “people of color” in government and in the private sector. There has never been discrimination in the USA (“all men are created equal” — duh!), and racism, if you want to talk about racism, is directed toward persecuted white Christian men only (a claim made by the original KKK, too, protectors of white Christian women). Equity, which means fairness, is another way of accusing beleaguered Christian white men of being unjust and unfair! Inclusion is a sneaky way to manipulate the gullible into believing that some people are being systematically excluded!

DEI is, according to our homegrown fascist movement, just like Critical Race Theory, a divisive and false ideological “theory” that makes the world much more sinister and complicated than it actually is. Those who are in charge are there because of merit, they’ve earned the right to be in charge. Just look at Trump’s cabinet! DEI is filthy anti-meritocracy that needs to be killed!

There has been no substantial push back from Democrats on this simple principle that is it fair, just and decent to remedy historic prejudice by promoting qualified people long excluded by unfair institutional practices.

There is a lot to push back on when dealing with Nazis, granted, and the fascist right, with a four year running start as their front man escaped criminal liability for clear crimes, is spraying their propaganda from high powered hoses 24/7 as heavily armed masked agents from multiple federal agencies terrorize innocent people in various cities. But like the need for Democrats to have a Shadow Cabinet — experts in each field to immediately and publicly respond to the latest policy depredation from the brains behind Project 2025, enacted by their idiot front man — we need to counter the bullshit about the amorphous “danger” of DEI — and ending DEI being somehow a noble goal for government — with facts. No? Otherwise you have bloated fascists like Bill Barr warning Blacks that the cops won’t protect them unless they start to show some fucking respect.

USAID, dead, and mass killing

Speaking of the crazed onslaught of Project 2025’s audacious plan to make America as fascist as the Old Confederacy was, Big Balls and his enthusiastic young friends helped Trump loot and close down USAID, with the estimated 103 HOURLY deaths that resulted from their elimination of claimed “waste, fraud and abuse”. This massive, silent death toll (2,472 DAILY, 17,305 weekly, 74,160 monthly), caused directly by Project 2025 priorities, has not been reported on in months.

Every day the dismantling of USAID creates a silent 9/11 death toll (or twice the number of deaths Hamas terrorists inflicted on Israel on October 7 [1]), directly caused by the actions of the Trump administration, as President Project 2025 wildly, incoherently attacks his enemies, anybody who does not obey his every childish whim. The last reporting on the shuttering on USAID, which is projected to cause the atrocity of 14,000,000 preventable deaths in the next five years, was months ago. Too much horror to process, as there always is when Nazis are on the march, but process it we must if we are to remain human.

[1] or a daily toll of about 3.5% of the estimated 67,099 deaths (as of this post) in Gaza during Netanyahu’s war against civilians to destroy Hamas.

The Enemy Within, those living in Bill Barr’s Anarchist Jurisdictions that do not support White Christian Nationalist Autocracy, need to be subjected to lethality by the buffed up all-male, all-heterosexual US military, according to the Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of War. Nothing out of line, it’s totally normal for the American President to urge 800 assembled generals and admirals to use Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Portland, LA, etc. as training grounds for “maximum lethality” unbound from the international laws of warfare. There’s no such thing as war crimes when you’re out to destroy evil, according to these two embodiments of the warrior ethos.

“San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re gonna straighten them out one by one,” Trump told hundreds of senior U.S. military officers packed into a hall at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

“This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within,” Trump said.

source

Enemies, after all, need to be punished. Death by military fire power is too good for us.

Meanwhile, here are some of Trump’s top personal enemies, targeted for vengeance

Remember the staged arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka under Acting State Attorney Alina Habba, on charges that were dismissed days later? He was arrested, after a tour of the ICE facility in Newark, for standing on the sidewalk in front of the place. On direct orders from Todd Blanche, Deputy Attorney General, recent Trump criminal attorney and benefactor of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, ICE agents were instructed to cuff Baraka and their leader told the force, as they went to grab him for not violating any laws “if you have body cams, turn them off.” It’s on videotape, it’s been on television. Representative LaMonica McGiver is facing 17 years in prison for objecting to the illegal arrest as ICE went nuts trying to cuff the mayor in the middle of a crowd of legislators and citizens. She is charged with assaulting heavily armed, masked ICE officers, at least one of whom was yelling “back up or I’ll shoot!”.

Christopher Krebs is a good one. A Trump appointee, his crime was announcing that the 2020 election had been secure and that the results were accurate. An enraged Trump immediately fired Krebs for this statement. I wonder what his alleged criminal liability will be, under an insane and desperately obsequious Trump DOJ. An outline of Krebs’s betrayal of Trump:

As CISA’s director, Krebs was the “administration’s most senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the presidential election”, held on November 3, 2020.^[9] Sidney Powell, an attorney for Trump and Michael Flynn, asserted on the Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo Fox News programs that a secret government supercomputer program had switched votes from Trump to Biden in the election, a claim Krebs dismissed as “nonsense” and a “hoax.”^[10] CISA created a website to debunk election-related disinformation, much of which was being promoted by President Donald Trump and his allies.^[11] On November 12, it was reported that Krebs expected to be fired from his position.^[12][13]

On November 17, 2020, Krebs said in a tweet that “59 election security experts all agree, in every case of which we are aware, these claims (of fraud) either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.”^[14] Trump fired Krebs via Twitter the same day, because the “recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud”. Trump provided no evidence of this fraud.^[14][15]

Wait a second, some of Trump most evil enemies are missing from this short list. Where’s Jack Smith? Fani Willis? Here is Fani’s unpardonable crime:

On February 10, 2021, Willis launched a criminal investigation into Donald Trump‘s attempts to influence Georgia election officials—including the governor, the attorney general, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger via a telephone call—to “find” enough votes to override Joe Biden‘s win in that state and thus undo Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.^[26][27][28] In January 2022, she requested a special grand jury to consider charges of election interference by Trump and his allies.^[29][30] In May, a 26-member special grand jury was given investigative authority and subpoena power and tasked with submitting a report to the judge and Willis on whether a crime was committed.^[31]

All irrelevant! Tens of millions of sick, dangerous enemies didn’t vote for Trump, who got a mandate in another rigged election he should have won by at least 300,000,000 votes! Treason, bloody treason! (to an insane tyrant, anyway).

Many of the richest, most pathologically greedy white men in the world (and their corporate alter egos) have an irresistible impulse to control everything.  This is no conspiracy theory, just look around at what these self-interest blinded entities are doing.   One of the world’s most lucrative entities, Disney and its affiliated corporate “persons”, is vying to become number one (presumably tired of smelling like number two) planning to consolidate more power, wealth and influence by buying another major television network group.   They need Trump’s MAGA-headed FCC (president gets to pick the chairman) to approve their purchase of a huge swath of ABC — employer of nightly Trump exposer Jimmy Kimmel — or Nexstar, or some combination of corporate properties.  

It was easy for Trump’s FCC chair, a pugnaciously partisan chap named Brendan Carr, to lean on the morally flexible corporate “person” who owns Kimmel’s contract, during a far-right podcast, to immediately fire Jimmy Kimmel because, “nice little monopoly you’re trying to build here, shame if something happened to it…” Not long ago Carr tweeted his true beliefs about the First Amendment (under the Biden tyranny, one supposes) and the proper role of the FCC:

Trump and his mouthpieces say if you speak ill of the radical rightwing movement that included both the martyred Charlie Kirk and his murderer, you risk your livelihood, if not your kneecaps and your nose. Unlike in a defamation case, the truth of your statements, or the ones you quote, is no defense against the charge of illegal opinions. What is best for the ever more feeble president’s delicate ego is the only consideration. Desperate men do desperate things in desperate times. What’s the world coming to when Cucker Carlson begins speaking common sense truth?

During his monologue on Monday’s show, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can see how hard the president is taking this.”. . .

. . .Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.” He pointed out that in 2023, Brendan Carr [1 — my footnote] himself posted: “Free speech is…the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) warned of a coming campaign to “use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to use the power of the White House to wipe out Trump’s critics and his political opponents.”

. . .On CNN, conservative pundit David Frum called it “state repression.” On his show, right-wing activist Tucker Carlson said: “[I]f they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human…. A free man has a right to say what he believes.”

source

Dan Rather wrote a very cogent explanation of the corporate side of this hideous “free market” canning of a popular comedian for poking fun at an increasingly unpopular wannabe dictator. There is already a lot of blowback on this fascistic over-reach, even Lyin’ Ted Cruz denounced the unethical, illegal, unconstitutional quid pro quo move as a mafia-style shakedown (see following post).

Trump clearly believes in free speech only for himself and those debased enough to publicly kiss his crusty ring. Whatever else you want to call the recently martyred Charlie Kirk, he was not actually a champion of free speech or open debate. He was a well-financed bully, who franchised his billionaire-funded MAGA youth movement on 800 college campuses. He often used the Bible, and his take on Christ’s teachings, to figuratively whack people in the head during his staged free speech cage matches. “Read Leviticus 19,” an Old Testament section he liked to cite to shut his critics’ mouths. Note Mr. Kirk’s flagrant violation of these commands of his white, Christian God, from Leviticus 19:

¹⁶ “‘Do not go about spreading slander among your people.

“‘Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord.

¹⁸ “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

³³ “‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. ³⁴ The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Of course, any devil with access to the internet can quote scripture — and cut and paste it. Just because Kirk slandered accomplished, brilliant Black women as lacking “mental processing power”, preached that gun murders were an acceptable, prudent price for the freedom to own guns, advocated for public, televised executions of the president’s enemies and was, to put it tenderly, no friend of foreigners residing among us, does not make him … uh, does not, he wasn’t… not a hypocrite. He was not NOT a hypocrite is all I’m saying.

His death was horrible and literally nobody deserves to die that way, but to call him a Christian martyr whose death demands national mourning and not a bad word said against the self-made millionaire White Christian Nationalist is false. 

“‘Do not lie.

“‘Do not deceive one another.

¹² “‘Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.

Leviticus 19.

Here’s Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, definitively nailing the evil, mean-spirited, nasty, heartless, catty, possibly violent, definitely radical (and comedic) comments that got Jimmy Kimmel fired… in Kimmel’s own explosive, obscene words.

[1] Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, is a Trump-appointed Trump ass licker. Here’s his application to president-elect Trump, a la Bill Barr’s.

On the podcast of right-wing influencer Benny Johnson on Wednesday, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr said that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” “Frankly, when you see stuff like this,” he said, “I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr explained: “There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say…’We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore…because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.'”

The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar—which needs FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger—said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show from its stations. Then ABC suspended Kimmel’s show.

Benny Johnson, the podcaster on whose show Carr threatened Kimmel, was one of the influencers Russian state media funded to spread propaganda before the 2024 election. After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”

There is an argument raging, between Nazi-types (blind, loyal obedience to the needs of an infallible Leader) and those to the left of Nazis over who are the actual Nazis at this perilous moment in history.   Read any history of the Nazi era and you will find not only historical rhymes, but direct one-on-one correlations between the America First movement during Hitler’s time and the one marching for MAGA today.   Here are four:  

1) the Leader is infallible and essential to protection from inhuman enemies; 2) personal loyalty to the Leader is the single most important value in the nation; 3) lies useful to the Leader, especially demonstrable ones, must be repeated with utter conviction, those who call them out angrily demonized and eliminated; 4) the Leader gets to decide who to attack, even kill, and he is always right to do so.

I don’t use the N-word word lightly as a mere insult, it is accurately descriptive of the fascistic regime we are facing now. These Nazis are always in a rage when faced with facts they hate. Check out FBI director Kashyap Patel’s torrent of rage at Adam Schiff, denouncing the senator as a coward and buffoon, for constantly “lying” about Russian electoral interference in 2016 and the Day of Love on January 6, 2021, as Schiff probed into the Trump cover up of the Epstein files and its recent preferential treatment of Epstein’s lying accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell [1].

Nazi logic is instrumental, transactional, designed to beat down your adversary by any means necessary, including inverting cause and effect and lying outright, then indignantly lying about the lie, with rage, more often than not. It is not strictly logic at all, because it is all based on the irrational will of psychopathic leadership whose every crazed word is law, enforced by terror and violence, but Nazi intellectuals will wrap it in a framework that makes it sound, to those unwary, unsophisticated or inclined to the same worldview, irrefutably logical.

Think of John Roberts needing only one lie, that the Senators who voted 98-0 to reaffirm the Voting Rights Act were relying on forty year-old data showing outdated forty year-old racist voting patterns in many states. The rest of his argument (if you lie, as he did, claiming that the Senators hadn’t studied thousands of pages of current voting data at numerous hearings [2]) sounds entirely reasonable. After reading his calm, logical ruling, before you get to the dissent, it seems plausible that the guy’s just calling balls and strikes and fairly ruling on the facts and the law. Check that shit out.

Here comes fellow Federalist Society stalwart Boof Kavanaugh, who denied, during his tantrum laden confirmation hearing, that the “boof” under his photo in the Georgetown Prep yearbook was a reference to having hard alcohol poured into his colon through a tube (it was a reference to his flatulence, he lied, sheepishly), making a particularly incoherent restatement of the demands of justice and the constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Neither, according to this supremely entitled mama’s boy and five other Federalists, is a brown, Spanish speaking or day laboring person’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search, seizure, detention and extrajudicial rendition to foreign countries for the “crime” of displaying traits of a “non-white” culture an “especially weighty legal interest.” Nazi Logic 101.

Notice how Nazi logic twists the question under review: he turns it not into an innocent person’s right to go about their life in peace, protected by the Constitution, but a question of a guilty person using our law to “evade arrest”. Smug motherfucker, too, Boof Kavanaugh.

[1] Ladies and gentlemen, Kashyap Pramod Patel, from earlier today, fed up with being questioned about the concealment of the Epstein files and preferential treatment for sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell (note tepid gavel use by MAGA Senate Judiciary committee chairman, 91 year-old Chuck Grassley, during Patel’s outburst, and his idiotic “both of you be quiet” at the end):

[2] Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush called a news conference to sign the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes (quoting Dubya):

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.”