Category Archives: Nazis

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…)

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

“A matter of political controversy”

For a Trump nominee to concede that the violence on January 6, 2021, a riot that shut down a joint session of Congress about to make Biden’s victory official, was not a patriotic Day of Love, and perfectly reasonable “legitimate political discourse” is to betray his/her/its deranged master. No Republican is allowed to say that January 6 was anything bad, at worst it can be called a “matter of political controversy.” You know, we can agree to disagree about what we disagree about, right? A talking point, no matter how incoherent, is good enough in the corporate America of 2026, when it comes to blindly partisan lifetime appointees to the federal bench.

The same goes for the legitimate election of Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election. “He was inaugurated…” is the only acceptable answer to the question “was Joe Biden elected president in 2020?”. It is political suicide in Trumpworld to concede that Biden won an honest and fair election (that would make Trump, history’s greatest winner, a loser!). You certainly don’t want to get the most vengeful compulsive liar in American history mad at you. So you choose your evasive words carefully, or repeat the ones your learned colleague just farted out.

In a similar vein, The Confederacy, of course, never lost the Civil War, a war of Northern aggression which was not fought to protect slavery but over states’ rights — to have slavery in their own states. The Nazis never lost World War Two, or caused the deaths of tens of millions, they just had to lay low while the generations who knew their crimes in detail died off. When enough time goes by everything in the past can be seen as “a matter of political controversy.” Everything inhuman is GREAT AGAIN, for anyone still gaga for MAGA. In the land of the desperate, faith beats reason every time.

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!!!

Totally, totally normal, you traitorous cucks!

President Trump has long been the “decider” in the closely held family business he inherited from his successful, psychopath father. He has bankrupted every business venture he ever went into, or had them closed down for corruption, fraud and abuse — like Trump University or the Trump charity. The guy is a blustering con artist who nobody in his employ has ever said no to. There have never been consequences for anything he’s ever done. The spoiled bully he was as a child is the same special guy running the most powerful country in the world. Falling asleep at a recent televised meeting, during a boring presentation about numbers, a more tactless person than I might call him Sleepy Don.

His niece Mary put it perfectly — he’s the weakest man she’s ever known, his genius is consistently finding people even weaker than him. This weakness in his inner circle must always include a non-existent moral compass. Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Pete Kegsbreath, MAGA Mike Johnson, Kashyap Patel, Todd Blanche, Tulsi Gabbard, Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Hung Cao, Michael Cohen, the list goes on and on. The soul-dead opportunists riding the MAGA train all know the key to Trump’s inner circle is eternal public deference to the big guy’s desperate, sucking vacuum of an ego. Trump can’t be wrong, has never, ever been, so if he is wrong, forcefully, angrily defend how right he was to do whatever stupid or evil thing he’s just done. Then smirk defiantly for the cameras, threaten to sue, prosecute, imprison, and wait for the moment the bus rumbles by, the one you will inevitably be thrown under, when the time comes.

Is this a surprise to anyone?

A classic asshole, whatever we may opine about his psychiatric condition or how the abuse he endured as a child warped him into the destructive, compulsive liar, with a taste for killing (double tap strikes on fishing boats, a girls’ school in Iran, firing squads for federal executions, yo), who now controls 5,000 nuclear warheads. Sometimes, as they say, a schmuck is just a schmuck.

Same ear, two years later. A miracle.

And in shocking breaking news, truly shocking, who would ever imagine such a thing at such a time?

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

Great lesson on the Strait of Hormuz

David Feldman, in his incomparable style (I started to say ‘inimitable’, but his distinct delivery isn’t hard to imitate), uses maps to lay out the supreme idiocy of Trump and Hegseth’s loud assertions that they won the war against Iran overwhelmingly and are only negotiating now to… uh, they completely and utterly won, decisively, destroyed Iran’s ability to wage war with unprecedented lethality and violence in the name of all that is holy (and the bossy f-ing pope be damned),  which is why they have agreed to a ceasefire and are negotiating terms with a nation that, whenever it wants to, can stop all oil tankers from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

It is clearly the lügenpresse [1], the lying globalists who control mass media (you know who he’s talking about…) lying about the most perfect war, more perfect, even, than Mr. Trump’s perfect call asking Ukrainian president Zelensky to “do him a favor” if he wanted the arms shipment Congress had already approved for Ukraine’s defense against Putin’s invasion.   The stinking rat who made that secret phone call public, and lied about the transcript, which was perfect (PERFECT!),  is going to get prosecuted pursuant to Tulsi Gabbard’s referral, and that will happen toot sweet, says Kashyap Patel, who will now be subject to being deposed in the idiotic defamation case the angry asshole brought against The Atlantic for smearing his good name (I know, what good name?).  It’s all the fault of the lying goddamned commie mass media that needs to be brought to heel, clearly.  These public servants are all perfect, the most perfect ever to serve this good nation.  PERFECT YOU SICK FUCKING LYING TREASONOUS MANIAC BASTARDS!!!!!

[1]

NY Times releases memos showing origins of corrupt 6-3 majority “shadow docket”

As disgusted as I often am with the NY Times’ typically Chuck Schumer-like courage and integrity, they regularly publish important investigative pieces. Their in-depth reporting on Trump’s father’s criminal tax avoidance scheme is a great example [1]. (Gift link no longer available, it seems, but try this.) This one, from today’s paper, is another good one. It is a short history of the shadow docket, the new rightwing mechanism for greenlighting illegal moves by its front man, on an almost instant “emergency” basis, by issuing quick, no argument/no legal reasoning decisions that enable their interests to advance unimpeded.

These short, quick decisions were usually reserved for yes/no rulings on a last minute death penalty appeal (and were usually a thumbs down for the person to be executed). Now they are used to allow their avatar to do maximum damage in minimum time without undue delay to his/their agenda. It all started, predictably enough, to block an Obama clean energy initiative.

The chief justice and some of his colleagues were watching warily, concerned the president [Obama] was going past what the Constitution allowed him to do on his own. In a 2014 opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court warned Mr. Obama that he needed to tread carefully in setting environmental policy without congressional approval.

That statement was one of the early articulations of what would come to be known as the major questions doctrine, saying that on important matters, executive branch agencies could act only with clear direction from Congress. . .

. . . For now, the chief justice contended that the court had to act immediately because the energy industry “must make changes to business plans today.”

“Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector before this court has an opportunity to review its legality,” he wrote.

. . . Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

At 6:20 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 9, the court alerted the public to its decision, releasing the cryptic one-paragraph order.

source

The upshot is that the first time they pulled this stunt, at the behest — and insistence — of fucking John Roberts, it was on behalf of the fossil fuel industry who stood to lose half a trillion in profits over the next decade in the switch to clean, renewable energy.   Obama was far from certain to prevail on the merits of the case, but the new regulations weren’t set to go into effect for six years, meaning there was plenty of time for litigation — until a fossil fuel group in West Virginia unaccountably jumped the appeals process to get directly in front of Roberts on an emergency basis.  The “emergency” was a likely Hillary Clinton presidency.   

To protect the oil industry, its lobby, and the overall agenda of his Nazi compatriots, corporatist “balls and strikes umpire” John Roberts jumped into unprecedented action, before the dangerous Hillary Clinton came to power, to rule against Obama without any hearing on the merits, judicial review of any kind or even the fig leaf of judicial reasoning.  The rest, like AI, is history.

This point bears repeating. In weighing the pros and cons, such as they did in a frenzied 5 days of short notes passing between them, none of the justices mentioned the actual emergency before them/us:

Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

How do you say fucking fucks in French?

[1] Trump’s father, Fred Christ Trump, as reported in the NY Times, created 295 income streams for his kids and multiple companies that did all sorts of good work getting dad’s money to his offspring without any of those punitive taxes.   In the case of the Koch brothers, they created and/or fund institutes, societies, non-profits, think tanks, academic programs, ad campaigns, lobbyist groups, even a popular grassroots movement, influential in thwarting all progress toward a more perfect union, except for themselves.  

Sane as can be

Heather Cox Richardson reports:

With Iran’s announcement the strait was open, Trump hit the media circle, announcing through interviews and social media posts that the war with Iran was over and peace talks were all but done, although Trump said the U.S. Navy will continue to blockade Iran’s ports. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted that Trump posted thirteen times in an hour claiming total victory.

He claimed that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” He said that the United States would work with Iran at “a leisurely pace” to retrieve and capture Iran’s highly enriched uranium and that Iran would receive no money for its cooperation despite a report from Axios that the U.S. is considering the release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for Iran giving up its stockpile of enriched uranium.

Right on cue the stock market jumped and the price of oil futures dropped. Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”

But, as Ashley Ahn of the New York Times reported, Iranian officials’ interpretation of events was quite different from Trump’s characterization. Iran’s top negotiator, speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, posted on social media that Trump had made seven claims in an hour, and all seven of them were false. Iran rejected Trump’s claim that it had agreed to hand over its uranium stockpile, and also said that the strait was open for commercial vessels—not military ships—but would close again if the U.S. blockade continued.

Tonight on Air Force One, after the stock market closed, when asked if Iran would turn over its nuclear material, Trump said: “We’re taking it. We’re taking it. Very simple. We’re taking it. With Iran. We’re going in with Iran. We’re taking it. We will have it. I don’t call it boots on the ground. We’ll take it after the agreement is signed. After there— there’s a very big difference. Before and after. BC. It’s before, and after. And after the agreement is signed, it’s a lot different than before. We would have taken it. If we didn’t have an agreement, we would take it. But I don’t think we’ll have to.”

When a reporter asked Trump whether he would extend the ceasefire “if you don’t have a deal by Wednesday” when it ends, the president answered: “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I won’t extend it. But the blockade is gonna remain. But maybe I won’t extend it. So you have a blockade, and unfortunately we’ll have to start dropping bombs again.”

source