Category Archives: Nazis

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

Convert to Catholicism knows way more than the pope

As every American school child knows, morality is not the concern of the American president. The president’s job is not to model or otherwise influence good or bad behavior, it is to dictate American public policy. Which makes him… a dictator? Hey, the pope was good with Mussolini and Hitler, he signed a peace treaty with them, why not the American version? Perhaps JD ought to pray on that, to God, not Peter Theil, before he opens his vapid mouth.

Very, very stable genius

Trump’s new open hostility to Catholics is kind of funny, when you consider that his vice president, JD Vance, converted and was baptized into the Catholic faith in 2019, and Little Marco, his diminutive Secretary of State, was born Catholic and has not converted to anything but Trump sycophant. Also Catholic: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, his most ardent judicial ass-lickers, outside of Aileen Cannon, who is silent on whether she’s Catholic or another kind of Christian. Second most corrupt AG in US history Bill Barr and architect of the Federalist Society 6-3 Supreme Court majority, Leonard Leo, HUGE, very religious conservative Catholics, (as well as militant theo-fascists).

Trump made a blasphemous Easter Sunday genocide threat, using the fucking f-word and insulting all Christians while also mocking adherents of Allah, then elegantly followed up a few days later, when– as the NY Times styled it, he “attacked the pope.” Then, while Trump recently sent Vance on a farcical “diplomatic” mission designed to fail, with the two filthy rich idiot real estate moguls Iran indicated were not acceptable negotiators, he sat with the man who should have been his top diplomat, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, ender of USAID and keeper of the National Archives, Little Marco, at an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Miami. Meanwhile, posting shit like this:

Me as a doctor, you fucking idiots.

(a doctor bringing Epstein back from death, Jimmy Kimmel noted the patient’s resemblance to JE the other night)

and this old favorite:

This is obviously my Star Wars costume, you fucking dummies.

In his politest manner, he tells the pope to go fuck himself, or things are going to go badly for him. Nice papacy you got there, pal, thanks to me. Would be a shame if you forced me to put my boot up its ass. His loyal Catholics are all silent, while Jesus curses them for their “transactional” Christianity.

No more stable genius ever had himself done up as a “pope” or a more magical “doctor”. You can take that to the bank, or the bankruptcy court.

I never met any of these people. HOAX, witch hunt!

Ah, for Christ’s sake…

Until Trump there was never a stable genius president who attacked numerous foes daily. Not sure an American president has ever attacked the Pope, (possibly during the heyday of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when hatred of Catholics raged) but this president is undeniably special. Heather:

Trump tonight posted on social media, in part: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump suggested the Pope was elevated to the papacy only “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” He wrote “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

Today is Orthodox Easter, and about 45 minutes after attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself in the place of Jesus, apparently healing a sick man in a bed, surrounded by a soldier, a nurse, a woman praying, and an older man. Behind him are the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and a giant American flag, while in the sky are two eagles, three fighter jets, soldiers, and what seems to be a monster.

Amid popular revulsion at what people are calling heresy and blasphemy, former U.S. representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

A minute after posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump posted an image of a Trump tower on the moon.

source

Negotiators sent by the Orange two year-old “fail”

Iran had already indicated they would not further “negotiate” with real estate mogul/pawns Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.   Trump told Iran “fuck you, that’s exactly who you get, assholes,” sending those two nincompoops, supplemented by the experienced, steady hand of the always truthful JD Vance.  JD not long ago reasonably feared Trump was our American Hitler.  Now he serves his authoritarian leader, no matter what.   Not surprisingly, the Iranians found no reason to trust the American “negotiators.”   Hard to blame them, however evil their theocracy also is.  

Here’s what Vance was spouting on the campaign trail about Democratic presidents and stupid wars, when he was not lying about brown people eating white people’s pets:

Of course, there is nothing “stupid” about Trump’s murderous rampage against Iran, whether he can give a reason for it or not. Reasons are for losers, violent, lethal action for winners. One day of failed negotiations proves, to the remaining MAGA base, that Iran is a sick, dangerous, totally obliterated theocracy, “Allah be praised” — to reprise the repeated sick, edgy, blasphemous “burn” of our epically furious two year-old-in-chief. Call it “Operation Shut The FUCK UP, Melania!” Speaking of sick burns, whoever wrote this line for Melania’s shock and awe press conference is a genius “I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.” 

Trump’s instinctual, reptilian survival reasoning is always impeccable. In this case “fuck Melania and her big fucking mouth, I’m using force to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and provoke an international standoff, provoke the rest of the world into military action to stop me, because I fucking can and because, fuck Epstein, when I had him suicided, after we managed to get that French fuck who was going to testify against him suicided in a French prison, that should have been the end of this bullshit hoax that never happened. Those little whores are all liars.”

Likewise, there is no reason to fear what these “transactional” mercenary servants of a criminally insane, demented psychopath will do in our name, except for fear itself, as was famously said in another fearful moment for our nation.  We will get through this fascist threat together, or not.  Victor Orban’s loss today is encouraging –as is him immediately covering defeat– hero that he is to Vance, Trump and our American global authoritarians.  All we can do here is organize, communicate, dissent, refuse to be quiet about the irrational, dangerous actions of our American Hitler.  Isn’t that right, JD?

“I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump.”

JD Vance, untruthful? Me, sarcastic?

It’s hard to believe the vice president of the United States would lie, isn’t it? Is not as if he admitted to repeatedly lying about Haitian immigrants (in an Ohio town whose economy they had saved) eating their white neighbors’ dogs, eating their cats. He explained, after his remarks were shown to be false, that his statements, while not truthful, were to wake up Americans to the fact that we are under existential threat from brown people who are not white Christian nationalists. His expressed fear that Donald Trump is the American Hitler, (not an unreasonable fear, actually), yielded to his overweening political ambitions. To put it bluntly, the man tends to be untruthful, when he makes statements of any kind.

Vice President J.D. Vance said there was a “legitimate misunderstanding” about whether the ceasefire included Lebanon. “We never made that promise,” he said. But in fact, Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, who posted the terms of the ceasefire on Tuesday, noted that the agreement did include a ceasefire in Lebanon. He tagged Vance in the post. source

Another big lie is almost certainly under way [in Orban’s campaign in Hungary]. While Vance was in Budapest, he claimed that the Ukrainian secret services interfere in elections on the United States and Hungary — an activity that is unknown to the scholarship of the subject, to put it mildly. This was reinforcing a campaign message of Orbán: the tall tale that the Ukrainian secret services had somehow penetrated all of Hungary and were preparing a systematic electoral falsification. When, as i likely, Orbán loses the vote count, he will probably revive this story in some form. Americans might endorse it; they might copy it themselves this fall. It is a comfortable story for Trump and Vance because it inverts the historical fact: that Russia always tries to tilt elections their way. source

When Trump is the smartest person in the room

25th Amendment, anyone?

The New York Times reported in detail on Trump’s path to a war he can’t justify. Fellow war criminal Bibi Netanyahu gave a February 11th Situation Room sales pitch to Trump about the perfect time to attack Iran and decapitate its leadership. It’s not that Trump wasn’t advised of the risks, he was, by virtually every adviser, but every one of these professional ass lickers deferred to their boss’s “instincts”. Most horrifically, to me, “diplomats” Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff were in the room for Bibi’s sales pitch, which was presented with a video presentation by the head of Mossad. source

Two weeks later, on February 26, two days before the US began the unprovoked, unjustifiable bombing of Iran, raining mass death on civilians, there was another meeting in the Situation Room. The cast of characters included Karoline Leavitt, with the lips Trump has praised, and raging asshole/communications genius Steven Cheung (pictured below).

Here are a few “highlights” of that meeting, from the NY Times report.

Mr. Vance, whose disagreement with the whole premise was well established, addressed the president: You know I think this is a bad idea, but if you want to do it, I’ll support you.

Ms. Wiles told Mr. Trump that if he felt he needed to proceed for America’s national security, then he should go ahead. . .

. . . Mr. Cheung laid out the likely public relations fallout: Mr. Trump had run for office opposed to further wars. People had not voted for conflict overseas. The plans ran contrary, too, to everything the administration had said after the bombing campaign against Iran in June. How would they explain away eight months of insisting that Iranian nuclear facilities had been totally obliterated? Mr. Cheung gave neither a yes nor a no, but he said that whatever decision Mr. Trump made would be the right one.

Ms. Leavitt told the president that this was his decision and that the press team would manage it as best they could.

Mr. Hegseth adopted a narrow position: They would have to take care of the Iranians eventually, so they might as well do it now. He offered technical assessments: They could run the campaign in a certain amount of time with a given level of forces.

Murderous maniac threatens genocide

Try not to be upset that our president has threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if his demand that Iran drop its defensive posture after refusing to unconditionally surrender, in spite of literally thousands of bombing raids against it in recent weeks, is not immediately met.

You have to see it from Trump’s point of view — he’s upset because the world still doesn’t take him seriously as a major league mass murderer. What does a strongman have to do to earn his place alongside the all-time greats? He’s killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, but that’s chump change to members of the strongman Hall of Fame. He needs a big kill to get the cred as a killer for the ages that he has sought since childhood.

Checking to get the insane bastard’s genocidal quote right, AI gave the first result (I forgot to add “-AI” at the end of my search) I got this:

The auto-generated answer “may contain inaccuracies,” as the psychopathic monetizers of incoherence, fear and hatred — the masters of the universe — inform the users at the bottom of the partially accurate answer. The president’s statement reflects, it’s plain to see, “escalating tensions and the potential for severe military action.” AI does not reflect any kind of psychotic break from reality, not derangement, dementia, a desire to commit war crimes, an inability to back down, ever, stemming from childhood trauma and an overwhelming terror of more humiliation. “Escalating tensions.” you understand, between reality, which has a famously anti-Trump bias, in fact, hates and vilifies all Christian white men, and … the violently acted out prejudices of terrified, enraged white Christian men, as well as Mr. Trump himself.

Look, if an American president, surrounded by sycophantic, militant white Christian Protestants, (including a Secretary of War who believes there’s no such thing as a stupid war crime), can’t make a little Easter joke in a menacing social media post threatening mass killing and sarcastically praising Allah, what is our freedom really worth? Others have a right to hate that freedom, but, you have to admit, it’s pretty incoherent to insist on your right to freedom while denying a Nazi’s right to the same freedom, right? The freedom of the top of the top 1% to do what benefits them is so precious and inviolable, in an incoherent schema, that the lives of a couple of billion poor people don’t amount to a hill of beans. Fair is fair. Be a billionaire or shut the fuck up.

You have to like the symmetry here. Trump promises oil executives that if they give him a billion for his campaign he’ll take care of them once elected. Then he cuts all the renewable energy projects funded under Biden. Then he drops bombs on a country whose predictable defensive move is to close the Strait of Hormuz, driving oil prices up and with oil prices, most other prices. Win-win, if you’re an oil billionaire. Charles Koch may privately hate the vulgar, incoherent, criminally insane Mr. Trump, but he sure is good for the bottom line.

Insane terrible two year-old as the most powerful man on the planet

Below is Dan Rather’s clear analysis of the deadly box Trump has placed himself (and all of us) in. I’ve been at a loss to explain my recent level of anxiety to myself, this — starting with a photo of a woman walking through a bombed out section of Tehran — puts some of my anxiety into pretty good perspective. After watching the excellent Nuremberg the other night on Netflix — the story of how the nations that defeated Nazism began creating a body of international law to prevent another such threat to life on earth — to see our own country in the hands of creatures so similar to the soul-dead men on the docket at the world’s first war crimes trial, makes my skin crawl. It is horrifying to know that the U.S. is now the single greatest threat to life on the planet the world has ever known. Because we have an enraged victim of lifelong epic fury as our Unitary Executive, manipulated by a cabal of determined “ideological” psychopaths with unlimited wealth and power. Here’s Dan:

Wars are chaotic. They’re unpredictable — hence the phrase “the fog of war.” That fog has descended on the war in the Middle East. There are some people who believe Trump’s war is going well. But the consensus of opinion right now is that the battle is going poorly for the United States and Israel.

You have to wonder if anyone is telling the president the truth. Because his version of what will happen if the war continues much longer differs wildly from that of experts in the region. If we think gas prices are high now, just wait.

It boils down to this: Donald Trump is trapped. As of this writing, there is no good option to end this conflict.

  • The U.S. walks away — as Trump has threatened — and the Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control. No one in the region likes that scenario.
  • The U.S. bombs Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, which is a war crime. Iran retaliates, likely targeting energy resources around the Middle East, while retaining a sizable portion of its missile stockpile.
  • Trump launches a ground war, which could be long, bloody, and expensive.

Any of the above scenarios could lead to a worldwide recession, or worse.

By the tone of his tweets, Trump’s frustration with the options is boiling over.

the rest is here

Could be, Grey Lady?  Bombing civilian targets like water desalination plants, power plants, infrastructure like bridges and girls schools, all calculated to terrorize and kill masses of noncombatants, ARE war crimes.