Category Archives: politics smells like meat

Keep Your Eye on the Ball, Fellow Citizens

The distractor-in-chief, gleeful chaos agent, lights multiple stinking dumpster fires every day — it’s his particular gift. That antifa guy who allegedly shot the religious right-wing counter-protester in Portland? According to Trump he got exactly what he deserved (death in a hail of bullets from U.S. marshals) in what has to happen in such cases. Trump told a host on FOX: “Now we sent in the U.S. marshals for the killer, the man that killed the young man in the street. Two and a half says went by and I put out “when are you going to get him.” And the U.S. marshals went in to get him. There was a shootout. This guy was a violent criminal, and the US Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

You can be as outraged as you like that the U.S. president advocates the summary extra-judicial execution of an unarmed American suspect (according to witnesses of the shooting) by federal police. The only alternative, and not to Trump’s liking, would have been holding a “politically correct” criminal trial with witnesses, evidence, all kinds of delay and inconvenience. Be outraged or keep your eye on the ball:

The number of votes that will be counted in the upcoming presidential election is the only crucial number right now.

The president used this identical tactic, repeating lies about widespread voter fraud, the last time he ran for the world’s most powerful office. He did this for the same reason he’s doing it now: to create fear and uncertainty ahead of an election he expects to lose if all the votes are fairly counted. And to set the table for going to court to contest an election rigged against the real winner– him.

A flashback, to show Trump used this exact ploy last time, from the Washington Post, October 18, 2016:

An unshackled Donald Trump is barreling down the final stretch of the campaign, making bold and unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and rigged elections the centerpiece of his closing arguments to American voters.

While Trump is light on the specifics of how this alleged election-rigging works, it seems to involve some combination of media bias and official complicity running all the way from precinct ballot boxes to the director of the FBI.

The truth of the matter is that lawmakers already have numerous legal options at their disposal for tipping the scales of democracy in one direction or another. Changing the composition of the electorate — by enacting restrictions on who can vote, or at what times, or on the ID required to fill out a ballot — are one way to do this.

source

Voter fraud is not a statistically significant thing in the USA. The incidence of documented voter fraud is a microscopic fraction of one percent. The stubborn myth of voter fraud has been debunked time after time, yet it will not go away — like the wild bot-fueled rumor of that Democrat-run child sex trafficking operation in the basement of a Washington DC pizza place (a place that had no basement) — there’s a large, growing movement based around that groundless conspiracy theory right now, applauded by the president himself [1].

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative “think tank” funded by Charles Koch and friends, published a study that found almost 1,100 cases of voter fraud between 2000 and 2018. For the state of Florida alone, Heritage lists one case in 2018 AND another one in 2017 (as well as THREE from 2015 and a whopping FIVE from 2013). Here’s the entry from 2017:

Gladys Coego, a temporary worker in the Miami-Dade County elections department during the November 2016 election, pleaded guilty to filling out the mail-in ballots of other voters in favor of Republican mayoral candidate Raquel Regalado. While she admitted to altering the ballots of at least two individuals, detectives believe that Coego likely fraudulently marked numerous other absentee ballots. She was sentenced to two years of house arrest. Source: bit.ly/2hmygEr, bit.ly/2w9hoax

source

The Heritage Foundation claims “at least 1,296” proven cases of voter fraud and 1,120 convictions (see their full report at the link above).

You can read a detailed critique of the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Fraud study at the Brennan Center website. The lede: Claims that the Heritage Foundation document contains almost 1,100 proven instances of voter fraud are grossly exaggerated and devoid of context, Brennan Center researchers found — but that is not the point.

Even taking the study by Charles Koch and friends at its word — nationwide 1,296 instances of “recent, proven election fraud” in recent years, out of perhaps a billion votes cast — well, you don’t need a calculator to see that this is a nano-fraction of one percent of all the votes cast. Hardly grounds for a dozen or more federal lawsuits by Trump and the RNC claiming, with microscopic evidence, that mail-in voting is an ongoing invitation to massive voter fraud.

Let us fight this transparent lie about extensive voter fraud head-on — there are no guarantees about the future of our democracy.

I’m researching a reliable number of the total votes cast in every election between 2000 and 2018. Taking the Heritage Foundation’s 1,296 fraud cases and dividing it into the number of votes cast will give us a fraud prevalence perhaps much higher than the 44/millionths of one percent fraud number I have been going on [2]. The Heritage Foundation-derived percentage may be many, many times that, perhaps as high as 44/ten thousandths of one percent fraud. In which case…

Keep your eye on the ball, ladies and gentlemen — making the votes count and allowing people to vote safely.

I’m going to do my best in the coming days to figure out how to get this number and this idea out there, find a way to organize with others and do everything to ensure maximum votes are cast and counted. Keeping our eye on the immediate goal: voting these corrupt autocratic rascals out of power — which will happen 100% if all votes are counted, or even 90%.

Stay tuned.

[1] The word “Satanic” was removed from the description of this cabal of powerful pedophile cannibal Democrats, to make the QAnon theory more mainstream, to attract non-religious Christian Americans and even non-Christians (this conspiracy is a gigantic tent, like Trumpism itself). Every decent American can get behind a movement that stands for the protection of children from organized, predatory, sex-pervert cannibals. Fair is fair, evidence or no, you can’t argue with the idea that children must be protected from evil. If you can argue against it, what the Devil is wrong with you, pervert? God bless the children!

[2]

Number of states with active voter ID laws: 32

Number of laws passed to tighten voting laws since 2001: Over 1,000

2012 voter turnout: 129,085,403

Approximate number of 2012 voter fraud cases: 4

Projected number of 2016 voter fraud cases based on 2012 turnout: 4

Your odds of getting struck by lightning (twice!) are more likely than election fraud at: 1 in 9 million

source

44/millionths of one percent

Documented prevalence of voting fraud by individuals 2000-2016 is 0.0000044%.

Say it loud.

Put it on fucking shirts and baseball caps.

It’s not that voting fraud by individual voters is extremely rare in the USA, it’s not that the RNC’s many ongoing lawsuits to restrict voting are based on zero actual evidence.

Voter fraud’s documented prevalence is:

44/millionths of one percent

And even if was a thousand times more than that, 44/thousandths of one percent– how would that change the story?

Why is this fraudulent insistence on widespread voter fraud not front page news in every major newspaper as our divided nation argues about “rigged” vs. “fair” elections?

Evidence vs. No Evidence (and the 44/millionths of one percent odds of winning on the merits, after exhausting all appeals)

We live in a bizarre and dangerous time when arguments presented without evidence can prevail — particularly in the algorithm-driven Court of Public Opinion. This court is not presided over by particularly sophisticated judicial minds. Any assertion that sounds legally plausible will do to support a claim already endorsed by partisans. Doctrines like Presidential Privilege, or Sovereign Immunity sound pretty impressive, and pretty darned absolute and unassailable. Case closed!

Blanket Unlimited Protective Presidential Immunity (for the president and anyone who has ever talked to him): BINGO! Sounds like a winner, unless you look at every previous Supreme Court ruling on less audacious claims of presidential immunity.

Fortunately for our democracy, laws and legal precedents govern when legal doctrines may be applied – and when they may not be applied. The final word on what is lawful is given to the courts of our country. These cases are won or lost based on who has the superior evidence for their claim. If powerful sounding legal doctrines are misused by the government, as Bill Barr routinely does, simply as stumbling blocks to delay the court’s final determination of a claim the AG (and every other legal scholar) knows will fall — that’s fatal for our democracy and the delicate system of checks and balances that upholds it.

Trump’s only hope for an outright, or at least arguable, electoral victory is chaos, confusion, fear, rage, violence and the suppression of millions of votes from people he’s alienated by his divisiveness and incompetence.

He’s favored in this hope by the winds of the highly infectious pandemic he decried and denied for months, a rampaging, deadly, airborne disease that creates chaos, fear, confusion. 39% of Americans couldn’t care less that he deliberately lied to the nation about the severity of the virus, as he revealed for posterity during his many recorded talks with Bob Woodward.

He’s favored by the discord he sows every day, the fear, rage and violence he inspires as he publicly strives to keep everyone calm. Those who follow him will insist he is the Law and Order candidate striving to keep everyone calm. They will faithfully repeat what the president himself has said, defending his decision to lie about the deadliness of the novel coronavirus.

He is NOT favored by the evidence for virtually any of his claims.

He’s not the brilliant dealmaker and great businessman he boasts about being; he’s a fraud and a snake-oil salesman, a serial failure saved from bankruptcy by vast family wealth over and over. Just before his election he settled a case to shut down his fraudulent university, as president his charitable family foundation has been shuttered for illegal activity.

Trump is well-known to be a compulsive liar. It is a compulsion, he literally has to lie. He is in jeopardy of prosecution for multiple crimes once he is no longer president. He’s been kept in office so far, in the face of massive evidence of his obstruction, abuse of office and other wrongdoing, only by fervent true believer AG Barr and soul-dead Senate leader McConnell. Trump is wounded and dangerous.

Please look at and memorize this number to trot out at your next virtual cocktail party: 44/millionths of one percent:

44/millionths of one percent

Rate of voter fraud in the United States 2000-2016: 0.0000044%

The president’s repeated claims about massive vote-by-mail fraud are not supported by any evidence. Voter fraud is a brazen lie told to help suppress the numbers who will be allowed to vote. You can read about the lack of evidence of voter fraud he and the RNC submitted in a federal suit they recently brought to limit mail-in voting during a pandemic [1].

Trump’s presidential commission on Election Fraud, created soon after his razor thin 78,000 vote Electoral College victory in 2016, tasked with finding the three million fraudulent Hillary voters that gave her a wide margin in the popular vote (many of these voters were dead Mexicans, as I recall Trump saying) found zero evidence. Headed by voting rights zealots Mike Pence and Chris Kobach, the commission shut down after two meetings, having turned up no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

By now, everyone should know Trump’s election rigging voter-fraud claim is false, a lie, 100% bullshit. The rate of demonstrated voter fraud is, let’s repeat it, to help remember the nano-percentage of cases of actual voter fraud, to drop into conversation:

44/millionths of one percent

Rate of voter fraud in the United States. 2000-2016: 0.0000044%

Yet the media continues to report on claims of widespread voter fraud like it is a real issue.

I read one in the NY Times the other day, grotesquely contorted to appear fair and balanced, that made me hate them anew. All they needed to do in that article was somewhere provide the number of actual, documented voting fraud cases from 2000-2016: 0.0000044% (or use the equally descriptive “statistically insignificant”). They dared not cite that damning fact, for whatever accursed reason, in assessing the truth or falsity of Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud and a rigged election.

You read the NY Times article and emerge with the idea that some very smart lawyers believe that mail-in fraud is much more widespread than in-person fraud. Perhaps as much as 200% more prevalent: 97/millionths of one percent, one imagines. Even if it is 1000% more prevalent, that’s 44/100,000ths of one percent. Come on, Grey Skank… sheesh, what is in it for you?

Trump has been pushing this load of crap since he announced that he was running for president in 2016. Check out this report from the Public Broadcasting System, October 2016, completely debunking this ignorant blowhard talking point.

As for American votes actively suppressed, recently, votes already legally cast and yet actually not counted, keep reading. This exchange is from the latest interview by national treasure Bill Moyers, about a federal lawsuit this Republican election lawyer is bringing to trump the multiple frivolous Trump lawsuits arguing for the need to curb unsubstantiated, widespread voter fraud [and also to throw a wrench into Trump’s ongoing conspiracy with mega-donor Postmaster General DeJoy to slow the delivery of mail]:

DAVID BERG: We have to prove imminent harm. In order to get any kind of injunctive relief from any court in the country, you have to prove that you are in imminent danger of losing, in this case, a valuable right, for which no money can compensate you. This is at the heart of this democracy: a free, unfettered right to vote. In this case, we were able to show, this is what we think is the harm. This is what we think we can say to the court. “Look, your Honor– ” I wouldn’t say, “Look, your Honor.” But I would say, “Your Honor– we have four people here. Their experience, from all published reports, is no different from millions of Americans. Their right to vote was unconstitutionally burdened, as the test goes.”

BILL MOYERS: In their primaries.

DAVID BERG: In their primaries. Yes, exactly. And in the runoffs. So, we say to the court, “That’s not something that a voter should have to confront.” And we can’t be certain, given everything that’s happened with the United States Postal Service, that this is not going to happen again. “This” being the failure to deliver the ballots in response to applications. And then, and this is also critical, because this is unknown to the voter. There were tens of thousands of votes that arrived too late at election officials’ offices during the primary season, and in the runoffs, Bill. And they weren’t counted. Used to be that, you know, you postmarked your mail-in ballot on the last day before the election, and it’ll get counted. We don’t have that assurance anymore.

BILL MOYERS: So what are you asking the court to do?

DAVID BERG: The court can look to the causes. There are four causes of the slowdown, probably more that we don’t know about. But there are four that widely publicize. The most serious of the causes, you’ve probably heard DeJoy and other of his cohorts at USPS–

BILL MOYERS: Postmaster DeJoy, President Trump’s appointment to be postmaster general.

DAVID BERG: Yes, exactly. He’s bragged about the fact in an email to all of the 600,000 employees of the United States Postal Service that the rate of delivery has really improved. On-time delivery has gone from 83% to 94% in just a month. That’s just about as trustworthy as when he, DeJoy, said he would suspend all the changes. Which was just a head fake, was just three card Monty with our election. When he said he’d suspend the changes that he was making at the post office claiming it just to be for cost-cutting, what he really meant to say was, I’m not going to reverse the changes I’ve already made, which has created slowdowns in mail delivery, failure to deliver mail all over the country. Especially more pronounced in some parts than others. So what we’re asking the court to do is lift the hiring freeze. Thousands of postal workers have been sidelined by the Coronavirus. And the fallacy of this business about delivering on time, Bill, if your trucks all leave on time, that’s one thing. But they leave on time without the mail. They are no longer allowed to do late deliveries or special deliveries to customers. So the mail stacks up, and that makes the delay even worse. So yes, he’s telling us the trains are running on time. But they’re empty.

[1] Trump’s claim in the case — that mail-in voting:

… denies any procedural visibility to candidates, political parties, and the public in general, thereby jeopardizing the free and fair public elections guaranteed by the United States and Pennsylvania Constitutions. The most recent election conducted in this Commonwealth and the public reaction to it demonstrate the harm caused by Defendants’ unconstitutional infringements of Plaintiffs’ rights. The continued enforcement of arbitrary and disparate policies and procedures regarding poll watcher access and ballot return and counting poses a severe threat to the credibility and integrity of, and public confidence in, Pennsylvania’s elections.

full amended complaint here

is not only unsupported by evidence (in apparent contempt of a judge’s order) but these claims are identical to Kremlin talking points about the upcoming US election. How a federal lawsuit is allowed to go forward, unsupported by evidence of any kind, in spite of the unambiguous order of the federal judge that Plaintiff’s submit evidence or STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE, is a modern American judicial mystery.  The failure of the news media to report on it is a modern American media mystery. 

self-dealing source 

History Lesson for September 11th

featuring an excerpt from Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back.

September 11 is probably a good time to transcribe this evocative passage from the opening chapter of the 2006 book by Amy Goodman and David Goodman that I have long been meaning to transcribe and post here.

Journalism is often called the first draft of history. These investigative reports from the first term of the Bush/Cheney administration detail the real-time actions of people struggling against a new regime in which torture was legally (if secretly, at first) redefined as “enhanced interrogation” and dark practices that were previously hidden were now flaunted as part of the US’s tough new zero-tolerance policy towards “Terror”. How did this official U.S. embrace of torture change history? Our current president, when he was a candidate, boasted that the tortures of Bush and Cheney were nothing compared to what he was prepared to do. In that sense, at least, Mr. Trump has kept his word.

Americans are famously prone to amnesia when it comes to history. The name Maher Arar will not ring any bells for most Americans. He was a Canadian citizen, born in Syria, who was detained at JFK airport on September 26, 2002, separated from his family (they were en route to Canada after a vacation) interrogated for days, drugged, diapered, shackled and “rendered” to Syria, where he was kept in a hole in the ground and tortured daily for a year before Canadian efforts finally got him released.

As Amy and David Goodman record: “Three hundred and seventy-four days after he landed at JFK, Maher Arar was released from the Syrian prison. Charges were never filed against him.”

Canada eventually issued a public apology to this innocent Canadian architect, a man with a name similar to someone the US suspected of being a terrorist, and paid him millions in damages. The U.S., in the name of “national security,” (and on several other grounds as well) dismissed the lawsuit Arar brought in U.S. federal court. Nothing to see here, dipshit, we’re fighting evil!

Years later President Obama would admit “we, uh, tortured some folks,” explaining that good people had done it with the best of intentions during very fearful times, but that it was still, you know, kind of wrong. So our first multi-racial president, whose election wiped the slate clean of racism once and for all, made a clean breast of our descent into barbarity, under cover of law. He said it was wrong. I will let the Goodmans take it from the beginning of their 2006 book, a work of journalism that is now a straight up history book (and one I highly recommend):

The United States is an outlaw nation.

The laws that used to govern the behavior of American leaders evolved from basic codes of conduct for civilized nations. In 1215 the Magna Carta asserted that no one, not even the king, was above the rule of law, and it established the concept of habeus corpus — a prisoner’s right to challenge his or her detention in a public court of law. Kidnapping, murder and rape, all nations agree, are crimes. The four Geneva Conventions, the first of which was adopted in 1864, established that even in wars, civilians and combatants have rights. The conventions prohibit murder, torture, hostage-taking and extrajudicial sentencing and executions.

These have long been the publicly proclaimed ideals of Western nations. In private, they have been routinely violated. From the Native American conquest, to slavery, to Vietnam, where torture and extrajudicial killing were staples of the CIA’s Phoenix program, to Latin America, where US-backed death squads rained terror on civilians throughout the 1970s and ’80s, to the US Army School of the Americas, which counts among its graduates a who’s who of Latin American dictators and humans rights abusers, the United States has been secretly involved in the torture business for years.

Yet even by these sordid standards, the United States is now probing new lows.

For this, we must credit President George W. Bush. A failed oil-man, he lost the 2000 election but was selected as president of the United States by the Supreme Court. Having lost the popular vote nationally that year — including, as recounts proved, losing in Florida– Bush proceeded to declare after the attacks of 9/11 that he had a God-given mandate not just to rule America, but to wage war across the globe. He reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam.” Bush decreed that neither international law nor U.S. law applied to him or his administration.

Bush was not able to achieve all this on his own. A compliant Congress, lubricated by contributions from self-dealing lobbyists and multinational corporations, together with a deferential American media have been essential parts of his arsenal.

In the Outlaw Nation that has risen up where the United States once stood, holding humans in offshore cages and denying them fair trials is fine. Kidnapping has become an essential tool of foreign policy. The vice president personally lobbies the Senate to legalize torture, while the secretary of defense decides which medieval torments are acceptable (drowning and freezing are in, disemboweling is out). The secretary of state trots around the globe to forcefully and unequivocally reassure squeamish allies — on whose soil the kidnappings and torture occur — that what they know is happening (and secretly assisted) is not really happening. The U.S. media speaks politely about possible “abuse” and refers delicately to things like “stress positions”.

Torturing enemies in secret is not new for the United States. But the open — even proud– embrace of it is unprecedented. Let us take a look into the dark alleys, behind the iron bars, and into the dungeons to shed some light on the secret actions of the Outlaw Nation.

Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back. pp. 17-19 (c) 2006 Amy Goodman and David Goodman

Anarchist Jurisdictions

Manifest Destiny. The Lost Cause. Rugged Individualism. Social Darwinism. The War to End War. Isolationism. Separate But Equal. American Exceptionalism. The Shining City on the hill. Climate Change Skepticism. The Death Tax. White Supremacy. States’ Rights. Eugenics. Race-neutral color-blindness. Morning in America. Law and Order. Birtherism. Libertarianism. Felon disenfranchisement. Russiagate. Pro-life. Illegal Aliens. Second Amendment solutions. MAGA, man.

Anarchist Jurisdictions [1].

Catchy slogans are great and American as apple pie and The Peculiar Institution. I have nothing against slogans, as slogans. It’s just that so many of them are so clearly stupid and destructive, created by wordsmiths, hired by “ideologues,” to serve what a less measured blogger might call “evil.” Lately we have a new one, created for a lawyered up, all-powerful Unitary Executive who is having walls built around the White House (that the Anarchists and leftist fascists he denounces are paying for) to symbolize his oneness with the people who elected him: Anarchist Jurisdictions.

These are places where teaching students the history of American slavery and our long, sluggish struggle against violent racism and other social evils is done openly. These Anarchist Jurisdictions do not obey the unwritten laws we believe to be sacred and inviolable– the truths we hold to be self-evident and unalienable [2], like our freedom itself. The president has threatened to come down hard on any state or city that is teaching young people about America’s history of racist violence. Anarchist jurisdictions, you understand. Defund the police? Defund your fucking n-word curriculum! Anarchist Jurisdictions!

Or, as Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence would call them Anti-Christ Jurisdictions. These are places where God’s plan for Christendom and mankind and His generous gift of His only Son’s Uniquely Precious Life, slaughtered by (well, you know who) to cleanse the world’s Original Sin (and also our extra-crispy sin) is denigrated. De-NIG-grated. These Anti-Christ Jurisdictions refuse to recognize the divinity and sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Of Jesus Christ! While claiming we are unChristian in our hearts. US!!!

We will bring the fist of justice down hard on these rabid dogs, fight these infidels with every righteous weapon in Jesus Christ’s great arsenal. We will extirpate this sinfulness, starting in every Godless Anarchist, Anti-Christ Jurisdiction we designate!

[1]

We will leave aside, for purposes of this discussion, a small problem with this slogan, an inherent contradiction, if you like.

Jurisdiction is defined as: the practical authority granted to a legal body to administer justice, as defined by the kind of case, and the location of the issue. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels. Wikipedia

[2]

Unalienable describes things, especially rights, that cannot be taken away, denied, or transferred to another person. Unalienable means the same thing as inalienable, which is now the standard term.

source

Trump and Barr’s proof of massive mail-in voting fraud — or not

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her most recent nightly Letter from an American:

He [AG Barr, interviewed on CNN] said that hostile foreign powers could send thousands of mail-in ballots to this year’s election, creating massive voter fraud. When pressed, Barr admitted there was no evidence for such a claim. The U.S. Intelligence Community has no evidence that foreign countries are trying to manipulate mail-in ballots. [Heather, this would be a great place to include a sentence on Republican “evidence” submitted in federal court two weeks ago]

Trump is also continuing his attacks on mail-in votes, insisting they will usher in voter fraud despite their widespread previous use that showed no evidence of fraud, and despite the fact that the president himself votes by mail. [or here]

Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Republican National Committee, in compliance with the federal judge’s order, submitted documentary proof of massive vote by mail fraud (or stated that they had no proof) in Trump’s federal case against the State of Pennsylvania, Trump v. Boockvar. Rather than citing Barr’s admission, when pressed by an interviewer, that there is no evidence for such a claim, why not look at the filing by Plaintiffs in the federal court in Western Pennsylvania? Did they submit evidence or, as the judge ordered, did they state they had none, as the judge ordered them to do if they had none?

Americans are simply not being told anything about this “put up or shut up” moment in a federal lawsuit brought to limit voting by a party that has become used to making incendiary claims without evidence of any kind.

On the bright side, we are told today that Mr. Trump will cut through all the Deep State red tape and cure COVID-19 by November 1, or kill countless Americans trying an untested vaccine or vaccines. Either way, victory Donald!

I need to send the facts of Trump v. Boockvar to Bill Moyers and Janine Jackson at FAIR. How can it be that nobody is reporting on Trump’s non-existent evidence of voter fraud in a federal lawsuit about the immediate (and longer term) future of democracy? WTF?

UNFAIR!

The implausible storyline the president is pushing:

It was so unfair for the mayor of Kenosha to announce that the president was not welcome in his city in the aftermath of a police shooting (in the back, seven times) of an unarmed man getting into a car with his three children, and understandable deadly violence from a peace and president supporting white kid a few nights later. The president!! Not welcome! Unfair for the governor of Wisconsin to second the mayor of Wisconsin’s hostile announcement.

Unfair for people to assume that the police officer who shot the 29 year-old had any kind of bad motive until William Barr fully investigates the shooting — especially the criminal history of the so-called “victim.” Unfair for that decent young white kid Kyle to be attacked by a mob of thugs without having a chance to defend himself. Unfair that the real victims never get the chance to be considered innocent until proven guilty, while the real sick, dangerous, violent criminals are allowed to run free, because of politics and “political correctness.” Unfair that loyal Mike Flynn still faces “justice.”

Unfair that politically motivated hacks keep bringing up the now 185,000 dead Americans allegedly killed by a pandemic that the president has already done everything in anyone’s power to get under control — while “Democrat” governors and mayors of cities like Sodom and Gomorrah whine and try to blame the president, and Jared, and Pence for their own miserable failure. If it’s anybody’s fault, blame Pence! So unfair. Yeah, I know “National Emergency.” Not my fault. Unfair to blame me– it’s the DEMOCRATS, those communist agents who only want to destroy.

Unfair if I lose the upcoming election. There will be a bloodbath if I “lose” and the only way I can is if the election is rigged. If I “lose” the election is rigged. Only a rigged election can cause my hugely successful presidency to be fraudulently ended. Unfair. The Democrats want to make it easier to vote, just so they can point to all those fake ballots and claim they won. Blood on the streets, I promise you, boys and girls, if, God forbid, their evil plan goes forward. Ask my loyal followers, they will not stand for it. Do you think that 600 truck caravan of my supporters pepper spraying and paint-balling Godless traitors in Portland was a joke? He who laughs last, laughs best, losers.

The Extreme Right Never Sleeps — Thousand Year Reich edition

In response to the pandemic, Pennsylvania made it easier for citizens to vote for president without going to polling places in person. In person voting is the preferred method for pandemic deniers to cast their votes, polls show. Pandemic deniers tend to be followers of the president who brilliantly handled the virus already, though his enemies keep snarkily pointing to the 1,000 Americans a day still dying from it, the “six million” who have allegedly been infected to date. A majority of Democratic voters appear to favor mail-in voting. So keeping down the number of votes cast by mail would appear to be the key to Trump winning the 20 electoral college votes of a battleground state he won by a fabulously slim 0.7% mandate in 2016– as well as every other state where it could be close.

Naturally, when they heard Pennsylvania was making it easier for absentee ballots to be cast, Trump and the RNC cried foul, fraud, unconstitutional, illegal, shameful, shameless, bloody murder, coup d’etat etc. They filed a federal lawsuit to stop it on June 29, 2020. You can see the history of this unreported on lawsuit and read all the filings in the case by clicking HERE.

The judge in that case, a Trump appointee named J. Nicholas Ranjan, ordered Plaintiffs to produce evidence of their claims of vote-by-mail fraud or state that they had no evidence. Donald J. Trump for President and the RNC were not deterred, apparently submitting 524 pages of clippings from Breitbart and FOX news, pages containing many accusations of shameless, massive electoral fraud but no proof of anything. After the judge stayed the case until October 5 for Pennsylvania courts to decide state law claims, Trump’s lawyers, on Friday, filed a request for a preliminary injunction– to prevent irreparable harm to the Trump campaign. It reads in part:

Without this relief, Defendants could begin irreversibly commingling potentially illegally cast ballots with other ballots from mid-to-late September 2020. Therefore, to prevent irreparable, constitutional harm to them and their fundamental rights, including without limitation their right to free, fair, and honest elections, and to preserve the ability to obtain an accurate count of the validly cast ballots in the November 3, 3030 General Election if this Court or any other court determines that any such ballots have been illegally cast, Plaintiffs ask this Court to modify the stay in its August 23, 2020 Order (ECF # 410) to provide for limited, preliminary injunctive relief and to modify the stay lifting date from October 5, 2020 to September 14, 2020.

Let’s run a bit of that back, because my “punchline” is embedded in legalese and is easy to miss.

…their right to free, fair, and honest elections, and to preserve the ability to obtain an accurate count of the validly cast ballots in the November 3, 3030 General Election

Trump’s motion was submitted with a glaring typo that refers to an election 1,010 years in the future, indicating either sloppiness in preparing the hurried application for emergency relief — or a more sinister intent to retain power by contesting election results for the next thousand years.

The second theory makes sense, from a poetic, non-evidence based point of view. Hitler and the original Nazis often vowed that their racially pure reign would be “The Thousand Year Reich.” Their administration was in power twelve years before self-destructing, as any regime based on hatred, rage, brutality and mass murder ultimately must destroy itself. Still, there are shades of so many of the original Nazi beliefs and techniques among Mr. Trump’s hard core of personally loyal party of the Leader zealots, haters and scofflaws, that it’s no surprise their lawyers made this Freudian slip.

Now if only the national news media would report on this crucial election case! Drawing attention to the president’s Twitter endorsement of truckloads of armed men driving in a caravan to violently confront protesters in Portland is important — but so is this federal case about how actual votes will actually be legally cast in 2020.

Fascists and their followers are capable of anything, have no shame, and they never sleep; neither can the rest of us, until our imperfect but crucial democracy is protected.