The president defends the murderous crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”), saying, essentially, that MBS lied very strongly, very strongly, when he denied direct involvement in the organized murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen, US resident and strong critic of MBS.  Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate.  

After denying that Khashoggi had been killed at all, in the days after MBS’s brother himself directed the journalist Khasshoggi to the consulate where the murder was promptly carried out, MBS changed the story:  it was Saudi rogues who had illegally entered the Saudi consulate, fifteen of them including an autopsy expert with a bone saw, and accidentally killed and dismembered MBS’s critic in the course of a fist fight ill-advisedly started by the hotheaded, terrorism-linked, middle-aged journalist.    

“He was very strong in his denials, very very strong, like Kavanaugh, ” our clueless, careless president said of his born-wealthy, supremely entitled Saudi counterpart, a soon to be future king and close friend of the president’s billionaire son-in-law, son of a convicted felon billionaire who lost his law license after hiring a prostitute and rigging a motel room with video equipment to blackmail his brother-in-law who was about to testify against him in a federal case.  [1]   

Here is what American intelligence agencies and members of the president’s own party are now saying about the crown prick’s involvement in the murder of a journalist/critic, according to the lying Public Broadcasting Station, PBS ——> clickez ici, mes enfants.

Freedom is on the march.

[1]  Jared Kushner’s aunt really didn’t like that videotape of her husband with the hooker. 

Jerrold Nadler will be the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when the new congress takes its seats in 2019.   He promised, after Kavanaugh was rushed on to the Supreme Court, after displaying a two-year old’s judicial temperament and playing fast and loose with the truth, skating on the edge of perjury with clumsy but effective evasions and other lawyerly dodges, to drag the character-challenged Justice before the judiciary committee for some follow-up questions about his arguably borderline perjury.

I am pretty much out of the letter writing business these days, but I will write to Nadler and remind him of the importance of holding a rash, clearly partisan political hack, now a lifetime member of our highest court, accountable for his behavior during the confirmation process, see if his testimony crossed the line into perjury and take appropriate action to get him off the High Court if he did.  This process is a necessary corrective to provocative partisan abuse of the political system.   There will be much joy in America, among the 60% or so who do not uncritically support everything the current extremist administration is doing, if Kavanaugh is forced back into his former job, or no job.

There was nothing the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could do during the Kavanaugh confirmation circus, they simply didn’t have the votes.  There was nothing the Senators who opposed Kavanaugh could do when he came up for an up or down vote — the president and Mitch McConnell were shoving the most gracelessly aggressive right wing zealot they could find down American’s throat, 51-49, fair is fair,  there wasn’t enough evidence produced at his hearing to convict him in a court of law so he’s cool, his character as a fighter, no matter how ugly it may look to the liberals, is good, democracy in action.   USA!  USA!!!!

But there is an impeachment process for federal judges, including ones who willfully and knowingly lie during their confirmation hearings.  There is a process to determine whether they lied under oath or not.   Let’s get on with the process, Jerry.  

I will include this succulent detail in my letter to him, from the authors of LikeWars, a recent book about the weaponization of social media.   It certainly points out that there was a coordinated effort to support the lying candidate, a right wing conspiracy, if you will, to cover the lying hack’s vulnerable hindquarters.  A link to the full interview is below.  The pertinent section for Nadler and his committee is this:

The same thing played out during the Kavanaugh hearing where he used a term in his – a high school yearbook that was a sexual term. And during his hearing, he says no, no, no. It’s not a sexual term. It’s about a drinking game. The problem for him is that there’s literally no evidence on the entire Internet of that being a drinking game until someone within the House of Representatives – again, everything is out in the open so we can geolocate it to that.

During the middle of the hearing, someone in the House of Representatives goes to create the evidence on Wikipedia to make it seem as if he is telling the truth. So you have this back-and-forth, back-and-forth. And it’s our contention that every single political debate moving forward is going to see these kind of tactics utilized again because both sides not only use them but believe that they were the key to their effort, including in winning.

source

A quick gorgle search reveals that Nadler, and millions of other Americans, already know all about this.  Here is USA Today on the subject.

I know, it’s so easy to dump on poor psychopaths.   There is a presidential order to use tear gas at our southern border to repel asylum seekers and their children trying to exercise a lawful right after fleeing monstrous conditions in their home countries.   Nothing to see here, why go straight to psychopath?   So judgmental!  

It turns out Obama did the same thing, using tear gas at the border dozens of times, when he was, fairly, called Deporter-in-Chief (he set a record) and Trump just increased its use, months after infamously separating children from parents and detaining them in desert tent camps, like the ones pardoned criminal comtemptnor Joe Arpaio used to use [1].  Using tear gas against lawful asylum seekers finally made headlines recently, after an escalating series of hysterical claims by the president about the criminality, terrorism and infectious diseases of this horde of filthy asylum seekers.  

I’m not saying either man is a psychopath, but I’m not saying they’re not!  These American presidents could simply be poor victims too, like the woman gang raped by members of a drug gang in her country and fleeing with her daughters, choking on tear gas near the border of a country promising a better life for victims of persecution, or maybe not!

Everyone can understand, I suppose, that these things are complicated.   The U.S. has supported some very vicious leaders in Latin America (let me not call them psychopaths, some are the finest people, people are saying that, they really are, fine people, the finest people) for many years and looked the other way as Death Squads, working for these “strong men”, murdered political opponents including nuns and priests, even an archbishop (now a saint) [2].   Harsh American drug laws, and a militarized war on mood-altering medicines not synthesized by American pharmaceutical giants, play a large role in much of this deadly violence south of our border.  People are fleeing from those violence and poverty ravaged countries now, toward political asylum in the US.   Complicated!

Psychopaths are often highly intelligent, we hear, known for their cunning.   Intelligence unrestrained by conscience or ethical consideration of any kind is a scary thing.  Which brings us to the most successful and profitable exemplars of this type, the fictive “persons” known as corporations.  Corporations, today, have almost universal influence over everything that happens on this endangered planet.

The examples of corporate barbarity are too many to even summarize here.  Tax subsidies for oil companies, a relatively benign seeming thing, comes to mind.   A highly profitable, outmoded, biosphere destroying way of producing energy– reaping huge tax breaks from a pliable American government, along with record profits.   Let’s be honest though, the oil companies are no worse than the tobacco companies, the fast food/diabetes and heart disease industry, the industrialized hormone-rich meat industry or many other highly lucrative industries that merely provide what people want and need.   I am one judgmental motherfucker– what next, attacking the life-saving pharmaceutical industry?  Maybe I am the psychopath. 

I offer this one recent example and I’m out of here.   I had a robocall from Spectrum, a monopoly provider of internet service in my area, demanding payment of some overdue fees.   When I called back the robot informed me that the minimum payment I had to make was twice my monthly rate.  Thirty minutes on the phone with their representatives and nobody was able to inform me exactly what this giant charge was for.   All they could tell me was that if I didn’t pay every penny of the entire amount my service would be terminated, automatically, by some kind of automated process.

I called back late last night, spoke to the night crew.  Rebecca was very nice.  She pulled up my record and saw at once that half of that charge was for a “trouble call” on October 3.   A technician had been sent to my apartment, after I’d protested that the previous technician, a month earlier, had found no problem with the line or the modem.  “It’s the only thing we can do if your intermittent service continues to be an issue is to send another technician out to you,” I was told.

The $45 was a “valid charge” Rebecca told me.   She said the technician must present me with a work order, inform me of the charge and have me sign.  I told her none of that had happened.   Rebecca told me she couldn’t remove the charge because it was a valid charge.

How was it a valid charge, without notice, without my knowledge, without anyone following the company’s own rules for charging a customer for a repair visit he resisted and was told was his only option?    Here we have the beauty of the corporate “mind” at work.

It’s a valid charge, Rebecca explained, because it is the company’s policy to allow the technician to determine whether the customer should be charged or not.  If there is no problem found the technician has the discretion to assess the $45 fee.

The technician, I told her, had not informed me of any fee, only warning me that a future visit might include a fee and that I should be careful and check in advance to find out if I was going to be billed for the visit.

“It’s a valid fee,” said Rebecca pleasantly.  “You don’t have a contract, but look at the terms and conditions on-line.  You would not be receiving internet service if you had not agreed to the terms and conditions.  It is set out in the terms and conditions as a valid charge.”

Each technician visit, she informed me, costs the company about $200.  I told her the visit lasted fifteen minutes and it was hard to believe the technicians, even the scab technicians the company currently employs after the CEO refused to negotiate with the union, made anything like $800 an hour.   She agreed that they probably made less, and I realized she was talking for the recording of our call, playing to her masters who would hear the tape if there was any question about what this pain-in-the-ass customer had said and whether she’d been loyal to the company bottom line.

I told her that the 5,000 words of legalize in the terms and conditions, a document nobody reads as they agree to the take it or leave it terms, used to be known as a ‘contract of adhesion’.   That is a one-sided “take it or leave it” deal giving all rights to one party, the more powerful one, and no choice to the other party.  Thirty years ago courts could still invalidate contracts of adhesion.  Now it is simply the way every corporate “agreement” is written and the courts don’t care any more.   John Roberts, Chief Justice of our Supreme Court, was a trailblazing genius of corporate law who innovated many of the devilish now perfectly legal details of our new corporate age.

I told Rebecca I was disputing the charge.  Rebecca told me that I could not dispute a valid charge.  I asked her if she understood how maddening that circular logic was.   She told me she was sorry that I feel that way.   I told her I was aware that we were being recorded, that she had to be careful about what she said, but that she would feel exactly the way I feel if the same thing was done to her.  I laid it out concisely, with extreme patience.  In the end she admitted she would probably feel exactly the same way I did, which gave me the only victory I would have in that call.

Alex, the supervisor, called me a half hour later.   He explained that because this charge had been assessed by “technical” that he had no ability to override it since he worked in “billing”.   You dig the genius of this?  Same company, different walled off areas of the corporate brain.  Alex and I spoke for a long while, and he was even more sympathetic than Rebecca.  He could see the two service calls, and the credits for intermittent internet service before and after each call.  

Alex offered his theory for why internet service in New York City sucks so much, and it made some sense to me.  He lives in suburban Colorado, gets his internet from Comcast and because of the lack of density and interference, he rarely experiences the intermittent outages that plague customers in congested places like New York City.  He could not have been nicer, more sympathetic, more conversational.   But as for the question of the arguably unfair valid charge, he was, unfortunately, powerless to remove the charge.

I told him I was disputing it, but that I was prepared to pay the rest of my outstanding bill to avoid an interruption in service.   He told me not to bother, if every penny of every valid charge is not paid, literally down to the penny, the service will be automatically cut off at a date certain, a certain number of days after the past due time bomb goes off and the automated disconnect signal goes out.

He told me he could “escalate” my challenge of the charge by emailing the technician, a scab named Stan (who left me his cell phone number), Stan’s supervisor, and the supervisor one level above the technician’s supervisor.   They would have to produce a work order, signed by me, that showed I’d been informed of the valid charge.  It could take a week or so to get it sorted out, he said he’d call me between 8 and 10 pm on Monday.  I thanked him.   Alex asked if I had any other questions.

I did, and for once I got a quick, straight answer that made complete sense.  My service will be automatically cut off at 4 a.m. on December 14th if all valid charges are not paid before then.  

I’d better renew my health insurance before that date, is all I can say.

Fun fact:  

Charter Communications (Spectrum)  chairman and CEO Thomas Rutledge received compensation worth $7.8 million in 2017, following his $98.5 million take for 2016 and $16.4 million in 2015, according to a regulatory filing.  (this comes straight off a google search).

The smiling sociopath’s $98,500,000 in 2016 was the top pay for an American CEO in 2016, more than twice the runner-up’s, Este Lauder CEO who took in only $48,000,000.

And a handsome rascal too!  

Would you negotiate with a striking technician’s union, determined to keep all of their health plan benefits, if you were as rich and handsome as Tom?   I think not!  No fucking way!

USA!   USA!!!!

[1]   from today’s Democracy Now! report:

As the Trump administration continues to defend firing tear gas into crowds of asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, we spend the rest of the hour looking at the history of tear gas, which is banned in warfare but legal for federal authorities and police to turn on civilians. Border authorities’ use of tear gas has spiked under the Trump administration, with the agency’s own data revealing it has deployed tear gas over two dozen times this year alone. Customs and Border Protection told Newsweek Tuesday it began using tear gas under the Obama administration in 2010 and has released the substance 126 times since the year 2012. The agency’s use of tear gas has now reached a seven-year record high under the Trump administration. On Monday, President Trump was asked about the tear-gassing of women and children migrants.

REPORTER: How did you feel when you saw the images of the women and children running from the tear gas yesterday?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Well I do say, why are they there? I mean, I have to start off—first of all, the tear gas is a very minor form of the tear gas itself. It’s very safe. The ones that were suffering to a certain extent were the people that were putting it out there.

source

[2] from the New Yorker article linked above:

In December of 1980, less than a year after Romero’s death, members of the National Guard raped and killed three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker. Over the course of the civil war, more than a dozen priests were murdered.

This is what it comes down to in the great state of Mississippi which has NEVER elected any sort of racist to Congress, going back to the days of slavery (and what if they did?  what if they did?!).   They are having a run-off election tomorrow.  

I went to have a look at the predictions for that vote, where a black Democratic candidate, Mike Espy [1] is running in a tight race with short-time incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, appointed by Mississippi’s governor in April 2018 when Mississippi’s long-serving senator, 81 year-old Thad Cochran [2]  left the job due to health concerns.   This popped up in the middle of the first page of search results:

read all about it

The president, who won Mississippi by a comfortable margin of almost 20%, is down there whipping up enthusiasm for his candidate at big rallies in Biloxi and Tupelo.   He has touted Hyde-Smith’s loyal support for all his initiatives at the rallies and made this powerful argument in an ad Hyde-Smith’s campaign is running:

“If Democrats get control, they will raise your taxes, flood your streets with criminal aliens, weaken our military, outlaw private health insurance and replace freedom with socialism,” Trump says in an ad paid for by Hyde-Smith and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Jeez, what a nightmare!

Let the best ad team win!  [3]

[1]  from Mike Espy’s Wikipedia page (the Republican ad campaign is hammering corruption charges against Espy):

Corruption trial and acquittal[edit]

Espy trial[edit]

On August 27, 1997, Espy was indicted on charges of receiving improper gifts, including sports tickets, lodging, and airfare. Espy refused to plea bargain and on December 2, 1998, he was acquitted of all 30 criminal charges in the trial. Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz presented more than 70 witnesses during the trial and spent more than $20 million preparing and trying the case.^[28]

During testimony before the jury, the prosecution’s star witness told Smaltz: “God knows, if I had $30 million, I could find dirt on you, sir.”^[29] During the trial, Smaltz protested that the defense was injecting race into the trial in what he saw as an appeal to a mostly black jury.

The defense rested without calling any witnesses, arguing simply that the prosecution had not proved its case. The jury deliberated less than 10 hours before finding Espy not guilty on all charges. One of the jurors said, “This was the weakest, most bogus thing I ever saw. I can’t believe Mr. Smaltz ever brought this to trial.” At least four other jurors echoed this view, though less pointedly.^[30] Barbara Bisoni, the only white juror, said Smaltz’s case “had holes” and that race never entered into the deliberations.^[30]

[2]  from the Thad Cochran Wikipedia page:

Anti-lynching law[edit]

On June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate formally apologized for its failure to enact a federal anti-lynching law in the early 20th century, “when it was most needed”. The resolution was passed on a voice vote with 80 Senators cosponsoring. Cochran and fellow Mississippian Trent Lott were among the 20 Senators who did not join as cosponsors.^[30] Cochran said, “I’m not in the business of apologizing for what someone else did or didn’t do. I deplore and regret that lynching occurred and that those committing them weren’t punished, but I’m not culpable.”^[31]

[3]  In Mississippi federal elections race lines are rarely crossed (no black senator from there since Reconstruction) in a state where blacks make up 37% of the population (highest percentage in the country).   The black candidate in the recent Senate election got more than 90% of the black vote, the white candidate got about 85% of the white vote.   The key, for white politicians in Mississippi, is making sure whites get out to vote.   The opposite goes for black candidates.   Nothing to see here!

The president used a throwaway line in his latest comment on the Saudi murder, in its consulate, of a Saudi journalist living in America and writing for a prestigious American newspaper, suggesting the murdered man had ties to terrorism.  POTUS engaged in his usual double-speak, claiming once again that it’s possible we will never know what happened to Jamal Khashoggi or who ordered his murder and dismemberment, no matter what the CIA learns through it’s now more than month-long investigation.  The CIA investigation indicates that Muhammad Bin Salman likely had something to do with this “tragedy”, and he very well might, OR, he might not!     

POTUS mentioned, though he didn’t say this is why the journalist deserved to be murdered, that he’d heard the dead man, Khashoggi, had been considered by the Saudis an enemy of the state and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.   It’s possible, you dig, that he was a terrorist who advocated the murder of millions, universal Sharia law and that he hated our freedom, I’m just saying.  It’s also possible he left the consulate or started a fatal fistfight with the hit team sent to kill him and many other things are also possible and, shit, we’ll never know.   (And, it goes without saying, once more, that whatever happened to Khashoggi has nothing to do with the brutal Saudi war on the civilians of Yemen and the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis, as the world’s lying press calls it.)

My understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood (the above wikipedia link aside) is that it’s a militant fundamentalist organization that came of age in the prisons of Egypt where secular dictators imprisoned and tortured members of the radical religious right.   The Muslim Brotherhood, apparently founded in 1928, whose membership included  the military officers who overthrew Egypt’s last king in 1952, produced at least one influential writer and philosopher, Sayyyid Kutb.  I remember learning about Kutb after 9/11, though I see no mention of him in the wiki on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Kutb had apparently been horrified, when he was here as a college student after World War Two. at the materialistic, over-sexed consumer culture of America.     Returning to Egypt, he devoted himself to religious interpretation and making a political philosophy out of fundamentalist Islam.   His jihad was now to protect pious Muslims from this increasingly global corruption.    His books were influential and he was a close adviser to Gamal Abdel Nasser after Nasser took power in a military coup.  He wound up sentenced to death for his alleged role in a plot to overthrow Egyptian dictator/president Nasser, whose repeated high government job offers he had refused.  Nasser commuted Kutb’s sentence, leaving him in prison.  Years later Kutb was released, soon after arrested again, tried and hanged, this time for alleged involvement in another plot to assassinate Nasser.  The author of more than twenty influential books, Kutb wound up a martyr.

Among those influenced by Sayyid Kutb was the Egyptian political dissenter, Muslim Brotherhood member and physician Ayman Al-Zawahiri.   Al-Zawahiri also spent time in Egyptian prisons, was also tortured, was also a long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood.   Later he would be second in command at Al Q’eada, sitting at the right hand of  Osama Bin Laden. [1]  He is assumed to be alive and currently commanding Al Q’eada, whose brand has taken a serious market-share hit since the killing of rock star terrorist OBL.

To my knowledge President schitt-breath is unaware of even this much history of the Islamist organization.   For his purposes it is enough to know it sounds bad, Muslim Brotherhood.   It sounds far worse than an inexperienced young medieval monarch rashly ordering the killing and dismembering of a political critic he hated — in his own consulate.  In spite of a long history of financial support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia now hates the Muslim Brotherhood [2].   Put it like this “Muslim Brotherhood” versus $450,000,000,000 from the Saudis for munitions, plus over ten million well-paying American jobs with full pension and benefits, unlimited calorie-free full-fat ice cream and plenty of great sex on demand.  USA!    USA!!!!!

 [1]  Recall the confusion on the lips of every talking head in America when they reported that Obama had executed Osama bin Laden, almost every one of them bungling the tongue-twister, interchanging Osama Obama Osama, Oh, mama!

[2] wikipedia:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia helped the Brotherhood financially for “over half a century”,^[23][200] but the two became estranged during the Gulf War, and enemies after the election of Mohamed Morsi. Inside the kingdom, before the crushing of the Egyptian MB, the Brotherhood was called a group whose “many quiet supporters” made it “one of the few potential threats” to the royal family’s control.^[201]

There is, of course, no law, rule, custom or practice requiring senate confirmation of special counsel investigating possible fraud, corruption and other high crimes and misdemeanors.   The senate has nothing to do with it, schitt-head.  

If there was such a law, lifelong Republican Robert Mueller would have obviously been voted down 51-49 as would any so called “independent” counsel who had not given a public oath of impartiality and personal loyalty to the man being investigated (as the original framers of the constitution clearly intended it).  

The attacked representative parried the tweet neatly:

By the way, according to the president, the jury is still out on whether Saudi crown prince Muhammad Bin Salman ordered the execution of a journalist he hated.  The CIA rushed to judgment, recently concluding, based on all available evidence, that the order came from him.  After only six weeks!   SAD!   Presumption of evidence and schitt!!!!