Archie explains what Meathead means, to Meathead
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxStW5X0_AoDvzj54uP-JPScVU31Y-L0Fl
Archie explains what Meathead means, to Meathead
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxStW5X0_AoDvzj54uP-JPScVU31Y-L0Fl
Members of the angry, frightened mass that become supporters of facist leaders love a totally “in control” guy who shows complete contempt for all of his detractors, and deadly scorn for his enemies. They love that he never backs down, takes no shit and gets terrible, public revenge against anyone who crosses him. They relate to being able to rip off a hated enemy’s head and shit down his neck.
The crowd that becomes followers of a fascist have always been with us, throughout history. They worship what they think of as strength and they admire a person who can take what they want, who is subject to no law but his will. They are, by personality and breeding, defiant authoritarians, filled with contempt for “weakness” and “perversion,” obedient only to the leader’s will. The most violent among them are members of the lynch mob, murderously enraged haters.
A charismatic fascist leader convinces the desperate crowd that he’s one of them. He may be very wealthy, obscenely privileged, enormously powerful, but in his heart, they know in their hearts, he’s one of them. He’s the man! He’s completely relatable, he’s just like us! As F POTUS, channeling Everyman, told the lackey he was about to send an angry mob to lynch “but wouldn’t it be cool to actually have that power?“
The tragedy, of course, is that each of these people who passionately believe in their violent leader, who faithfully hate whoever the leader hates, also loves their family and friends, and many would run into traffic, or dive into a river, to save a toddler, any toddler of any kind, who found herself in deadly peril.
I was doing my laundry the other night, at around 2:00 a.m. when the place is empty and I can use as many dryers as I like to get done quickly. When I walked in a guy was engaged in animated conversation with the long time night porter at the laundromat, a very friendly guy from Mexico who speaks limited English. After getting my laundry in the washing machine I went to sit outside and enjoy the central air conditioning that abused Mother Nature has graciously provided in recent nights.
The talkative guy came out to smoke a cigarette. I made a comment about the smoking section and how in the old days you could smoke a cigarette wherever you wanted to. He turned to me full of an expectation that was palpable. He said “can I talk to you, man? I really need to talk to somebody,” and I nodded, told him it was fine.
He was in turmoil, his wife was about to leave him, because after four years clean and sober, he’d fallen off the wagon, having a few drinks on the third anniversary of his father’s death. He always used to drink with the old man on his birthday.
He told me about his life, and it turned out his wife was also in recovery as he put it. I said maybe that’s why she’s so freaked out about your falling off the wagon, she sees it as a threat to her sobriety, that the same thing could easily happen to her. He was amazed by this simple idea, it seemed the thought had never occurred to him.
His sponsor had told him recently that he needed to start reaching out to people, for their opinions, for their insights, for help. I told him his sponsor sounded like a smart person, that it’s good to get perspectives from people who don’t know you because they have nothing to gain, no axe to grind. I had nothing to gain and no axe grind, and even though he never let me actually finish a thought, he was clearly very relieved that somebody was listening to him carefully and taking the trouble to respond with some thought.
When our clothes were dry and we packed everything up to leave, he thanked me and we exchanged a strong handshake. I told him he was on the right path looking for insight, understanding, that it was a good sign that he was reaching out. I wished him luck and I told him I was confident that he’d be okay, because most people don’t even bother looking for insight in their lives and he had a big leg up on everybody like that.
The experience reminded me again of how important it is to be heard. One of the most effective ways to stomp the living heart out of a person is to subject them to complete silence. They can speak, they can lay their heart bare, but by not saying anything in return you can make it very clear to them that they’re fucking dead to you.
Life or death. When Death finally comes we have nothing to say to it except to go. During our life we can choose the way of life or the way of fucking death. Me, I’ll take life every time.
It turns out, according to a legal expert on Fox Entertainment, that Merrick Garland is the one who has been caught making more than one (two!) inaccurate and misleading false statements! Judge Cannon, on the other hand, has crafted an exceedingly fair (and balanced) way of dealing with these lying fucks at the DOJ and FBI.
I just read a rich appreciation of John Donne, recently published in the New York Times. Of Donne all I know is his poem The Flea, but, oh, what a poem that is.
The author cites Donne for reminding us all, in this world where we all must cease to exist, sometimes on little or no notice, to keep a keen eye on everything that crosses our senses and inspires wonder, or any deep feeling. I found this couplet profound:
“Nothing but man, of all envenomed things,/Doth work upon itself with inborn stings.”
What John Donne Knew About Death Can Teach Us a Lot About Life
The brilliant, well-informed, cheerful Alison Gill has several very popular podcasts. I listen to the Daily Beans everyday, as essential as Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, in my opinion. Allison cuts to the chase, and is never afraid to call b*******, or use the word bullshit, or sometimes fucking bullshit (the Daily Beans is drily billed as “news with swearing”).
Allison does another podcast weekly, Cleanup on Aisle 45, with attorney Andrew Torrez. Torrez does not f****** swear, but he’s very fucking articulate and cut from the same cloth as Allison Gill. They recently analyzed lifetime federal judge Aileen Cannon’s ballsy but batshit crazy decision in Trump v Deep State Cucks. Allison called the episode “Loose Cannon”. You can hear the whole discussion at the link below, it’s fantastic.
https://megaphone.link/SHVA3925994146

I’ll give you the gist of it from notes I took while relistening just now.
Cannon argues in her ruling that even though the Trump defense team did not assert any grounds for the court’s jurisdiction or submit any evidence or sworn statements by anybody, she was asserting equitable jurisdiction over this oddly amateurish, one-off motion, brought specifically to her courtroom in Fort Pierce. Without jurisdiction a judge may not hear a case.
Equitable jurisdiction can only be found where there is some kind of inequity or unfairness that the law cannot otherwise address. The argument for equitable jurisdiction was not made by Trump’s lawyers, Cannon found it based solely on attorney argument at the hearing. This reticence to say anything under oath by lead attorney Jim Trusty, Torrez pointed out, was a clever move (in a corrupt judge’s courtroom) by F POTUS’s lawyers. Since attorney argument during hearings is not subject to the penalties of perjury (as an untruthful sworn court filing would be, and motions for equitable relief always depend on convincing sworn statements.) they left themselves free to throw things against the wall and see what the judge would make stick.
Cannon (who refused amicus briefs from conservatives opposing F POTUS’s motion, unheard of behavior from a judge) makes arguments in her ruling that Trump’s lawyers never raised in their idiosyncratic, frivolous filing. She applies the four Richey factors from a 1975 case where Mr. and Mrs. Richey sued the IRS to get back papers taken in a search. The appeals court in that case sets out what a moving party must show to get equitable relief in federal court in a pre-indictment case against the government.
The first and most important factor the moving party (movant) must show is that the government “displayed a callous disregard for the movant’s constitutional rights” (such as by deliberately not obtaining a legal search warrant prior to the search). Cannon admits this was not the case in the legal FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
But she then decided that factor number two weighed heavily in F POTUS’s favor, that he had a compelling interest in and need for the personal property seized.
Kind of counterfactual when it comes to all of the executive branch documents he was illegally hoarding. It was, of course, not his property.
The third factor is a showing of irreparable injury to the moving party, something else Trump’s lawyers did not allege in their dodgy papers. Allison reads some testimony from his lawyer Jim Trusty, a long time criminal defense attorney from a white shoe Washington DC boutique white collar criminal defense law firm, in response to this question from Cannon. Trusty mumbles and mutters and eventually comes up with a vague, and irrelevant, claim of “institutional harm”. Cannon takes this and runs with it, the harm is to Donald Trump’s reputation and good name, presumably as an honest man, great party leader, past and future president and a lucrative brand.
Lawyers for George W. Bush argued a better, though also asinine, irreparable harm to their client in Bush v Gore — if the recount wasn’t stopped and all the Florida votes were counted their client would suffer the irreparable injury of losing the 2000 presidential election. If you have unethical members of your legal fraternity deciding the case, you have a shot at that kind of bullshit flying. It worked like yer proverbial charm for Dubya and Cheney, with conflicted but unrecused Scalia and Thomas casting the deciding votes in the 5-4 one off ruling.
The fourth factor is whether or not there’s an adequate remedy at law for the grievance, like a regular appeal. In this case, ordinarily Trump would be able to raise Fourth Amendment defenses about the government search only once he was a defendant in a criminal trial. Here judge Cannon is allowing Donald Trump to delay the investigation of the evidence of a likely crime (and how many of these documents he’s already sold to Saudis, his friend in Moscow, and all the highest bidders all around the world is inpossible to guess) as he did in every previous investigation, baseless witch hunts all. He is, as we all know, a serial and habitual obstructer of justice. So Judge Cannon just tried to help him out here a little bit. And who could blame her?
In weighing the equitable interests on both sides, Cannon decided that F POTUS’s squishy irreparable reputational injury claim (made by her in the absence of any irreparable injury asserted by the guy’s experienced white shoe lawyer) outweighed the two interests of the executive branch argued by the DOJ 1)– that the seized papers are needed to conduct an ongoing criminal investigation, and, 2) that they are needed for an urgent National Security harm/threat assessment.
Cannon dismissed the DOJ’s argument that the papers have all already been reviewed by a taint team and that the few attorney/client and personal ones have already been set aside and would never be seen by investigators. She noted in her ruling that the FBI and DOJ are “not always perceived to be impartial” (deep state cucks) and that there is a “perception” that they are both biased against fucking F POTUS.
This argument has the same stink as Lyin’ Ted Cruz’s sneered January 5th claims, citing the perceptions of millions who honestly believed in the rigged, stolen election as the reason that an independent committee had to be appointed to investigate the voter fraud that could not be proved in dozens of federal lawsuits. The perception you understand, the perception, you fucking fuck!
For good measure Cannon also opined that the movant was likely to succeed on the merits of the case — that the goverment illegally took his property. The likelihood of sucess is a heavy factor in the granting of injunctive relief (a legal time out to avoid irreparable harm), even if manifestly, ridiculously untrue in this case (he’d have to prove he was the actual owner of all those government documents owned by the executive branch) but good enough for a Federalist Society lifetime appointee just showing loyalty and gratitude to her unblemished benefactor. Love you, boss!

Designed to make F POTUS’s head explode when he watches it over and over, as I did, I couldn’t help it. Although my head did not explode, I did find it very sadistic. Watermelon head!
Trigger warning: flashing lights and trippy psychedelic effects.
Watermelon head!


Excellent discussion of how DOJ schooled the passionately loyal but unjudicial MAGA judge, at the end of an untenable legal limb with her incoherent and lawless order. Nicely done, by DOJ and by O’Donnell.
If you believe in a democratic society, one where the government works for the people who elected it, not the people who paid to rig it, but the people who consented to be governed by it and cast their votes, you take the job of governing more seriously then a minority party that insists on its right to rule everything.
If your goal is to destroy the administrative state, when you come to power you leave entire agencies defunded and understaffed, run by idiot loyalists, the stupidest in-laws of your most idiotic donor hangers-on get jobs running vast bureaucracies they have no experience with. It’s like those 25-year-old preppy assholes Dubya and Cheney put in charge of Iraq after they destroyed the civil society of Iraq. If your goal is to prove that government is the enemy, it’s very easy to make the government you control a despicable fucking enemy.
Take the IRS for example. For the tax year of 2016 I was told by my accountant that I owed zero tax but that I still technically had to file. A few years later I was forced to pay about $2,500 including two large fines of about $400 each, plus interest that was constantly being compounded. The accountant explained later that when the IRS calculates your tax they are not obliged to give you the standard deduction, and suddenly you owe some tax on an inflated income, which is then subject to penalties and interest.
My long calls to the IRS were unable to resolve this, in part, I learned after an eternity on hold and then on the phone and then on hold again, because the matter had been turned over to a private third party collection company, and, I was told, the IRS no longer had my fucking file. They gave me an 800 number for this private third party collection outfit, I repeated the number back to make sure I had it written down correctly, as was my habit during the years I worked as a lawyer. I called the number for the collection agency. It was a recording at a used car lot. Then I got a bill with another $400 fine on top of it and I finally went online fucking paid $2,500 more than I owed just to be done with these evil toxic incompetent assholes. There was of course no appeals process available.
Then there is a functioning government, where the IRS has its budget restored and comptent administrators in charge. I get a bill supposedly for hundreds in penalties unpaid in a previous year, I think it was 2017. The IRS waited a few years to send me any notice of this so-called debt, all penalties and interest, the tax had been paid in full. I was slow to pay the goddamn thing. In my recent mail I had a check from the IRS, it was a refund from 2019. The check was for $23. I thought that was pretty goddamned paltry, then I opened another letter from the IRS which told me that $443 owed had been deducted from my refund.
How much simpler, more efficient, sensible and humane is that? That’s how the government is supposed to work in a goddamned democracy, you don’t farm things out to fucking corrupt for-profit assholes to do the job badly and more expensively than the government which is designed to do these exact kinds of administrative jobs.
Vote Democrat. These Nazis are not a political party in a democracy anymore. They are, quite distinctly, Nazis. Don’t forget the Nazis didn’t start mass murdering until many years in. They first had to establish a fascist state that would make it possible. Don’t vote for Nazis, ever.