Jared wasn’t fucking lying!

For the first few years of his term Trump used his unlimited pardon power sparingly [1], starting with his pardon of pugnacious, racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was found guilty of contempt of court.  Nothing wrong with showing contempt, Trump reasoned, if the judge is a complete fucking asshole who won’t even let you run outdoor concentration camps for dirty brown people in the brutal heat of the desert.   After he lost the election in 2020, in a landslide, Trump’s pardoning power went into overdrive.  Jared wasn’t lying when he said, under oath, that he was too busy pushing pardons to pay much attention to White House counsel whining about proposed illegal actions by the president.  Jared was busy!  You can see the full list of Trump pardons here, including the feverish flurry at the end:

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-donald-j-trump-2017-2021

Did you realize that Trump’s pardon wiped out a combined $51,000,000 in fines and restitution imposed on the infamous scumbag duo of Stone and Manafort?    Nice going, Jared!  

[1] Here’s how Trump compares to other presidents in granting pardons and clemency:

Despite a burst of pardons and commutations in his last hours in office, Donald Trump used his executive clemency power less frequently than nearly every other president since the turn of the 20th century, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Justice Department data.

Trump granted 237 acts of clemency during his four years in the White House, including 143 pardons and 94 commutations. Only two other presidents since 1900 – George W. and George H.W. Bush – granted fewer acts of clemency than Trump.

His predecessor, Barack Obama, granted clemency 1,927 times over the course of eight years in office, the highest total of any president going back to Harry Truman. Obama’s total was skewed heavily toward commutations (1,715) instead of pardons (212).

source
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/22/trump-used-his-clemency-power-sparingly-despite-a-raft-of-late-pardons-and-commutations/

Winning, losing, and the urge to create

Some people love creativity for its own sake, for the exhilarating feeling of making something new in a world that has seen, heard and tasted everything.   Most people in our culture understand creativity in the context of success or failure, the urge to invent being a transactional impulse that can move someone to an exalted place if sold, or a depressing place if creativity is left unmonetized.  If you’re really good at a hobby, most people smile blandly, understanding only what the world considers financial/artistic success, that of the professional. Sometimes they may be moved to say “you should do this professionally!” a high compliment.   

I know I have nothing to say to the world on this score, but I can assure you that the first view of creativity is the better view, in every possible way.  Do what you love, as much as you can and feel grateful for that love and the feeling of fulfillment creativity brings.

Now I think of the ultimate transactional American, former president Donald Trump.   To men like him only domination matters.  You are a sucker and a detestable chump if you let anybody beat you, that’s all there is to it.  His father Fred was a psychopath who amassed a vast fortune.  His mother, Mary, a dirt poor immigrant from a godforsaken Scottish island, married the wealthy psychopath and produced several children.  The oldest boy, Fred Jr. had all the tools, intellectual, social, emotional and otherwise, to do anything he set his mind to. 

Fred Jr. was, according to his little brother Donald, loved by everyone.  He was, Donald said, a great athlete, funny, popular, the first person people would call if they were in trouble, he was an amazing person, everyone liked him, everyone wanted to be friends with him.   In Donald’s version this is what killed his older brother, he was too nice, people fucked him and he drank himself to death.  Talk about a lesson learned.

Dad started paying baby Donald $200,000 dollars a year back in 1947.  By the time little Donald was eight, he was a self-made millionaire.  When Fred Jr., managing a Trump property, did a kind thing for tenants without forcing a long court fight, his father flew into a rage and Fred Jr. opted out of the family business and got a commercial pilot’s license.  Little Donald, a distracted student and schoolyard bully, was eventually sent to a reform school for wealthy juvenile delinquents, after buying a case of switchblades. 

After Fred Jr.’s banishment the far less talented Donald was reluctantly groomed to become the heir of Fred Trump senior’s real estate empire.  Starting with every advantage in the world, except the love of his parents,  Donald launched many closely held businesses where he was the boss, made every decision, the buck stopped with him.  He learned young about the power of unscrupulous lawyers, guys like the satanic Roy Cohn, ready to bend and break the laws to prevail, working on a gigantic retainer that was a business expense.  He learned to stiff people who worked for him, get revenge on anyone who tried to take him to court, he declared bankruptcy over and over.  He refused to lose, even though every business he ever launched, outside of his personal brand, failed.  If you lose, you are a loser and deserve your humiliation.

Do you have any doubt that Donald was at the center of the seven tentacled plot to overturn the results of an election that humiliated him?   His only choice, faced with losing again, was to lash out desperately and enlist a group of blindly ambitious toadies to carry out his crazy plans.  They did so.  Is any of it surprising?   I’m looking forward to the rest of the case against him, laid out as clearly as in the opening hearing the other night.  Laying out that case persuasively, in the face of virulent propaganda, is an act of great, other-directed creativity.

Capitol Police officer/actor lies about Trump’s peaceful protest on primetime broadcast!

It is amazing, even in an ad-driven post-truth culture where “alternative facts” galvanize more passionate support than regular ones, that a carefully orchestrated prime time presentation is necessary to illuminate what most fair-minded Americans, having witnessed it on live TV, already know to be true.   

The violent storming of the Capitol, to stop the peaceful transition of power, was organized and fomented by the former-president in consultation with a small cabal of mad dead-enders like Sydney Powell, Mike Flynn, Rudy, Steve Bannon, the MyPillow CEO, and lesser known key players like John Eastman (former Clarence Thomas law clerk) and Jeffrey Clark (American Eichmann). 

We now learn that the storming was led by actual storm troops, three hundred or so Proud Boys who had been standing back and standing by, went to the Capitol earlier on January 6 to scope out the police lines and finalize a coordinated plan of attack so the locked down Capitol could be stormed by an angry mob.

We now know why there was no parade permit applied for that day (or at least none granted by DC police).   Trump’s secret service had already nixed the big guy’s participation in the protest at the Capitol.   It simply could not be organized, with that huge angry crowd at the Ellipse forming an unstoppable human tsunami if they’d all marched off together behind Trump’s motorcade to “stiffen the spines” of Republicans reluctant to subvert democracy.  In some cases this stiffening of the spine would be accomplished by the extreme means of hanging by the neck until good and rigid.  Not to worry, though, nobody was actually lynched with a rope.   Not to say it wasn’t very, very ugly there in the midst of the storming of the Capitol.

At one point, a police officer who was injured at the Capitol, Caroline Edwards, testified to seeing “officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”

“I can remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a war scene,” she said. “It was something like I had seen out of the movies.”

source

She had been trying to help Officer Brian Sicknick, who later died of “natural causes” (the medical examiner commented that the two strokes Sicknick suffered during the fighting were likely related to the mortal combat he faced), his face white after gassing.  She found his color troubling, since pepper spray produces a red face, but he was white as the sheet of paper she held up. 

Her confusion ended a moment later when she was sprayed in the face with the same mystery gas and she was blinded and fell to the ground again, as Trump’s peaceful supporters peacefully made their way into the Capitol to exercise their sacred First Amendment right to use deadly violence if all else fails. As unimpeachable Clarence Thomas’s Framers had explicitly intended, right in the text of the sacred document.  

Jennifer Rubin on Jan. 6 hearings

These hearings are aimed partially at the 110,000,000 lazy American patriots who, while eligible to vote, declined to exercise the franchise in November 2020.

Republicans have played this game before. They insist that exposing an indefensible deed committed by one of their own “won’t matter” because those who have made up their mind (i.e., themselves) won’t be swayed. (Tautology alert!) The media repeats this talking report to sound “balanced” or sophisticated. Polls after the proceedings show that opinion has not shifted much. Republicans then exult: See, we were right! (Funny how they never voiced this argument regarding the Benghazi hearings.)

Such inane and irrelevant commentary is now coursing through mainstream media today regarding the House select committee’s hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection, even though the hearings involve the fate of our democracy and the worst betrayal by an American president in history. Giving the party responsible for the attack on the Capitol veto power over whether the investigation “matters” is, sadly, what much of the news coverage has come to. The only thing worse is pronouncing investigations into hugely important topics “boring.” Ignore it.

https://wapo.st/3Qf65H0

Disinformation Governance Board shut down by disinformation and online threats

The Nazis, in the years before they seized power, had street thugs in organized groups all over Germany. This informal army was called the SA, the Brownshirts, angry young men who would go into the territory of their political enemies, beat people up, occasionally kill them. This was done to intimidate the public, galvanize support by a show of manly action and give angry young men a meaningful cause to completely justify their rage. After all, if fucking Jews were responsible for all the misery in Germany, undefeated in the World War, but for backstabbing fucking Jewish criminals betraying the victorious German army, why wouldn’t you join an armed gang and go publicly humiliate as many Jews as you can?

Incendiary propaganda and normalized violence go hand in hand. Activated by an infuriating lie, you can join an outraged mob attack that sends dozens of cops to the hospital. Your political leadership will dismiss that violent overrunning of the Capitol as simply protected First Amendment expression, “legitimate political discourse”. Liberals will chafe at this, which is part of the point of saying it, but very few of them will risk having their asses physically kicked over it by maniacs all too happy to kick some liberal ass.

That’s what authoritarians count on — an inflammatory lie repeated on a loop and the willingness of violent followers to take names and kick ass — that and the general public’s not unreasonable fear of being lynched by an angry armed crowd chanting about killing people.

How to halt the free mass expression of hatred, lies and violent rhetoric that lead to these kinds of atrocities is a question that has increasingly bedeviled us here in the Free Market. The right of free people to freely choose to spread hateful lies that lead to violence must be balanced, capitalism’s staunchest defenders insist, against the inherent wisdom of the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, a hand that theorists of capitalism say always turns things to the best possible outcome (in terms of maximizing profit for those who produce the best product at the lowest price). In practical terms it means the right of several obscenely wealthy people to unlimited additional billions in personal wealth,l and great returns for shareholders must be balanced against potentially profit-limiting protection of an abstraction like “democracy”.

Melania Trump’s tireless campaign to rid our society of bullying seems to have been in vain. Bullies are at their mightiest online, hiding their cowardice behind a user name they are free to use threats of violence to intimidate anyone they hate. Bullies are driven by hatred and the humiliation they experienced. So they threatened to kill Christine Blasey Ford, and gave out her home address. She has had to move four times so far (the first time even before she testified credibly against Kavanaugh) as a suddenly bipartisan Senate rushed to protect Supreme Court justices from peaceful protests outside their homes when they restrict voting, allow unlimited dark money in politics, are poised to criminalize abortion (based on centuries’ old theories about women) and are set to turn the time machine back, in every possible way, to the good old pre-Civil Rights era. If you don’t like it, vote us out, bitches, says a spicy Federalist Society justice named Alito.

What is our government doing to protect us all from online violence and hateful rhetoric based on demonstrable lies, propaganda that leads to murder? Here is an excellent, and troubling, interview by Terry Gross, of recently resigned head of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, online disinformation and bullying expert Nina Jankowicz, who, in spite of her expertise and skills, was forced to resign after a short time on the job, after a deluge of online disinformation and cyber-bullying, including threats of violence and disclosure of her personal information to make her an easier target for angry young assholes. An important story that simply never got much traction in the firehouse of reactionary Trump/Bannon/Koch diarrhea we are all constantly being sprayed by.

Fresh Air: How A Disinformation & Harassment Expert Became A Target

On discussion in a zero sum culture

This piece, When Every Conversation Becomes a Game, We All Lose, from a recent New York Times is a very insightful discussion of the difference between a conversation, where both sides listen to and hear each other, and respond reasonably, and the more common American cage match where two adamant rivals are pitted against each other, will do anything to dominate the other, and only one can be declared the “winner”. The second style of discussion is, sadly, the dominant form of discourse in a nation of angry assholes.

Part of American Exceptionalism is, frankly, mass bullying by a handful of the wealthiest white men alive at any given time. Don’t want any more ten year-olds massacred by enraged young white men with legally acquired military assault rifles with high capacity clips? Then shut the fuck up about it, losers… there’s nothing your deadlocked, weak, historically unpopular, “democratic” Congress can do about it, and if they try — FILIBUSTER. It worked to protect slavery, white supremacy, lynching .. so what is your goddamned problem?

terra incognita!!!

Mapmakers used to describe gaps in their knowledge of the world under the phrase terra incognita.  The legend on old maps described uncharted, unimaginable expanses of unknown terrain.  Krakens, dragons and every kind of supremely destructive beast were presumed to inhabit terra incognita.  Prove they didn’t, using the maps of the day, you couldn’t.  Therefore, under the coercive, superstitious logic of the day, these monsters actually lived in the terra incognita, and if you disagreed too conspicuously, you could be bound and publicly set on fire as an instruction to other monster skeptics.

Armed with better and better maps intrepid explorers, funded by kings, queens and wealthy early corporations (Dutch East India Company comes to mind) bravely ventured into these uncharted areas and the maps became more and more complete until there was no corner of the earth (except perhaps deep under the sea) that was truly terra incognita.  Today the greatest expanse of terra incognita is inside the minds and hearts of homo sapiens.

A friend used to have a footer on his emails (which I was unable to find in a pile of emails to quote verbatim, dagnabbit):  be kind, remember that everyone you meet is engaged in a hard battle.   True, and good advice.  The invisible battles waged by everyone are truly terra incognita.  We stumble into this land of other people’s unimaginable terrors at our peril.   When your interior battle crosses mine, watch out.  

I spent two years, every day, writing everything I could think of about my father, a perplexing man of unlimited potential and unlimited defensiveness.   My father was chased every moment of his waking life by what he referred to as the demons we all have inside us.   After writing and conducting a long post-mortem discussion with him for two solid years I came to truly understand his motivations, though I didn’t always agree with them, and this understanding allowed me to truly forgive a destructive character who apologized for the first and only time at the very end of his life, hours before he breathed his last. Still, as well as I grasp the tragedy that was my father, the recesses of my heart are still haunted, as all such recesses are.

Do the same thing my father used to do, glare with implacable hostility, maintain an angry defensive silence, defend yourself in lawyerly and inhumane ways, create and insist on an insane counter-narrative to make me the aggressor, you the victim, and I immediately find myself in that familiar, terrifying, incoherent terra incognita.   We can’t map this terrain because we can’t bear to look at it for more than a second or two at a time.  It overpowers us and seems to limit our options to fight or flight.  It is primitive, terrible, maddening business.   We push it down because there is little else to do about it.  Anyone seemingly not engaged in a hard battle is very good at acting, until you touch a nerve that sets off their fight or flight response.

We live in a culture where our collective terra incognita has been set on fire. Along with actual record wildfires on various continents, and the rage and violence we see and hear in many of our citizens, a fire rages in the hearts of tens of millions of us.   This fire is fed regularly, and much of its most potent food is incoherent poison, things a healthy body would never put into its mouth.  No matter.  Down the hatch it goes, and instead of digestion, fire belches forth, to singe the eyebrows of anyone who dares to ask “Jesus, are you OK?” 

When you breathe fire, of course, you are not OK, not fucking OK at all!  How infuriating is that stupid question when the burning inside you is actually flaming out of your mouth and singeing the face of your interlocutor?   Jesus, am I fucking OK?  Yes, I’m fine, you’re the one who is about to die, asshole… 

Woodward and Bernstein compare Nixon and Trump

Spoiler, it’s not flattering to either of them.

. . . After Election Day, Trump began another, more deadly assault on the electoral process.
“JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” he tweeted on Dec. 30, 2020, from Mar-a-Lago, where he was spending the holidays.
Longtime chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had been in and out of Trump’s favor, picked up the thread in a phone conversation with Trump that same day.
“You’ve got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today,” Bannon told him, according to reporting in Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, “Peril.”

“You’ve got to call Pence off the f—ing ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis,” Bannon said, referring to the vice president, who was vacationing in Vail, Colo.
“We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th,” Bannon said.
If Republicans could cast enough of a shadow on Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, Bannon said, it would be hard for him to govern. Millions of Americans would consider him illegitimate.
“We are going to kill it in the crib. Kill the Biden presidency in the crib,” Bannon said.
Trump’s attack on Biden’s legitimacy included a stream of public statements, legal deceptions and a constant focus on disruption of the Jan. 6 certification in Congress

https://wapo.st/3ay2F1M

More guns is the only solution, says half our Senate

Experts not working for the gun lobby know that there are policies that can reduce this escalating American epidemic of gun killing. Licensing, robust gun removal laws to seize an individual’s guns when there are red flags, banning large capacity magazines, no firearms to anyone under 21, investing heavily in violence interruption programs. To name the top five from the expert in this video.