Some very sick and dangerous criminals

Hitler supporters called the democratically elected German officials who signed the punitive armistice that ended the First World War “the November Criminals”, traitorous cowards who stabbed the victorious German army in the back. Criminalizing your opponents is a great way to underscore for your people that this is an existential war between morality and Evil. It did not hurt the German rightwing narrative that some of the November Criminals were Jews, who, you know, no need to say more.

Isn’t that right Adam Schiff?

Seditious Conspiracy, Mr. Eastman?

Right wing legal extremist John Eastman needs to testify about his expansive role in Trump’s wild plan to overturn certified election results and have himself declared the winner of an election he lost by an 8,000,000 vote margin and an Electoral College tally identical to the one he racked up while kicking Crooked Hillary’s ass, while losing by a much more respectable 3,000,000 votes.

Mr. Eastman had put himself on the radar of Mr. Trump’s political aides during the election when Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, had shared on Twitter an article Mr. Eastman had written. The article, in an echo of racist questions stoked by Mr. Trump about where President Barack Obama had been born, questioned whether Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, could legally become president because her parents had not been born in the United States.

Now, confronting election results that showed Mr. Trump lost, one of Mr. Trump’s aides reached out to Mr. Eastman to see whether he could come over to the hotel to help Mr. Trump’s team.

Mr. Eastman said he was only in the room for 15 minutes before being ushered out — but it was long enough, he said, for him to catch Covid-19 there, and he became ill for several weeks. By the time he felt better, it was the beginning of December — when Mr. Trump called to see whether Mr. Eastman could help bring legal action directly before the Supreme Court. In the days that followed, Mr. Eastman filed two briefs with the Supreme Court on Mr. Trump’s behalf, but those efforts quickly failed.

The Lawyer Behind the Memo on How Trump Could Stay in Office https://nyti.ms/3A7XCfE 

This legally sophisticated pettifogging Birther seditionist needs to testify under oath about his role in advising the former president on a supremely brazen last ditch extralegal way to cling to power, and about the intent behind his speech to help whip up the crowd who marched down to the Capitol and lynch the weak, disloyal Mike Pence.

Am I wrong?

Joe Manchin III’s Entitlement Mentality

Conservative  Democrats, yesteryear’s moderate Republicans, the ones almost universally called “centrists”, are concerned that by focusing on the needs of human citizens, rather than the souls of eternal, judicially created corporate persons, the government will create an “entitlement mentality”. 

That’s Joe Manchin III’s line, echoing Reagan’s racist and hugely successful “Welfare Queen” meme.  That’s the rationale behind Manchin’s objection to raising the minimum wage to $15 as well as to funding programs to help struggling Americans, create well-paying jobs to care for other Americans and combat the looming climate catastrophe. 

 
Of course, Manchin III is kind of a cartoon character, a smug, lying rich fuck who lives on a yacht, takes in bushels of toxic polluter cash, and has his son, Joe Manchin IV, manage his coal interests, which net him a cool half a million dollars or so every year while avoiding all conflicts of interest. 

When I say “lying fuck” I am thinking of Joe’s recent claim that he never crunched the numbers, which is only a lie because of the “soft-infrastructure” budget memo he prepared, with a price tag just north of one trillion, and gave to Chuck Schumer at the beginning of this hammering out period for the Build Back Better Act.  Joe now thinks $2,000,000,000,000 over ten years sounds a hell of a lot better than $3,500,000,000,000 over ten years.   He just doesn’t think it’s fair to expect billionaires to pay their workers a living wage, or to force them to pay more than a small percentage of their income– not wealth, God forbid! — which will disincentivize them from creating jobs that pay something like the f$11/hr. that Manchin proposed. A “moderate” compromise with the radical socialist members of his party, who point out that $15 is already a compromise when the actual wage, adjusted for inflation, should be about $24/hr.   


Joe’s not a billionaire, not by a long shot, but like many members of Congress, he is a millionaire.   He’s concerned that taxing the corporations and billionaires that support him so generously will hurt them, will lose him what he is entitled to, with his rich guy’s entitlement mentality.   Those fat checks from Exxon, Chevron, Koch, the rest of ’em, the campaign funds he’s entitled to, that he’s earned by his consistent votes and actions and inactions as chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will dry up and blow away like a fart in the wind if the Coal Baron of West Virginia does not deliver for his peeps, the big donors.   

Same deal with “moderate, centrist” Kyrsten Sinema.  If I was an even more coarse person than I am, I’d be tempted to call them both whores.  I suppose they are.   But they’re entitled to be, because the system pays some whores very well. 

I’ll let Heather Cox Richardson, writing the first draft of history night after night, put Joe Manchin’s compromise offer in context of what our government spends on our behalf to “defend” us and how automatic those trillions over the decades, 39% of our annual budget, have become.

Continue reading →

Rupert Murdoch to Rudy — yer not welcome on FOX, mate

Talk about cold, Rudy “America’s Mayor” Giuliani was informed by officials at FOX, the day before the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, that he was no longer welcome on The Fair and Balanced network. Talk about cold-bloodedness enhanced by brutal timing. I don’t like Rudy, he was an abusive, self-aggrandizing right-wing dick as NYC mayor, he has always been a litigious blowhard, defender of inadvertent police violence, bringer of frivolous lawsuits on behalf of a would-be tyrant, desperate promoter of the deranged lies of his former best friend, the former POTUS. I don’t like anything about Rudy, but, damn, that was cold of FOX, after all the views the demented former prosecutor provided for the network over the years.

Seth Meyers put Rudy’s subsequent bad mood in perspective, highlighting just one example of Rudy going on when he’d have better served himself by keeping his own counsel, and his mouth shut:

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Restraining heartlessness

Dean Joan R.M. Bullock:


Thank you. Well, I will just end with the quote from Martin Luther King, who said, “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.” And what I want us to — as the takeaway — is that whatever the rule is as it relates to the meeting of the minds must be of one set that applies equally to all and that the heartless, those who govern by rules which they would not prescribe for themselves, must be restrained in that situation. And if we do, at least, restrain the heartless– we might not be able to change the minds and the hearts of everyone, but if we can restrain the heartless and have everyone under one set of rules, we will indeed be a people that are equal under the law.

Bullock, Joan; Fain, Constance; Weeden, Larry; and SpearIt (2021) “Panel III Discussion: The U.S. Constitution: Reimagining “We the People” as an Inclusive Construct,” The Bridge: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Legal & Social Policy: Vol. 6 , Article 5. Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern University.

“Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.”

Rules, agreed to and abided by, with enforcement when needed, can restrain heartlessness. A strictly enforced law against lynching may not change the hearts of those who feel most alive as part of a righteous, muscular mob hauling some guilty chickenshit bastard off to be tortured to death, but the certainty of severe punishment for the merciless act can restrain the heartless. That King quote cited by the law school dean begins with a beautiful sentence: It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.

My oldest friend summed up a terrible and common human dilemma: it is humiliating to have to ask for what you should be given freely, but it is also something we must do. The context was close personal relationships in which the other person treats you unfairly, or even with a nonchalant brutality sometimes, instead of giving you the benefit of the doubt and the steady mercy we all require from our loved ones. We grow up with the beautiful idea of unconditional love, being loved simply because we are a soul that deserves love, not because love, like respect, has to be earned. All love, it turns out, has conditions attached. It can only flourish when the humiliation of having to ask for what we need is not constant, doesn’t become a heavier and heavier burden. Love by itself, clearly, is not the answer to every terrible question.

The essence of morality, expressed by the ancient Jewish sage Hillel when he was challenged to state it, is “what is hateful to you, do not unto others.” To me the simple practicality of this statement stands by itself as an indispensable guide to a moral life. We all know, more intimately than almost anything else, what we hate. If we hate it when it is done to us, we should be aware that others would hate it too and refrain from doing it to them.

It has taken me many years, but I finally understand the empathy-related problem with even that insightful expression of the Golden Rule. Its limitation is our human limitation on feeling empathy automatically, unless someone else’s vexation is identical to, or very close to, our own. This is a universal limitation on our powers of effective real-time mercy. What is so hard about the seemingly straightforward “what is hateful to you do not unto others” is that we humans naturally understand things from our personal perspective and are geniuses at framing things so we are blameless.

“No, I wouldn’t hate that, no, you just have a problem with someone making a perfectly reasonable demand,” is much easier to say to an aggrieved loved one than, “you know, now that you’ve explained yourself clearly, without making me feel defensive — thank you for that — I would feel terrible if somebody treated me like I just treated you and I’m truly sorry and will try my best not to do it again. Please let me know whenever I start to do it so I can be more aware of correcting that fault in myself.”

That second answer is for fairy tales, in the society we live in, or only possible between two people who love each other while honestly, openly accepting each other’s faults, a rare thing. Easier to shift the blame off yourself, particularly in a highly competitive culture like the one we live in, where one is expected to defend oneself at all costs.

We have not been raised in a generally cooperative society, we don’t solve mutual problems as a group, (ironic in a democracy, that), but see and are forced to accept unilateralism daily in our own lives, in the workplace, we can hear it reported in the news every day as part of public life. One unmovable person, in the right strategic position, has the power to hold up a solution for an entire family, or, in the case of government, thwart a solution for the unmet needs of millions.

We also don’t have a social support system in America for, or a history of, group problem solving, no respected wise elders available for advising on disputes between loved ones, outside of family court and the ever-popular divorce court. In our combative society we’re rewarded for playing hard and winning, not for daydreaming and refusing to compete.

A glance around, at the boiling hatred that animates so many of the world’s billions right now, shows us that a conversation based on the need for love will not get very far. If you are a Muslim in India, ruled as it is by a hard-line Hindu Nationalist party, you do not expect love, or even respect, from your government. Love is for the immediate family, the tribe, and people everywhere are always ready to fight for that. For outsiders, the Other, all bets are currently off. The question is: how do we best restrain heartlessness?

Seeing how hard it can be between individuals who care about each other to always show kindness, we can multiply the difficulty of mitigating group heartlessness by a million or so. The common, grim view of humanity is that we are all flawed, corrupt, out primarily for ourselves, and that we, if given the power, would fuck others we don’t care about as nonchalantly as those in power routinely do to the powerless. Given this view, held by billions, the best we can shoot for is limiting the heartlessness of those with the power to inflict humiliating conditions on others.

The dean quoted at the top obliquely references Hillel’s Golden Rule when she notes “that the heartless, those who govern by rules which they would not prescribe for themselves, must be restrained in that situation.” A wealthy legislator who lives on a yacht, rakes in a tidy sum from his coal interests, and is well-funded by the nation’s greatest toxic polluters, does not consider himself heartless just because he opposes any law that would hurt his family’s bottom line. He simply loves his damned family and wants to make them wealthier! A woman who campaigned as a progressive, promised to fight for fairness and equality, be an advocate for the oppressed, and then takes $750,000 in campaign donations from pharmaceutical corporations that benefit from the current health insurance laws in the US, does not consider herself heartless, or hypocritical, when she opposes any changes her generous sponsors would not like.

When you ask a proven heartless partisan like Mitch McConnell, as Chuck Schumer did the other day, for a procedural compromise to prevent the scorched earth that McConnell’s threat to filibuster raising the debt ceiling will inevitably produce, you will always get some variation on this: “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will go out of our way to help Democrats conserve their time and energy, so they can resume ramming through partisan socialism as fast as possible.” 

Politics in the USA as usual. The heartless (and ridiculously exaggerated) claim here is that Democrats are attempting to ram through a hateful, partisan, socialist agenda, including securing the ability to continue paying for a debt that McConnell’s party increased by 25% during the four years of a popular, angry, incompetent game show host’s presidency. That McConnell’s claim is incoherent makes it no less compelling in today’s heartless, zero-sum, sound bite-driven polity. I’ve got no solution for this, except to urge strength to the arms of those in power who find themselves in the humiliating position an incoherent set of loudly amplified self-serving lies has placed us all in. Love them or hate them, the heartless must be fought and restrained with everything we have.

Projection 101, The Lawsuit

Now THIS shit is kind of funny.

We all know that sometimes the Orange Polyp flies into a childish rage. When he does he often sues somebody and makes them spend thousands of dollars defending against a frivolous suit. Here in America, contrary to what I learned in law school and while practicing law, there seems to be little consequence for a wealthy litigant who hires an army of lawyers to fight endless frivolous legal battles to bludgeon his enemies. The American Rule says that the other side isn’t going to be able to recoup legal fees, even if the suit gets tossed out of court after a few rounds of expensive legal wrangling, so it’s win-win for a rich guy who uses lawsuits to attack people he hates. The lawyers too seem immune from any consequences for filing and prosecuting their unethical, technically illegal, expensive, process-abusing lawsuits.

Now he is suing the New York Times for publishing true facts about him, based on documents his niece Mary Trump provided them. He is also suing Mary, the niece he ripped off when she was a teenager, after the death of her father, Fred Christ Trump Jr., Fred Christ Trump the first’s one-time favorite and all-around good guy. The Polyp used lifelong medical care for Mary’s disabled infant nephew as leverage in the fight over the contested will.

A week after they went to court, a Trump family company cut off health insurance to Mary Trump, her mother, brother and her brother’s family, including Fred III’s 9-month-old son William, who had suffered from seizure disorders and would be diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Donald Trump acknowledged the termination of the insurance was related to the fight over his father’s will.

“When [Fred III] sued us, we said, ‘Why should we give him medical coverage?’” he told The Daily News at the time. Mary Trump told the newspaper that by contesting the will she was fighting for their father to be recognized. “He existed, he lived, he was their oldest son. And William is my father’s grandson,” she said.

Litigation over the will and the health insurance became the vehicles for the Trumps to hurl insults and raise grievances that had hung in the air for years.

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Mary Trump had this to say about her uncle’s frivolous lawsuit “Donald is a fucking loser.” His lawsuit is a loser too, of course, since, in order to proceed the Polyp must undergo the deposition the NY Times and Mary Trump will demand. Since he is unable to refrain from lying, saying anything under oath, subject to the penalties for perjury, is always a problem for him. Here is the heart of the Polyp’s claim against his niece, his suit accuses the NY Times and:

As Glenn Kirschner put it when reviewing the case:

Let’s face it, if there’s anybody who knows what it’s like to be motivated by a personal vendetta, a desire to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall, it’s the orange one.

watch the video

In Happier Days

Let me first point out that the happiest days of some of our greatest American “winners” are the stuff of nightmares, fleeting breaks from the relentless, high-pressure, anything goes war they wage against everybody. Their happy moments are momentary flushes of “victory” that can never be sustained, since their thirst for dominance is unquenchable, and even their greatest wins only make them more determined to fight and win the next grim battle.

To those who view life as total, endless war, a war where every tactic is on the table and scorching the earth that provides sustenance to those they hate is a great thrill, their happiness consists in the suffering of the hated enemies. If it means millions of their own have to die, so be it, that’s part of the price of being the greatest. Ask Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Jared Kushner.

That said, here are two great Americans, now slightly estranged from each other, though they both serve the same psychopathic worldview, the same impulse to dominate at any cost, the same deranged disregard for everybody else’s troubles. Here are two powerful motherfuckers in “happier” days.

Note their genuine warmth toward each other

How smart well-funded American Nazis use the law

How to get tax exempt status, keep your wealthy donors secret and spend unlimited amounts to promote lies useful to your larger mission — a one party corporate-private state to protect the interests of the super-wealthy in perpetuity. From another excellent investigative report by the great Jane Mayer:

One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based group that, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.

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Speaking of partisans monitoring polling sites and hovering over voters to intimidate them, particularly in states where you can carry a gun without a permit, there are new provisions in the Democratic attempt to save democracy, tweaks to the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill, to give voters a minimum 8 foot distance from hovering, partisan poll watchers. For every step American fascists take, supporters of democracy must devise a counter-measure. All this takes a lot of time, and if we are to have fair elections again in 2022 there is no time to waste protecting the right to vote and the right to have those votes counted by impartial officials.

Of course passing any voter protection law will require a radical change in the hearts of at least ten Senate Republicans, to overcome that tool of “bipartisan compromise” the filibuster. Or, more realistically, it will require carving out a filibuster exception for Voting Rights , as McDonnell did for Supreme Court confirmations when he abolished the filibuster and 60 vote threshold for the confirmation of controversial, ideologically pure Supreme Court justices, members of a right wing legal fraternity chosen by that fraternity for their fidelity to corporate interests, dark money in politics, religious rights and partisan voting shenanigans being fine, unless they INTENTIONALLY target the people most effected by these laws, ON THE BASIS OF RACE. Also, of course, dedicated to outlawing abortion across the country for women without the money to fly to clinics outside the country for their own discreet procedures.

Sheldon Whitehouse has done a series of excellent presentations on the corrosively corrupt power of dark money in judicial appointments, and state takeovers by allies of ALEC (Joe Manchin III is a member of ALEC, naturally). Here is part of it, delivered during the rushed hearings before Amy Coney Barrett was shoved down America’s throat, 52-48, days before the election as Trump planned his insurrection to steal back the soon to be “stolen” election. In these remarks from the Senate floor Whitehouse described the rash of 5-4 Supreme Court decisions, decided on purely partisan lines, 80 cases of pure simple majority 5-4 judicial activism by members of an ideologically pure right wing fraternity, taking their orders from the people who secretly put up $250,000,000 in dark money to get their judges on the federal bench, because… they are making America great again, for the wealthiest and least principled among us.

Whitehouse outlined the main goals of the anonymous billionaire polluters and privilege protectors who fund the lifetime appointments of right wing superstars: unlimited dark money in politics, demean and diminish the civil jury, weaken regulatory agencies, allow the legal suppression of votes for partisan advantage. Now look at the EIGHTY [80] 5-4 partisan decisions made by the Roberts Court and note how consistently those goals were met in every case. The ideological score on those party-line cases is 80-0. A pretty good return on a quarter of a billion dollars in dark, tax-deductible money.

Here is Whitehouse, last week, describing the audition and appointment of Boof Kavanaugh [1], the snarling, lying (“Boof”, according to Kavanaugh, means gassy, not having alcohol poured into your asshole, through a funnel and tube, ‘Devil’s Triangle” is a drinking game, nothing to do with sex between two guys and a woman, as its common meaning would have it, and Team Kavanaugh quickly posted some changes to Wikipedia, from an office in the Capitol building, as Boof was making up the drinking game), super-ambitious partisan who, after he got tearful at his confirmation hearing about his likely defeat, came out in the final round kicking, biting, hissing, gouging and scratching — to preserve his life, which George Soros and liberal Jews, getting revenge on behalf of the Clintons, were trying to destroy with paid lying liars accusing him and an army of them making FBI complaints about his unfitness for office. Thankfully, in spite of American Jesuits and various bar organizations calling for Kavanaugh to withdraw from consideration, Trump ordered the FBI to quickly investigate Kavanaugh VERY CAREFULLY and in a TOP SECRET manner (all tips vetted by Don McGahn) that would ensure nothing bad would be found or revealed about the petulant, entitled candidate for a lifetime of joining his right wing colleagues for a series of unappealable 5-4 Federalist Society rulings.

Thankfully, we are only a month or two away from Biden’s Committee of Legal Experts issuing their report. A report all legal scholars agree will confirm that the Constitution allows Congress to change the number of Supreme Court justices, particularly when preserving the integrity of the judiciary is the goal.

[1]

As for the traumatized woman, Christine Blasey-Ford, who, with nothing whatsoever to gain and everything to lose (and who, along with her family, has paid a steep personal price), testified about Kavanaugh’s drunken, traumatizing behavior, well… she was just part of a calculated, orchestrated, well-financed Clinton-backed cabal of extremists who hate him because he loves God and his family and doesn’t believe any of that godless crap they preach. As for the official Catholic publication in America removing their endorsement of him, or the similar American Bar Association position that, in light of these serious allegations, Boof needed to remove his name from nomination – what don’t you get about George fucking Soros?!!!