Federal death row inmate Lisa Montgomery might be allowed to die a natural death

Talk about a random twist of fate staying the executioner’s ax — Lisa Montgomery, the first female slated for execution by federal authorities since, correct me if I’m wrong, Roy Cohn orchestrated the electrocution of Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 (though, see [1]) may get to live the rest of her tormented life in prison. She will not be executed as Trump originally planned, days before Biden’s inauguration, because her lawyers came down with COVID-19 and could not appear to make arguments to extend her stay of execution. A simple twist of fate may save her miserable life of solitary confinement in prison.

A judge has delayed the execution of Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row. Montgomery suffers from mental illness caused by a life of abuse, and her lawyers are asking for clemency. She was convicted for the gruesome 2004 murder of a pregnant woman. Her execution this month was delayed after her lawyers got COVID-19; a D.C. district judge ruled Thursday the Justice Department can’t move ahead with a January 12 execution because the stay order will still be in place. Advocates hope Montgomery’s life will be spared by Joe Biden, who has vowed to abolish the federal death penalty.

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Trump and his shameless enabler Bill Barr have executed more federal prisoners in the last few months than have been killed by the federal government in the last fifty years. The last lame duck president to carry out an execution was former executioner Grover Cleveland, in January 1889 [2]. Trump clearly loves the power to order the death of black men, as he pardons unrepentant war criminals, private (Blackwater) and military (disgraced, sadistic SEAL Eddie Gallagher) and corrupt colleagues. Trump and uber-Catholic Bill Barr were determined to kill a woman too, the only female federal death row inmate, come hell or high water.

The woman in question committed a gristly murder in 2004. She is administered a daily cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs. Never mind any of the details, Trump was determined to execute this crazy lady — whether by lethal injection, electric chair, firing squad, hanging, poison gas or any other means necessary (Barr actually changed the department’s guidelines for state executions to include those other ways of killing, in case certain mandated deadly chemicals were not available for lethal injection).

One can only hope for, and agitate for, justice to be applied to these wicked men. Justice is the only remedy for wickedness, though the interests of justice are disregarded with sickening regularity when it comes to wealthy, powerful, white men.

[1]

The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War.[48] Ethel was the last female convict to be electrocuted in the state of New York and also the first of the only two women executed by the Federal government in the 20th century, the other one being Bonnie Brown, also executed in 1953.

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[2]

The number was updated to five, after the article quoted below came out, four are already dead, see THIS:

The Department of Justice has scheduled three federal executions during the administration’s lame-duck period: Orlando Hall on November 19, Lisa Montgomery on December 8, and Brandon Bernard on December 10. The last time the U.S. government carried out an execution between a presidential election and the inauguration of the new president for a federal crime was nearly 132 years ago, on January 25, 1889, when the outgoing administration of Grover Cleveland executed Richard Smith, a Choctaw Indian, for a murder on tribal land in Arkansas.

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The power of honest history

The power of accurate, clearly written history writing is not the same kind of power as that threatening blunderbuss-style of power wielded by an unaccountable maniac with a childish view of life and a sadist’s keen delight in the suffering of others, but it is powerful. It cannot literally take food out of the mouths of hungry children, or a week’s pay away from their parents, as can randomly flexed presidential power when POTUS pouts and golfs while protesting the unfairness of things like the proposed name changes of military bases now honoring traitorous Confederate generals, not that it would want to. A president so inclined can mandate a national curriculum of denial of history, a historian with a conscience writes serving the opposite inclination.

A detailed, honestly told history is a powerful force in the world. Here is a prime example of it, written last night by Heather Cox Richardson, who ends with this inspiring observation:

One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.

But it is never too late to change the future.

Read the rest of her powerful piece here.

A friend sent me the recent NY Times business piece about the historian’s amazing and well-earned viral internet success and her sudden wealth. The reason so many subscribe to her nightly newsletter is that she has emerged as a clear, mostly calm voice, giving the perspective of history to shed light on this horrific moment in time. Forwarding this piece to my friend last night all I could add was “WOW”. All he needed to write was “Agree”. A short read, well worth your time, particularly if you think history is a bunch of boring and irrelevant busy-work with no relevance to our current predicaments and no clues to offer about a way to a better future.

Why Be Normal?

This is something of a trick question, obviously.

Years ago, during a visit to my parents after they retired and moved to Florida, I bought a bumper sticker, legible from five car lengths back, that read:

WHY BE NORMAL?

On my way out for a walk that evening, I put it on the back bumper of my parents’ Cadillac. It remained there until my father noticed it, a day or two later, and it was gone.

To suggest that being normal is even a question, well, it’s simply not normal. The normal thing is to want to be normal, I suppose, to do what a normal person normally does, to want a normal life. The larger question, of course, is why be philosophical? Why inquire?

It was not normal, before recent years, for an incumbent (or even retired) president to publicly lie over 25,000 times in a four year span. Now we’re used to it, you know, everybody lies, this guy is just really, really driven to lie, so what? The deadly, massively destructive storms that now visit nations around the world regularly, while uncommon, even unthinkable two decades ago, are now pretty much normal. Friends communicating exclusively by texted initials like LOL, ROTFLMAO!, etc. is now, like, totally normal (even if these two are relics). We have a bias toward getting used to what happens regularly, quickly considering it the new normal. The first time we are confronted with the unfamiliar might be a shock, even feel like a moral reckoning, the fifteenth, certainly the hundredth, time is pretty normal.

This is what we mean when we speak of battle-hardened troops. It’s normal for a person to hesitate to kill another person, until you are in a place where your best friend’s head gets blown off by a deadly enemy. You see the ugly bastard swing his gun toward you and you blow his fucking head off. It’s him or you. The first time you blow somebody’s head off you might vomit, have nightmares about it. After a few times, well, shit happens, you simply have to get used to it. It becomes fairly normal. Eventually you can even fire into a crowd, fuck it, these fucking people are not even people. It’s normal human behavior, has been from the dawn of the homo sapiens epoch.

So it was when one of the psychiatrists who interviewed normal German bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann before his trial for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem. Asked if Eichmann was “normal” one court appointed shrink said “more normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him.” [1] Astute readers of this blahg had to know a reference to Nazis was on the way, at the same time, the normal Nazi is one of the best examples of what I’m talking about.

We have Normal (standard behavior based on the norms of the group — sane) on one side and Abnormal (extraordinary, exceptional, out of the ordinary — insane) on the other side, the side where monsters, saints and heroes live. As I have written here many times — we are always able to justify our actions as good and morally correct. This is a cardinal characteristic of the “wise ape”. If I cut your head off it’s because you made me do it, you sick bastard. That’s normal.

Normal for 126 sitting members of the House of Representatives to join the president’s Texas friend’s baseless lawsuit seeking to invalidate the votes in each swing state that Trump lost in 2020. They just argued, you know, that the Supreme Court should throw out those millions of votes because they deprived the majority in the great state of Texas of their right to the president they chose. Nothing not normal about sucking up to a powerful, famously vindictive boss who rules by fear and intimidation and is also a sadist. Normal, also, for the well-funded elected representatives of the rest of us to do nothing about these 126 democracy subverting lickspittles.

Decency, of course, is normal too. Kindness to others, perfectly normal. Mercy, normal. Except when these things are weaponized, which is now normal too. What a useless idea “normal” is. I was reminded of that by this headline in the New York Times.

Now there is absolutely no reason to think that Mr. Trump was one of these outliers, I’m not saying it or even suggesting it. In defense of a man who’s hard to defend, he was pretty much the same before and after his dramatic brush with COVID-19 (and Vegas oddsmakers are at odds over whether the Liar-in-Chief actually ever was infected with the novel coronavirus before his heroic quick “recovery”). Mental illness is a whole other topic, when we start throwing around words like “psychotic”… hoo boy, that’s not normal. Not normal at all!!!

[1] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem p. 25

Come on, man!

from today’s NY Times

United States

population: 328.2 million (2019) per capita income: $53,240

India

population: 1.353 billion (2018) per capita income: $1,900

Brazil

population: 209.5 million (2018) per capita income: $10,400

incidence of infection:

USA — one in 17 Americans (more than a 5% infection rate, and steadily rising)

India — one in 132 Indians (less than 1%)

Brazil — one in 156 Brazilians (less than 1%)

As we can plainly see, the country with the greatest wealth and the most liberty, once again leads the world in freedom, justice, health, safety, patriotism, nationalism and everything of value. USA! USA!!! And if you don’t believe it — go defund yourself!!! “Facts”? Go fact check yourself, pencil neck!!!

Motherfucker publicly sodomizes stinking skeleton of his long-dead orangutan mother

One should not be too opinionated these days. These are very angry and stressful times. We all know that Mr. Trump is an unusual kind of president, the kind of person who seems to behave irrationally as he instinctively serves the powerful forces that have served him all of his life. He’s not as stupid as he seems, perhaps, just a malignant narcissist. A spoiled two-year old who never experienced real affection and so is incapable of feeling it, by the looks of it. Each of us have our opinions of this greatest and most brilliant, handsome and well-endowed president in American history.

I really should keep my foul-mouthed opinions to myself. We all need to be more understanding. After all, the president’s story is like the story of many of us here in our nation of immigrants. Trump’s mother started life as what is often called White Trash, dirt poor from a benighted part of Scotland. She was transformed into a glamorous queen by marriage to a very wealthy second generation German-American man.

Mary Anne McLeod Trump [1] may or may not have been a loving woman, the odds are she was challenged to be a nurturing mother to her brood of five, little Donald being number four. He was apparently a handful, disrespectful to her, unruly, constantly acting out, impossible to manage. One can’t blame a mother for having a hard time with such a child, I never held my mother’s difficulties raising someone like me against her. That’s not really true, of course, but it sounds generous — I held it against her for years. As an adult of advanced years I finally learned not to hold my mother’s human limitations against her. Donald and his mother, perhaps not so much. Not to judge, God forbid!

But what exactly brings forth this sickeningly opinionated title I’ve put on top of this post? Well, after a delay of just a little more than half a year, during a terrifying, out of control pandemic, Mitch McConnell allowed a watered down version of bipartisan bill to relieve some of the suffering of the majority of Americans to become a bipartisan law to help many of the eight million Americans who have fallen into official poverty during this Act of God pandemic, and giving aid to millions more who are hungry and in imminent danger of homelessness. Democrats and Republicans agreed to the $900,000,000,000 COVID-19 relief bill right before Christmas. That was part of a $2.3 trillion Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. It was approved and passed on to the president on Christmas Eve, because, you know, no point waiting until the very last minute.

Then my man Fuckface refused to sign it as he headed to Florida for golfing and plotting a self-coup. Happy Christmas, traitors! If Trump doesn’t sign it within ten days (and this Congress ends on January 3) he’s run out the clock with a “pocket veto” and forced the third U.S. government shutdown in three tries (he didn’t get a chance to shut it down in 2017, but he did in 2018 and 2019 [2] ). Here’s Heather Cox Richardson, to explain:

Trump’s supporters are urging him to “pocket veto” the Consolidated Appropriations Act, taking advantage of a weird option at the end of a congressional session. Normally, a president has ten days, not including Sunday, to review and sign a bill. During a congressional session, if the president doesn’t sign a bill within ten days, it becomes a law. But if the congressional session ends within ten days, the bill does not become a law. This is known as a pocket veto. The 116th Congress—this one—officially ends at noon on January 3. If Trump got the bill on December 24, and all indications are that he did, the ten-day window ends on January 4. So, he could, in fact, run out the clock in such a way that Congress could not override his veto.

source

Now we assume Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was Trump’s mother, he looks a hell of a lot like her, including his hairdo.

Comedian Bill Maher famously offered to pay a few million to Trump’s favorite charity if Donald could prove his mother was not an orangutan. Nothing in nature is that color, besides an orangutan, said Maher. His offer was a parody of Trump’s famous public challenge to Barack Obama to pull his pants down, bend over and show America everything about his high school and college grades, his SAT and LSAT scores, his “long form” birth certificate and all the rest, daring him to disprove Trump’s many lies about him.

The famously thin-skinned Trump saw no humor in Maher’s disrespectful and disgusting parody [3] and had lawyers sue Maher for “breach of contract” (since as a public figure he could not win a slander or libel suit over parody, as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988) — see FN 2) when Trump produced HIS birth certificate — proving his mother was homo sapiens, SO THERE! — and Maher didn’t pay up on his joke offer.

The case cost Maher/HBO a pile of cash, no doubt, they had to respond to Trump’s baseless lawsuit or lose by default, but Trump’s lawyers did their job, the enraged threat became real, even if they wound up quietly withdrawing the pathetic claim after it had its effect in showing Trump takes no shit from anybody about anything, including the ugly statement that his mother who was completely a human being, was some kind of smelly great ape. He’d do the same thing, dozens of times, after losing the election he claims was stolen from him, almost two months ago.

So, fast forward a decade or so, to the day after Christmas of an historically hellish year, Donald Trump orders the exhumation of the skeleton of his dear mother, has her brought to Mar-a-Largo, and begins furiously violating her. “You did this to me, you fucking heartless bitch!” he sobs over and over, violently taking the pile of bones from behind, as is every motherfucker’s prerogative. There’s no such thing as “consent” or “rape” when you own the thing you are having sex with — the same goes for the dead, they lose their legal right to complain, even of necrophilia.

As for the millions now in real danger of continued hunger, increased terror and winter homelessness the week after Christmas, (and never forget, Trump made wishing each other “Merry Christmas” legal again in the United States after years of illegal rule by sick and dangerous Democrat miscegenist pedophile cannibals) — well, shit happens. Merry Christmas, Sir, they say to him now, the people in his bunker.

All he really wants at the moment is a little privacy, to keep hammering at the skeleton of his sainted, once-human mother.

[1]

Mary Anne Trump was a Scottish-American philanthropist known for being the mother of Donald Trump and the wife of real-estate developer Fred Trump. Born in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, she emigrated to the United States in 1930 and became a naturalized citizen in March 1942. Wikipedia

[2]

There have only been a handful of full federal government shutdowns, most lasting only a short time. Most of these were hardline leverage by the Opposition party. Trump has shut his own government down when it refuses to do things like fund THE WALL. Trump holds the all-time, unlikely to be broken record for longest temper tantrum-driven shutdown, 35 days. Here is the chart:

ShutdownDaysAgencies
affected		Employees
furloughed		Cost to
government		PresidentRefs
19801FTC only1,600$700,000Carter[29][30]
19811241,000$80–90 millionReagan[31]
19841 (approx. 4 hrs.)500,000$65 million[31]
19861 (approx. 4 hrs.)all500,000$62.2 million[31]
19903all2,800$2.57 millionH.W. Bush[32]
Nov 19955some800,000$400 millionClinton[10][33]
1995–199621some284,000
201316all800,000$2.1 billionObama[34][35]
Jan 20183all692,900Trump[36]
2018–1935some380,000$5 billion[37][38]
source

[3]

Which, it must be said, did not begin to compare, in sheer disgustingness with Larry Flynnt’s truly revolting parody of a risqué Campari ad, asking Jerry Falwell about his “first time”. The parody ad was even disgusting to me, which is saying a lot. Let me see if I can find it online for you, judge for yourself (lest ye be judged):

read about Falwell’s lawsuit and the famous Supreme Court ruling, HERE

Musical Interlude

This early pandemic recording (May 2020) seems a good Christmas offering, something about Tony Bennett, the singer who made this lush pop tune popular back in the Eisenhower days, even before my time. [1]

To me this tune is a great example of a great arrangement, you really can’t do the proper accompaniment without playing the two main parts. The chords are basic and provide a pleasing harmony to the melody. But it’s the line the piano is playing against the chords (a clever arpeggio of the chord), it turns out, that gives the song its swing, its groove. The melody, applied over the top, even loosely, cannot help but be at its most beautiful, set off this way by the other two parts. My Christmas elf’s hat is off to the arranger of this great tune.

To the musically hip, check out a fatal flaw in the underlying loop, every time the top comes around (and dig the riff from Santana’s first album in the bluesy final chorus, and a guest vocal from Sekhnet at the very end).

[1]

“I Left My Heart in San Francisco” is a popular song, written in the fall of 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, with music by George Cory and lyrics by Douglass Cross and best known as the signature song of Tony Bennett. Wikipedia

Merry Christmas, Ivanka-style

Hell of a rain last night, on Christmas Eve, along with 60 mph winds. Today is just gray, 60 degrees in New York City (a week after a substantial snowfall) and predicted to go down 30 degrees tonight. Christmas time is here again, and for me and Sekhnet, sad to say, not easy to find a Chinese restaurant open, certainly not one where you can sit down, have a good meal and crack open a fortune cookie after eating a slice of orange. In New York City we are paralyzed by fear of a fake and easily defeatable so-called pandemic. So just a quick one, before I go downstairs to play Christmas tunes, clunkily, on the piano.

If you’re going to get a pardon from daddy, for alleged financial crimes it is quite likely you were part of, it is best to lay the groundwork for why that pardon is righteous and not part of a large, corrupt cover-up attempt by your scofflaw father. The NY State tax evasion charges, brought by the Manhattan DA, will be impossible for daddy to protect you from, but as for that vicious, partisan fuck in D.C. — that little district is not a state, it’s under federal law, hah! So tweet something like this about that:

“This is harassment, pure and simple. This ‘inquiry’ by NYC Democrats is 100% motivated by politics, publicity and rage. They know very well that there’s nothing here and that there was no tax benefit whatsoever. These politicians are simply ruthless.”

Motivated by politics, publicity and rage. Rage and a babyish desire for attention! Motivated by rage, a base emotion which is by its nature irrational and vindictive.

Ah, yes, here we go:

$5,000 is a fair market rate for rental of the ballroom that week, as paid by the conservative Christian group who rented D.C.’s most elegant ballroom to celebrate the miraculous election of God’s historically flawed vessel. So is the $175,000 paid by the Trump Inaugural Committee for that same room, that same week. You see? Nothing to see here, you villainous Democrat scallawag [1]!

As Boof Kavanaugh put it so passionately, fighting back tearfully after he got up off the canvas to knock out outside left-wing opposition stooge Dr. Christina Blasey-Ford and her ugly accusation in a stunning final round comeback victory:

A calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with pent-up anger about president Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is how you do it. If your enemy is fueled by pent-up rage, well, not only does it prove they are quite wrong, you can use that violent emotion against them, ju-jitsu style. That D.C. politician who is bringing the suit against Ivanka and the other dignitaries of the Trump Inaugural Committee over grossly inflated rental fees paid to the Trump Hotel that went into the Trump family portfolio? Fueled with pent-up anger about president Trump and the 2016 election. Typical slime “investigation” from a ruthless politician! Isn’t that right, daddy?

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good afternoon.

[1]

In United States history, the term scalawag referred to white Southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts after the conclusion of the American Civil War. As with the term carpetbagger, the word has a long history of use as a slur in Southern partisan debates. Wikipedia

Low Tide Thoughts On Christmas Eve

On Monday I woke from fitful, too short sleep, to brood about three issues that are no longer torturing me. I needed a couple of more hours of sleep, but my brain was boiling, thoughts leaping from one supremely annoying scenario to the next. I got up and began hammering at the keyboard in an attempt to tire myself enough to get back to sleep.

My plan didn’t work, all the annoyances, especially in exhausting combination, retained their power to keep me awake. A fucking doctor, a negligent dermatologist in a hurry that necessitated a second biopsy to confirm what I went to him complaining of in October, nonchalantly illustrating the often cancerous nature of profit-driven, unaccountable American corporate medicine; some money-related trouble that also involved apparent disrespect; and the thought of the upcoming high-stakes runoff election in Georgia and a short, persuasive letter I wanted to write, print and mail to the same people I’d sent postcards to in Georgia. The deadline clock ticking loudly on the second and third of these items. These three nagging thoughts tag teamed me all morning, and took turns buggering me, into the afternoon and evening.

When you are fresh you can tackle whatever it is you need to deal with and often make short work of it. You tend not to let a couple of random annoyances become a solid, ominous wall you cannot get over, under or around. In an exhausted state, as most of us are on this extraordinary and isolated Christmas Eve during a disorienting plague, overseen by a depraved administration, three random troubles are more than enough to poison your day.

All day Monday I was grumpy as hell, overtired and overwhelmed after short sleep, I could not sleep it off or rouse myself from my mood. Sekhnet could do little to help, except to be nimble jumping back when I lunged to bite her. Yesterday she was in a similar state to my Monday malaise, her mouth a determined frown I could not move, no matter how puckish I attempted to be.

A couple of random thoughts that could bring a touch of good cheer and then I’m off for a nap. I’m afraid they are Trump-related and I warn you of this in the event you understandably want to tune out. To me, they are a bit of upside as our attention-craving Executioner-in-Chief kills a last bunch of federal death row inmates, ignores another few thousand American deaths of COVID-19, keeps claiming that the election he openly tried his best to steal was stolen from HIM, rages that he’s surrounded by traitors in his own party, and scrawls his jagged Sharpie signature on the pardons of more of his friends and co-conspirators.

A pardon, and pardon me if you know this, removes any jeopardy for the crime you were pardoned for. You can’t be punished in any way for anything connected to the crime you were pardoned for, you can’t incriminate yourself in that matter. 86 of the so far 94 pardons Trump has granted so far were given to people personally connected to our transactional president. A number of them were convicted for lying under oath to protect Mr. Trump by dummying up about or falsifying information that could put Trump in legal hot water.

Now that they’ve been pardoned, in many cases completing a typical Trumpian quid pro quo, there is no problem forcing them to testify about what they were involved in. There’s no possibility of double jeopardy, self-incrimination or punishment for the original crime. Guys like Manafort, Stone, Flynn, perjurers and obstructers already convicted of lying to protect their benefactor (let’s gratuitously add the demented Giuliani and the blustering Barr to this list, Merry Christmas!), will have a very hard time not lying to a grand jury when direct questions are put to them by skilled attorneys. When they lie again under oath they commit a brand new crime of perjury that the presidential pardon has no effect on. Like their buddy the president, they are not strictly capable of not lying when cornered.

That thought cheers me up on an otherwise fairly bleak Christmas Eve.

Former Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen is already serving a prison sentence for a conspiracy committed with and at the instigation of co-conspirator Individual One. That unnamed party is Donald Trump. That gives me a little bit of Christmas cheer, even as Trump no doubt has Legal Kraken Sidney Powell crafting the overblown language of his self-pardon even as I tap out these pissy words.

A pattern demonstrating corrupt intent can be shown as evidence of a key element required to prove obstruction of justice (as Mueller showed when presenting at least ten instances of this pattern to establish Trump’s modus operandi in trying to obstruct the Special Counsel’s investigation into the 140 known instances of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Putin — something he eventually succeeded in thwarting when he hired Bill Barr). When Trump preemptively pardons Louis DeJoy, or Rudy, or Igor and Lev, it will be another tile in the seamless mosaic of the president’s corrupt intent to cover his crimes by pardoning his co-conspirators. If Trump had run these pardons by the office of the Presidential Pardon Attorney, as is the standard practice, he probably would have known this. In Trumpworld, however, nobody is smarter, cannier or a more stable genius (or a more “perfect physical specimen” or more “extremely young”) than Trump.

Yes, yes, politics is exhausting and Trump is exhausting as a matter of his chaotic and domineering personality and his insanity. No, the Democratic party, as a party, has shown little to no courage in making a compelling case to America about much. Yes, unfettered corporate power is choking democracy to death and it firmly controls the party of Pelosi and Schumer. Understood, but still.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated his campaign smashed the old record for inauguration donations raised. The DA of the District of Columbia is done with the discovery phase of his lawsuit against the Trumps for self-dealing, fraud and illegally profiteering off the presidency. The amount at stake is a paltry million dollars, and Ivanka, who was deposed recently, denounced the lawsuit on twitter as another baseless Democrat witch hunt against her father [1]. Of course, that doesn’t explain why a ballroom at the fabulous D.C. Trump Hotel that a conservative Christian group rented for $5,000 that same week cost the Inauguration $175,000 a day to rent. Money that went directly into the Trump family coffers, along with a ton of other money raised that was not accounted for. Like the more than half billion that was funneled opaquely through the slush fund Jared set up for dad-in-law, Ivanka and family.

Sure, abuse of power is no longer illegal for a president to engage in, that’s only politics. Obstruction of justice, same deal, depends on whether the person you obstruct is a complete asshole who is biased against you. Corruption is in the eye of the beholder, which is why Trump has made a point to find and pardon the greatest and most notorious scumbags he can. War crimes? No such thing, it’s like abuse of power, a charge with a simple, irrefutable answer: fuck you.

The thing that encourages me at this sickening moment for our nation, as the barking mad president organizes rallies for himself that he hopes will kick off a violent revolution to keep him in power, is that decency is more powerful than cruelty. We wise apes have a bias toward justice, toward seeing karma play out fairly.

It may not seem like that way much of the time, especially at this moment in history, and we can argue about whether some of our top leaders are sociopaths or psychopaths, or merely just very competitive, empathy-challenged lying narcissists, but the human instinct is for decency. I believe even people who seem like angry idiots, when given the sudden choice between saving a baby or letting the kid get killed, will scoop the kid up and talk soothingly to her.

Of course, Anne Frank thought the same thing and things went badly for her. Still, it’s a comforting thought on this eve of the birth of the Prince of Peace, the gentle, godly son of the Creator who taught that it is a blessing to protect the meek, to… ah, you know the drill. Merry Christmas, everybody.

[1]

Regarding the criminal investigation by Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Ivanka tweeted:

“This is harassment, pure and simple. This ‘inquiry’ by NYC Democrats is 100% motivated by politics, publicity and rage. They know very well that there’s nothing here and that there was no tax benefit whatsoever. These politicians are simply ruthless.”

A lawyer for the Trump Organization did not provide a statement to us on a possible indictment by the Manhattan D.A., or on the charges he is considering.

In legal papers, Donald Trump’s legal team has said Vance’s inquiry is “bad faith,” and an “overbroad fishing expedition.” Trump’s lawyers have stated in response to news reports there was “no fraud or tax evasion by anyone.”

Ivanka Trump tweeted about Vance’s investigation: “This is harassment, pure and simple. This ‘inquiry’ by NYC Democrats is 100% motivated by politics, publicity and rage. They know very well that there’s nothing here and that there was no tax benefit whatsoever. These politicians are simply ruthless.”

source

Justice, Justice Shall Ye Seek

A citizen worth emulating [1]

The title above is the first line of Deuteronomy 16:20, yo. Biblical text, the original intent of the framers — Justice, justice shall you pursue. Which would you rather pursue as a life’s goal, fairness or unfairness? Doesn’t take an ancient mystic, or the exhortations of a holy book, to help you work out this uncomplicated riddle.

Unless, of course, you benefit tremendously from institutionalized unfairness, in which case, you can forgive yourself for calling it “Liberty” and creating a worldview centered on the inviolable right of the individual to do whatever she wants with her wealth, outside of things like steal, murder and rape, of course, actual, legally defined stealing and murder the law will hold you accountable for and rape that you can actually lead to your prosecution and jailing. Outside of actual rape and murder, survival of the most liberty-loving! We have a dominant (if demographically doomed) political party that now explicitly stands for this worldview.

One of the last dissents of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s long, principled life (possibly the last, as far as I’m aware) was a plain-spoken and clear-eyed analysis of the problems with the narrow legal reasoning used by a 5-4 minority to restrict voting in Wisconsin during a pandemic. The dissent was the first writing by the Notorious RBG that I recall reading, not long before the end of her remarkable life, and I was very impressed. Clearly written, clearly reasoned, laying out, in a few broad strokes, the human story deleted from Boof Kavanaugh’s nakedly partisan “narrow legal” attempt to help his party attain a slight electoral edge in the justice game.

Reading Kavanaugh’s ruling, in which he took the dissent to task (unconvincingly) for being “quite wrong on several counts” (his telltale childishness is never long concealed) and claiming (falsely) that he’d taken COVID-19 into full consideration (along with the fact, never mentioned by Boof, that thousands of Wisconsin voters had not even received ballots in time to mail them in by the deadline), you’d never know that two federal courts had ruled, in light of the pandemic, postal delays and the Republican state legislature’s refusal to allow modifications to the primary election schedule, that it was reasonable to allow a few extra days for mail-in ballots to arrive and be counted. In Kavanaugh’s view, the question was a narrow, strict question of law, to be applied mechanically and unemotionally (and, by total coincidence, for the perceived benefit of his political party). He was dead wrong, “quite wrong” in fact, but, you know, he had the four other Federalist Society votes to make his will the final unappealable 5-4 ruling on the matter.

“Five to four, suck it!” is not democracy. “51-49, fuck you, losers,” is not democracy. An extraordinarily bold and historically brazen insertion of a sixth vote to make the Supreme Court an unappealable six-three right-wing, (51-49 suck it, cucks), majority is, while worthy of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Hermann Goering and friends, not democracy.

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and her immediate rushed replacement by a religious cult member true believer in the causes dearest to the hearts of the extreme right, underscores that a nine person partisan Supreme Court is no longer a viable option for preserving American democracy.

That the rights of millions of Americans may hang in the balance of who is the deciding vote, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Amy Coney Barrett, is an anti-democratic tragedy we must not endure. There are powerful federal Courts of Appeal with many more than nine judges ruling by 5-4 majority. There’s no reason, nor any need for a Constitutional amendment, not to expand the number of Supreme Court justices to 15, or 25. Form a bipartisan commission to approve the new candidates. Have a court where the opinions of one, two or even six party-line judges does not mean the difference between a century of our fellow Americans having “no rights a white person is bound to respect” and a court whose watchword is Justice, justice shall you pursue.

You know that for the good of us all, and our hope of preserving what’s left of our beautiful natural world, justice is a much better goal than an unappealable “6-3, suck it, loser.”

[1] wow, this looked much better on my phone’s tiny screen. Blown up I can see how sloppy it is! Sorry about that.

 

Share and share alike

Years ago a friend asked me to rewrite his parents’ wills to make sure his newborn daughter was added by name. His parents were happy to do this, I went to meet them. Reading the two short documents they already had I noted one serious flaw — the signature of the attorney, by wild coincidence, in addition to being scrawled in the same eccentrically blue-green ink as the witness signatures, was in the exact same handwriting as the signatures of the two witnesses to the will. When I pointed this out to them they smiled at me, and at each other, and told me fondly what a lovely man their now deceased lawyer was. Each will was an otherwise standard will, except for a phrase I really enjoyed. The assets not otherwise spoken for above were to be divided among the grandchildren equally, “to share and share alike”. I made sure to retain the phrase in my rewrite of the wills.

Share and share alike is a formula for avoiding conflict. There’s one less big reason to fight if we share everything fairly. Most people I know have this impulse. When you cook and put the food on the plate, or slice a cake, you try to give the same portion to everyone at the table (unless somebody indicates they want a smaller portion). When Sekhnet and I were domesticating the Feral Five this summer, we both reflexively did the same thing: made sure they all knew they’d get the same food, attention and playtime as all the others. One kitten would start eating, the others quickly learned that within a moment they’d have their own bowl in front of them. When giving them treats, each one got the same amount tossed to them and there was almost never stealing or attempts at hoarding. There was little anxiety or any reason for competition for these things because they shared and shared alike. It seems pretty clear that this is the fair way to divide things — share and share alike. It’s a basic philosophical stance, it seems to me– that everyone should get, to the extent possible, the basics that they need to live with safety and dignity, particularly in a place where others have a thousand, or a million times, what they need.

I think about that, in our gilded age of Inequality with its insane, often lauded, greed and — in an environment of the artificially enforced scarcity, the glorification of the “winners” of our natural “competition”. Our greatest citizens are not those who learned to “share and share alike” they are the audacious ones who learned to grab, and bring lawsuits against others like them, dominate the competition, take it all.

The supremely entitled twat who runs Facebook? One of the greediest fucks on earth, and supremely destructive in his limitless greed and arrogance, but– hey, don’t knock what he’s accomplished! Bill Gates? Arguably a slick monopolist at one time (with the lawsuits to prove it) but today one of our greatest philanthropist, although he is the ultimate expert on everything and determines precisely how his donations are spent (he always knows best, after all), and rightfully so, he’s about the smartest man in the world, as demonstrated by his vast, hard-earned fortune. But who am I to judge these great men so harshly? What fortune have I amassed? The People rest!

There is no downside in America to super-sized greed and hoarding — no matter how obscene — if you are a success. Our greediest and most avaricious [1] citizens are seen as the best of us by most of us — a kind of natural aristocracy in American life. Sekhnet doesn’t disagree when I snarl at the seemingly insane greed of a Jeff Bezos (not that she likes my frequent snarling), but she also loves the innovations in convenient shopping he’s made possible and defends the sick fuck, at least for the excellence of his genius instant-gratification delivery service. Bezos, I note, never leaves a penny on the table when he can grab it for himself.

It seems to me that once you’ve amassed, say, a $100,000,000,000 personal fortune, you can afford to stop obsessively snatching up every penny in sight. It’s probably safe to allow your hardworking employees to form a union, let’s say, or to have certain benefits at work (like bathroom breaks), a work site that is as close to a modern day salt mine as exists in our enlightened nation. For Jeff “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Bezos, it’s the principle of the thing. A penny left on the table, or in a mere employee’s hand, is a sin. A fucking sin!

I imagine that in the childhood homes of every supremely greedy acquisitor (often wealthy homes) there was an ethic (false, of course) of “zero entitlement” and of “working to earn everything you get.” “Share and share alike” was considered a recipe for losers. Fred Koch made his boys literally fight it out for his approval. The young Koch brothers punched each other in the face, and Fred was all for this manly vying over who was the most ambitious, the fittest to survive and therefore the most entitled to inherit oversight of his fortune.

Think of young Donald, with his charismatic, much older brother getting so much of daddy’s attention and praise — until the brother broke his father’s heart by showing himself much less ruthless than necessary to run an empire. Young Donald, fourth pup in the litter of five, angry, spoiled, entitled, bullying, acting out, fledging rich young juvenile delinquent, was then sent to military academy in an unsuccessful attempt to make a mensch out of him as Frederick Christ Trump groomed the young narcissist to become Trump.

Back to the opposite of these types and share and share alike. What is wrong with share and share alike as a view of life between siblings, life in a community? One thing that pops out of the American/Puritan myth — if you always get what you need, where is the incentive to create wealth, to dominate and become “great”?

Greatness, in the capitalist ethic, means constant expansion — continual growth of the enterprise, of profits, of wealth. Success is measured in immensity of expansion and the scope of your personal dominance. That’s why you can rape the earth as much as you want (as long as their is no priggish progress-hating government nanny there to coerce you and force you to stop) if the end result is being the richest man on the planet you murdered.

You want to raise children who are less susceptible to jealousy and corruption? Teach them to share and share alike, by your fair example. The alternative is what we are living in now: Betsey DeVos as the Secretary of Making Education An Earned Right Again as Christ Himself teaches.

[1]

I use, employ and deploy this synonym for greedy (note this is greed for wealth and material gain, as opposed to simple greed) in a nod to the pettifogger’s habit of stating and restating, reiterating and repeating, the obvious, the plain, the too clear to need clarification, the open and shut, in as many words and variations as possible, to cover every contingency, circumstance, event, foreseen and unforeseen, every possibility, in this world or any conceivable world. I learned that this laughable, risible, ridiculous habit derives from the age when we used to use scriveners, men with excellent handwriting, to write our legal papers. These weasels were paid by the word, hence the endless series of qualifiers, synonyms, distinguishing marks, clarifiers, the ostentatious, overbearing, absurdly ornate and, frankly, wordy restatements of the same thing: