Reality Check, maybe

The world’s single nation record for COVID-19 infections in a day was set not long after the presidential election. The NY Times reported:

A little more than a week earlier we’d broken the 100,000 case a day barrier (and they said it couldn’t be done!). I attribute this shattered record to all the contact, all over the US, that resulted from the Trump/Kremlin lie that mail-in ballots were tickets to widespread fraud and all the propaganda and Republican voter suppression that sent millions to stand on lines to cast vote in person. In places like Texas, poll workers were not required to wear masks and they could force voters to take off their masks in order to vote. Freedom, you know…

Today we nonchalantly eclipsed that sad-ass record again with a non-record 207,000 new cases (and an impressive 2,259 deaths from COVID, not a record but nothing to sneeze at!)

Check out this graph and think of how hard this dangerous, lying child, our Winner-in-chief, is still fighting to make this skyrocketing mass death on his heedless watch simply go away as he scrambles, hideous as a late stage Roy Cohn, to avoid all responsibility for anything in his long, narcissistic life of unlearned lessons.

During the years of the Cheney/Bush administration the octogenarian mother of a friend showed up at dinner one night sporting a BUCK FUSH button. Right on, sister! TRUCK FUMP!

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

I rarely take corporate surveys, particularly if there is a long wait involved to talk to one of the underpaid representatives who are busy helping other customers (which there almost always is). It was my pleasure to fill out the survey from the CISA website (the one debunking “rumors” about the thousand ways sick Commies were going to steal the presidency from Mr. Trump).

They also had a nice form that showed my whole survey, which is here:

My comment: This information is really great. Everything is clearly presented and sources are given. It is a wonderful public service and a great resource. I salute you for it all. I wish it was more widely disseminated.

This is the way it should be for all information crucial to the public. Lay it out clearly, give us the proof that what you are saying is not pulled out of a random, powerful psychopath’s ass. This is called transparency. Without transparency we have only a set of facts, no matter how convincing, versus an even louder FUCK YOU YOU GODDAMNED GODLESS FUCKING FUCK!

Or, to put it more politely: reasonable compromise based on reality-based debate versus arguments based exclusively on the necessity of “LIBERTY’s” defense against “TYRANNY”: the liberty to infect others during a deadly pandemic vs. the tyranny of mandated public safety measures, for example.

It goes without saying that that kind of idiotic FREEDOM vs. TYRANNY debate is no way to run a democracy.

The so-called truth about the so-called election (as of yesterday, anyway)

Clicking links can be tedious, I know. So, as a service to the reader in a hurry, a few highlights from the traitorous Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s website (as of yesterday — subject to deletion upon discovery by the president’s most loyal men and women). All this information is apparently still online today.

You can click on the CISA website’s URL HERE for more details about each of these thoroughly debunked rumors/Trump barking points. Most of these debunked rumors have useful resources below including links to the laws and practices that protect and ensure each of these things. A quick scroll through this list should probably do the trick, though.

Or, as is your inalienable right as an American anti-masker type, simply ignore this seditious “reality-based” list, as millions of our other countrymen, including 18 state attorneys general and 106 House members, are currently on the record doing (though in the guise of a lawsuit on other grounds not covered here).

 Reality: Ballot handling procedures protect against intentional or unintentional ballot destruction.

  Rumor: Ballots can easily be destroyed without detection, preventing them from being counted.

 Reality: Voting systems undergo testing from state and/or federal voting system testing programs, which certify voting system hardware and software.

  Rumor: Voting system software is not reviewed or tested and can be easily manipulated.

POST-ELECTION

 Reality: Robust safeguards including canvassing and auditing procedures help ensure the accuracy of official election results.

  Rumor: A bad actor could change election results without detection.


 Reality: Voter registration list maintenance and other election integrity measures protect against voting illegally on behalf of deceased individuals.

  Rumor: Votes are being cast on behalf of dead people and these votes are being counted.

 Reality: Variations in vote totals for different contests on the same ballot occur in every election and do not by themselves indicate fraud or issues with voting technology.

  Rumor: More votes in one contest than other contests on the ballot means that results cannot be trusted.

 Reality: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) do not design or audit ballots, which are processes managed by state and local election officials.

  Rumor: DHS or CISA printed paper ballots with security measures and is auditing results as a countermeasure against ballot counterfeiting.


 Reality: Election results reporting may occur more slowly than prior years. This does not indicate there is any problem with the counting process or results. Official results are not certified until all validly cast ballots have been counted, including ballots that are counted after election night.

  Rumor: If results as reported on election night change over the ensuing days or weeks, the process is hacked or compromised, so I can’t trust the results.

 Reality: Provisional ballots are counted in every election regardless of result margins.

  Rumor: Provisional ballots are only counted if there’s a close race.

 Reality: In some circumstances, elections officials are permitted to “duplicate” or otherwise further mark cast ballots to ensure they can be properly counted.

  Rumor: Witnessing election officials marking ballots means that fraudulent voting is taking place.

 Reality: Election night results are not official results.

  Rumor: If election night reporting sites experience an outage, vote counts will be lost or manipulated.

 Reality: A defaced or manipulated election night reporting webpage would not impact counting and certification of official results.

  Rumor: If the election night reporting webpage is defaced or displays incorrect results, the integrity of the election is compromised.

 Reality: Malicious actors can use fake personas and impersonate real accounts.

  Rumor: If a social media account claims an identity, the account must be run by that person or organization.

 Reality: Cyber actors can “spoof” or forge email sender addresses to look like they come from someone else.

  Rumor: I received an election-related email that looks like it came from a certain organization, so the organization must have sent it.

PRE-ELECTION

 Reality: Some voter registration data is publicly available.

  Rumor: Someone possessing or posting voter registration data means voter registration databases have been hacked.

 Reality: Online voter registration websites can experience outages for non-malicious reasons.

  Rumor: An online voter registration website experiences an outage and claims are made the election has been compromised.

 Reality: A compromise of a state or local government system does not necessarily mean election infrastructure or the integrity of your vote has been compromised.

  Rumor: If state or local jurisdiction information technology (IT) has been compromised, the election results cannot be trusted.

 Reality: Malicious actors can fake manipulation of voter registration data to spread disinformation.

  Rumor: Videos, images or emails suggesting voter registration information is being manipulated means voters will not be able to vote.

 Reality: Safeguards are in place to prevent home-printed or photocopied mail-in ballots from being counted.

  Rumor: A malicious actor can easily defraud an election by printing and sending in extra mail-in ballots.

Reality: Safeguards are in place to protect against fraudulent voting using the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB).

  Rumor: A malicious actor can easily defraud an election using the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB).

ELECTION DAY

 Reality: Election officials provide writing instruments that are approved for marking ballots to all in-person voters using hand-marked paper ballots.

  Rumor: Poll workers gave specific writing instruments, such as Sharpies, only to specific voters to cause their ballots to be rejected.

 Reality: Voters are protected by state and federal law from threats or intimidation at the polls, including from election observers.

  Rumor: Observers in the polling place are permitted to intimidate voters, campaign, and interfere with voting.

 Reality: Safeguards are in place to protect ballot secrecy.

  Rumor: Someone is claiming to know who I voted for.


 Reality: Polling place lookup sites can experience outages for non-malicious reasons.

  Rumor: If polling place lookup sites experience an outage, election infrastructure must have been compromised.

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Now, it’s true that outside of all this obviously partisan palaver, there is still the totally plausible chance that there was massive voting fraud and coordinated irregularities in ANARCHIST JURISDICTIONS that deprived our greatest, most handsome, smartest, most charismatic, most sexually attractive, BEST FRIEND OF THE GODDAMNED COLORED RACES SINCE “HONEST” FUCKING ABE president of his rightful second term (just as a baseless WITCH HUNT deprived him of a fully effective first term, and the Chinese/Democrat virus HOAX unfairly hurt him too). You can believe unhinged “reality alarmist” traitors at some government agency nobody ever heard of or… or…

Only one final thing I have to say on any of this, to Mr. Trump, the shady AG of Texas (under indictment since 2015), the other dozens of loyal-to-the-death elected Republican Trump zealots who signed on to the Texas AG’s idiotic “lawsuit” delivered to Amy Coney Barrett and her five Federalist Society colleagues on the Supreme Court:

Black, Brown, Urban, “Minority” Votes Matter (and count just like your’s), you racist motherfuckers, whatever you might sincerely, fervently, strongly believe to the contrary.

Exhaustion is the whole point

It’s exhausting to witness the president’s inexhaustible commitment to denial, every day, every moment — the now reclusive Winner-in-Chief grimly insistent that he WON, now more than a month after he lost the election. You can restrict yourself to catching the news once a day and there it is. Lame duck tweets “#OVERTURN” — 17 state attorneys general join shady Texas AG in petition to Supreme Court to overturn certified election results in four other states. You think, well, “overturn”… Trump’s admitting he lost, isn’t he? No need to overturn the results of an election you won, right? No matter. He makes a brief appearance on camera and shambles away in the middle of hanging a presidential medal around somebody’s neck. You watch the short clip, the camera pans over to the medalist, suddenly alone in the middle of the Oval Office. The man gives the camera a big WTF? shrug. He shrugs for all of us.

It’s hard to focus the mind on anything else, I find, while this rabid man persists in soiling everything his office, his nation, is supposed to stand for. As our country sets a world record for COVID-19 deaths in a single day, surpassing the total killed by terrorists on 9/11, the defeated president is focused only on somehow invalidating the ballots of millions of Americans. We are literally in the middle of a seemingly eternal war between demonstrable fact, upheld by actual laws, and FUCK YOU YOU GODDAMNED FUCKING FUCK!

Tech giant youTube puts a link to a government website debunking all rumors of a stolen election under every video [1]. You click on it (accidentally in my case) read a bit and wonder how the government officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who maintain this so-called fact-based website are still on the job under the reflexively vindictive master of the purge.

Let me try to take our minds off the immediate shit show for a moment with this little game. Take any fact you like, let’s go with a historical one. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, the party’s second ever candidate for president [2]. The sharply divided Democratic party in 1860 (it ran different candidates in the north and in the south) was dominated by pro-slavery racists, certainly in the slave states. Today you will hear the talking point, from in-your-face right-wing provocateurs, that the Republican party is the party of equality, the party that emancipated the slaves, and the Democratic party is the party of the Ku Klux Klan.

Look at any presidential election map since Nixon’s 1968 victory. The entire former Confederacy is painted solid red, for Republican. Since the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s (and LBJ, signing these bills into law knew he was crippling his own party in the former Confederacy), and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of dog whistling racism to bigots to get votes that would have gone to his challenger George Wallace, the party of the aggrieved white man is the former party of Lincoln. Wallace, we learn, pursued an electoral strategy similar to Trump’s — throw the lost election to the House of Representatives [3]! Fuck, there he is again…

Impossible to escape from this ubiquitous, attention-obsessed, emotionally frail egomaniac and his loud-mouthed fans. Hard to even remember that in 40 days his replacement will be sworn in. Just using the word ‘replacement’ in that sentence puts the cadence of those fine young chanting men into my head “Jews will not replace us!” It’s exhausting to anyone who believes reason and logic are still indispensable to the human experiment in not destroying all life on the planet.

Exhaustion is the whole point of the infernal exercise.

[1]

from the “traitorous” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency website:

#PROTECT2020 RUMOR VS. REALITY

Mis- and disinformation can undermine public confidence in the electoral process, as well as in our democracy.  Elections are administered by state and local officials who implement numerous safeguards to protect the security of your vote pursuant to various state and federal laws and processes. This resource is designed to debunk common misinformation and disinformation narratives and themes that relate broadly to the security of election infrastructure and related processes. It is not intended to address jurisdiction-specific claims. Instead, this resource addresses election security rumors by describing common and generally applicable protective processes, security measures, and legal requirements designed to protect against or detect large-scale security issues related to election infrastructure and processes. 

You can learn more about mis- and disinformation from CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force. Click an icon below to go directly to that section.

[2]

History little recalls the nation’s first Republican presidential candidate. Most of us will need a search engine, and less than a second, for the answer to that trivia question:

John C. Frémont ran as the first Republican nominee for President in 1856 behind the slogan “Free soil, free silver, free men, Frémont and victory!” Although Frémont’s bid was unsuccessful, the party showed a strong base. Abbreviation: GOP (Grand Old Party) Political position: Center-right to right-wing
History of the Republican Party (United States) – Wikipedia

[3] Wikipedia:

Former Governor of Alabama George Wallace ran in the 1968 United States presidential election as the candidate for the American Independent Party against Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Wallace’s pro-segregation policies during his term as Governor of Alabama were rejected by most. The impact of the Wallace campaign was substantial, winning the electoral votes of several states in the Deep South. Although Wallace did not expect to win the election, his strategy was to prevent either major party candidate from winning a majority in the Electoral College. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where Wallace would have bargaining power sufficient to determine, or at least strongly influence, the selection of a winner.

Although Nixon ultimately won a majority of 301 electoral votes (270 being a majority), Wallace’s effort put the chance of a brokered electoral college relatively close. For example; had he won South Carolina or Tennessee (falling less than 50,000 votes short) and had the Democratic ticket won either Illinois or Ohio (trailing the Republican one by around 100,000 votes in both cases) Nixon would have ended up with a plurality but not a majority, and the election would – for the first time since 1824 – have been thrown to the House of Representatives.

The United States of Hate

I don’t want to hate the people who hate people like me. Not only because I think hate is bad (it is) but also, practically, because it leads to hopelessness and rage, which lead inevitably to deadly violence. The only way out of this cycle of viciousness is through conversation, listening, understanding, honestly working to solve big problems that oppress us all. Powerful forces are intent on making that kind of helpful dialogue impossible among the billions of regular people of limited power. Hate is the antidote to Reason.

One thing unites the half of the country who voted for Biden and the almost half who voted for Trump: hatred of the other side. The stoking of agitated hatred by political attack ad is a successful tactic in American elections, as proved every election cycle. Do not discuss ideas, plans, strategies to deal with the many daunting challenges we face, do not mention what is actually happening in the world — attack the godless Communist you are running against (if she’s a Democrat) attack your hypocritically pious Fascist opponent (if she’s Republican.)

Let us not pretend that this is a mutual, even, fifty-fifty war, with very fine, and very horrible, people on both sides. There is no real equivalence between the political parties in 2020, as far as the lengths they will go to create hatred, provoke fear and rage, threaten violence from angry, low-information voters who want revenge on people they honestly believe are stealing their very lives from them.

I won’t go into the accursed mass media false equivalence business here, except to state one obvious fact: one party’s leader wants to count only votes for himself, and his supporters in Congress insist the president has every right to take this radical position, no matter what the so-called courts might say: because the future of the world depends on it! A brazen, stubbornly irrational position (without proof of fraud or irregularities) that until it was done would have been unthinkable — to petulantly and baselessly contest an election everybody from both parties has certified the results of and says you lost — is now in some bizarre way “normal”. A few years ago, this kind of open defiance of national election results, which includes repeated calls to violently resist a “stolen election,” would be considered treasonous. Now the president’s apologists insist this open attack on American democracy cannot even be investigated. To investigate sedition is itself sedition!

Facts, as we have noticed over and over, no longer matter in politics. Faced with a tidal wave of pandemic infections, overflowing hospitals and morgues, millions more Americans thrust into poverty, the president’s party, passionate, mouth breathing anti-maskers, focused only on putting a hyper-conservative religious cult member on the Supreme Court days before the election.

The national moratorium against evictions will end December 31. On the first working day after New Years there will be a million evictions of people behind on their rent, their mortgages, who have not been able to work and have not received any government help (aid repeatedly blocked by the president’s party — unless corporations are immunized against liability for all harms they inflicted during the pandemic). These pauperized American families, newly homeless as winter descends, will be thrust directly into the jaws of a deadly, highly infectious, airborne medical emergency. Because?

During The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, centuries when science and technology took great strides as philosophers rediscovered the writings of the ancient (pagan) Greeks, Reason was held up as the guiding principle of human endeavor. Renewed was the forgotten belief that humans are creative, primarily rational, actors, free to make the best choices and find the best solutions, based on considering free-flowing good information and making intelligent calculations based on knowledge. A world guided by Reason, it turns out, is a very optimistic view of human affairs (this was pointed out in this excellent video). We seem to have returned, en masse, to the monkish ignorance and superstition (a phrase I always loved) [1] of the Dark Ages.

As the painter Francisco Goya wrote on a famous image, (a 1799 aquatint, Jeeves informs us): the Sleep of Reason produces Monsters.

Medieval monkish ignorance and superstition 101: to fight the mass death of the Bubonic Plague, round up and kill every single Satanist witch, burn them to death, along with their evil “familiars,” the cats. In Europe cats were killed wherever they were found. With the cats gone, rats proliferated and so did the plague, which was carried and transmitted by rats. I don’t need to make the comparisons to how the party of Trump is reacting to science’s best efforts to control the spread of our modern day plague.

A few years ago, after listening to the beautifully read audio version by Wanda McCadden (from the NY Public Library), I picked up my own copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s masterful rumination on the world famous trial of a high ranking Nazi bureaucrat. The book, which started a shit storm even before it was published, is deep and thought-provoking, as well as a treasure chest of illuminating historical detail about this dark era of human history. I’ve read it several times now.

I wrote a piece, back in 2018, called Hannah Arendt, towering intellectual It-girl. It was read a handful of times when I posted it, and forgotten (not a single reader in 2019, WordPress informs me). I’ve been surprised at how many readers seem to have discovered the piece in 2020. In it I express my great admiration for Hannah Arendt, who wrote that real, honest internal dialogue is the key to puzzling out any vexing mystery. All evidence must be carefully weighed, as many specious arguments as possible removed from consideration, and to the best of your ability, patiently analyze what you have and act on it. Arendt convincingly shows that the inability to conduct this kind of principled internal debate marks an ambitious person for life as the perfect Eichmann, a person of limited imagination whose only moral duty is unquestioning obedience to authority.

What does the average Eichmann want? Respect, praise from his boss, a world he can feel safe in. Nothing unreasonable there, once you accept the terms. In Eichmann’s case those terms were that forced emigration would not solve the Jewish Problem after all — only wiping out every Jew in the world would solve the Jewish Problem. Eichmann himself was not happy about mass killing, not at all, he was no killer, no sadist, not crazy, but he did his duty, to the best of his ability, as Nazi morality demanded. How did he become convinced that tirelessly facilitating mass murder was his duty? The Leader, a man endowed by God with 100% confidence in his infallible convictions, told him he must. End of conversation.

Here’s an insightful analysis of how the process of winning angry hearts and overwhelmed minds works in the age of mass media [2]. Mr. Trump is doing the same thing now that successful fascist demagogues of the past did, doing it with surprising adroitness. The bloodbath he keeps coyly inciting will hopefully not start, Trump dead-enders may have to content themselves with sabotaging everything possible to ensure that the Biden administration inherits a chaotic, failed country nobody can fix. The blame for the ugly mess will then go to the hated Democrats, again, who will be voted out in disgrace. I vote for them, but, I have to be honest, I hate them too (with a handful of exceptions).

Hate is so fucking easy, takes so little work and gives a strong feeling of righteousness — I guess it’s just irresistible to us “wise apes”.

[1]

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

Thomas Jefferson, author of Liberty and father of mulatto slave children, in a letter written before the final July 4th of his long life.

source

[2]

Possible Trump tweet:

Give me 2 months and a few million violence-prone, low-information, chanting, gun-toting angry white men and I’ll show you how to put on a show! “Abuse of power”, “contempt of congress” (fuck them!), open defiance of things like the stupid Hatch Act, quid pro quo with foreign leader for electoral advantage, nada! Ditto incitement to violent overthrow of the duly elected government. USA! USA! LOL! LO fucking L!

They want to be Nazis so bad…

I confess, I don’t really understand the strong authoritarian urge of the party of Trump, certainly not among so many in his base who get so little from this openly corrupt, self-serving man. I don’t get the impulse to march in lockstep behind a violent “strongman”. I know that Trump has a painful compulsion to “win” at any cost and a need to inflict maximum pain on others as he does it. It’s hard for me to think of him as not floridly psychotic, a flailing, desperately self-obsessed, addled maniac with pronounced sadistic features.

He truly, sincerely, strongly doesn’t care that perhaps twice as many Americans have died, and are dying, of COVID-19 than if he had taken any reasonable steps to slow its spread, anywhere along the way. He doesn’t even bother to show up at meetings of his pandemic task force, hasn’t for months. He is unconcerned about mass American death, even in areas that voted for him in great numbers, and doesn’t even pretend to give a damn. But what’s up with his lickspittle accomplices? Lindsey Graham? Little Marco? Lyin’ Ted? Moscow Mitch? All the rest?

The vast majority of Republicans in Congress have been silent in the face of Trump’s unhinged coup attempt (his won-lost record in “legal” challenges since the election is now 1 and 49). The Washington Post surveyed congressional Republicans recently and found only 27 out of 249 would admit that Joe Biden won the election. Historian Heather Cox Richardson provides a historical precedent for this kind of cynical Republican power play, from America’s last Gilded Age [1].

When pressed for comment about Trump’s refusal to admit defeat these powerful Republican election results deniers keep repeating their idiotic talking point: Trump has every right to attack and use every means he can think of to try to overturn an election he honestly believes he rightfully won. They all seem to have swilled the Kool-aid Alan Dershowitz offered in a deranged defense of Trump at his rigged impeachment [2]: even if Trump is wrong, if he honestly believes he’s right to do something, and is doing it for what he truly feels is the good of the country, how can his actions be against the law?

Incoherence is perfectly cool among this type of true believer. Mail-in voting is ripe for massive fraud, repeated Barr, Trump, Graham, Putin — bolstered by no evidence but Barr’s conclusory “common sense”. Preventing massive mail-in voting fraud was the theory behind making it hard for people in cities to vote by mail, removing and dismantling high speed mail-sorting machines and pulling mailboxes off the streets. This fantasy of mail-in voting fraud is the basis on which Trump attacked the solid 7,000,000 vote, 306 Elector majorities for Biden. Republican voters in the do-or-die Georgia runoff are now urged by their president to vote by mail. Do not trouble yourself about the contradictions: just do it!

One of the candidates in the upcoming Georgia runoff that will decide if we have a working democracy again soon or more of the Grim Reaper’s mirthless obstruction, Kelly Loeffler, who joined fellow ardent Trumpist senator David Perdue in demanding that the Republican Attorney General of Georgia step down (for his part in the fraud that stole the election from Trump?) was asked “Yes or no, Senator Loeffler, did Donald Trump lose the recent presidential election?”

“You know, President Trump has every right to use every legal recourse available, it’s unfortunate that the focus is on a debate about who won the election when this process is still playing out …. and president Trump has every right to every legal legal recourse… The president has the right to pursue every legal recourse to make sure this was a free and fair election in Georgia… The president has every right to every legal recourse, and that’s what’s taking place…”

The system is corrupt, the election in Georgia was rigged, your votes have been stolen, and Trump is trying to reveal this and overturn the fake results certified now three times by traitorous top Georgia Republicans — now get those absentee ballots in, Georgia Republicans, to enable Mitch McConnell, with an unchallengeable one vote majority, to fuck up Biden like he hogtied that illegitimate secret Muslim son-of-a-bitch so-called president!

Since all politics is local, angry Republicans with the power to do so may intimidate and punish enemies real and perceived with the full force of the law.

From Heather Cox Richardson:

This morning in Florida, about 10 armed law enforcement officers raided the home of former state data scientist Rebekah Jones and seized her computers, phone, thumb drives, and hard drives. Jones was fired from her job at the state Department of Health for insubordination in May when she apparently refused to manipulate data about coronavirus to downplay state infections at a time when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was eager to reopen the state. Jones had built the state’s Covid-19 dashboard, and after she was fired, she continued to compile and post coronavirus updates on her own.

An investigator with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement filed an affidavit saying that someone had hacked the state emergency management system to send a text to about 1,750 people with the message: “It’s time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.” The affidavit said the text came from an IP address connected to Jones’s house, and the affidavit was the reason for the search warrant that led to the raid. Jones denies having anything to do with the text, and noted that it went out on the official channel about the time that five of the eight team leaders at the DOH were fired in what she described as a purge.

source

Purges, it’s what fascists and bulimics do. Proof, shmoof, move on, nothing to see here, you vicious turds. The reason the Trump loyalist, COVID-denying governor of Florida’s forces raided the fired scientist’s home?

she apparently refused to manipulate data about coronavirus to downplay state infections at a time when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was eager to reopen the state. Jones had built the state’s Covid-19 dashboard, and after she was fired, she continued to compile and post coronavirus updates on her own.

and from that same Letter from an American:

Despite the coronavirus crisis, the Trump administration continues to put its energy into trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Having won only once, Trump today lost his 49th legal case, when lawyer Sidney Powell, who was recently dismissed from Trump’s campaign legal team, lost yet again in her attempt to get the results of the 2020 election thrown out. In Georgia, Judge Timothy Batten, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, rejected a lawsuit to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. “They want this court to substitute its judgment for that of 2.5 million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden,” Batten said, “and this I am unwilling to do.”

Nonetheless, tonight we learned that Trump reached out to a third state to try to enlist the support of Republican officials to overturn the election results. The office of the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Bryan Cutler, confirmed that the president twice called to try to get Cutler to “fix” what he claimed were “issues” in Philadelphia. Cutler was one of about 60 state legislators who asked Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to object to Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes when they are brought before Congress on January 6, 2021, an effort that might cause a fuss but is unlikely to do much else. Trump has also unsuccessfully pressured officials in Arizona and Georgia to change their state’s votes.

Don’t worry. This is all perfectly normal. It happens in every society that goes authoritarian.

[1]

note this parenthetical:

(among other things, [Republicans] added six new states to the Union to pack the Electoral College).

Also today, the Washington Post printed the results of its query to all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, asking them who won the 202 presidential election. Only 27 of them are willing to acknowledge that Biden won. Two Republicans insist that Trump won the election, all evidence to the contrary. The rest of them—220 of them—refuse to say who won.

This is a big deal. This was not a close election. Biden currently has over 7 million more votes than Trump, and has won by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. And yet, Republican leadership is permitting Trump to undermine our democracy. Try to imagine any past Republican president doing what Trump is doing, and you can’t. But today’s Republican lawmakers are standing to the side, permitting Trump to poison our democracy.

To what end? Why are Republicans accepting this anti-American behavior from Trump?

It seems to me they are unwilling to risk losing Trump’s voters in the future because they are determined to regain power. They don’t much care about our democracy, so long as they have a shot at keeping Trump’s people on their side. But then, again, to what end? If Republicans regain power in 2022 or 2024, what will that look like? Do we have any reason to think they will then begin to defend our democracy? Do we have any reason to think they are interested in anything but even more legislation that moves wealth upward?

We have been in a spot much like this before. In 1884, Americans turned against the Republican Party because it had abandoned its support for ordinary Americans in favor of the industrial leaders who put money into Republican lawmakers’ political war chests, as well as into their pockets. Voters put Democrat Grover Cleveland into the White House, the first Democrat to hold the presidency since James Buchanan was elected in 1856.

Horrified, the Republicans flooded the country with stories of how Democrats were socialists who would attack the rich by ending the legislation that protected businesses. If Democrats continued to control the government, Republicans said, they would destroy America. In 1888, they suppressed Democratic votes and created modern political financing as they hit up businessmen for major donations. Despite their best efforts, voters reelected Cleveland by about 100,000 votes, but Republicans managed to eke out a win for their candidate, Benjamin Harrison, in the Electoral College. Harrison promised a “BUSINESSMAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” and indeed, in office, he and his men did all they could to cement the Republican Party into power so it could continue to defend business (among other things, they added six new states to the Union to pack the Electoral College).

But voters still didn’t like the Republicans’ platform, which seemed more and more to funnel money from hardworking Americans upward into the pockets of those men who were increasingly portrayed as robber barons. In 1892, they voted for Cleveland in such numbers they couldn’t be overridden in the Electoral College. Voters also put Democrats in charge of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

And that is the moment I cannot help thinking about today. Faced with a legitimately elected Democratic government, Republican leaders deliberately sabotaged the country. They swamped the media with warnings that Democrats would destroy the economy and that men should pull their capital out of stocks and industries. Foreign capital should, they said, go home or face disaster. Money began to flow out of the country and stocks faltered. When financiers begged the Harrison administration to shore up the markets in the face of the growing panic, administration officials told them their job was only to keep the country afloat until the day of Cleveland’s inauguration.

They didn’t quite make it. The economy collapsed about ten days before Cleveland took the oath of office, saddling the new president with the Panic of 1893 and very few ways to combat it. Republicans had deliberately sabotaged the country in order to discredit Cleveland, then demanded he honor the demands of financiers to stabilize the economy. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Cleveland tried to work with moneyed interests to combat the depression and promptly split his own party. The country roiled as out-of-work Americans despaired, some of them marching on Washington, D.C., to demand the government do something to address their plight.

The Republicans went into the 1894 midterm elections blaming the Democrats for the crisis in the country. They won the midterms in what remains the largest seat swing in the history of the House of Representatives. Then they claimed that, with Republicans back in power, the economy was now safe. They papered the country with media announcing that the panic was over and people should reinvest. The panic was over, and a Republican president won in 1896, once again insisting the Democrats were socialists, but this time adding that the past four years had proved the Democrats could not run the economy.

There is no excuse for the silence of Republican lawmakers as their president attacks our democracy. But there might be a precedent.

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[2]

How’s this for Nazi-style justice?

The president hired an Attorney General who auditioned for the job by opining that the foundation of the Mueller probe was fatally flawed– and who, once on the job, dismissed the findings of the investigation as the work product of waffling, illegally spying partisans who had, in spite of massive efforts, found nothing on the president. The president was eventually impeached over an illegal quid pro quo that was witnessed by multiple officials who were on the call . The transcript of the “perfect” call that his own people released showed he withheld military aid to get a foreign leader to announce an investigation that would damage his political opponent. The call was heard in real time by many, some (like Mike Pompeo) lied about it, some testified truthfully, under oath. The president was impeached by the House who sent the articles over the the Senate for the trial.

Mitch McConnell, the head juror, immediately announced that the impeachment was a desperate and unfounded purely political attack by a party angry that its “witch hunt” had turned up no hint of wrongdoing by the president. The jury, he said, would work closely with the president’s defense team to acquit the president of all charges as quickly as possible. McConnell announced this on national TV. No witnesses or new evidence of presidential wrongdoing (which was gathering almost daily) would be allowed at the trial. We’ll hear from the desperate, lying Democrats, he promised, and then we’ll acquit our president of all the fake charges. We have the votes, bitches.

Once the “trial” was over, Trump began purging everyone who had testified against him under oath. He took revenge on everyone and their brother, literally, as it turned out.

Pardon Me, Sir, The American Rule?

There was no federal anti-lynching law for the many decades large numbers of people were being lynched in the USA. This was because a sizable block in the Senate truly believed that certain people needed to be dragged off, tortured and strung up, or mutilated and set on fire while still alive. Legally sanctioned terrorism was a way of life in certain areas, an integral part of maintaining “law and order”.

If there was not even a federal anti-lynching law for so many years, why would you expect an anti-discrimination law to stop the racist application of government programs? It was not until after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, during the upheaval of the “Civil Rights” Movement (Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz, correctly called these Human Rights) that federal anti-discrimination legislation, like the Fair Housing Act of 1965, was signed into law to halt some of the more pernicious practices of genteel, wealthy racists.

The wealthy, genteel or not, have always seen to making laws that enforce their privileges. That’s why having money in the United States is often the difference between a long life and a short one. My father, born into terrible poverty, was part of a generation of American veterans of the Second World War who were able to get a free college education and a low cost housing loan and, with hard work, emerge from poverty into the middle class. The program was called the GI Bill.

I read recently that in New York State, of the thousands of these GI Bill housing loans and low-cost mortgages that were made to veterans who bought houses (and amassed an inheritable estate), only a handful (11, I think) went to black veterans. Black veterans applied for these benefits, they were legally entitled to them, they just didn’t get them. Renting a decent place to live was the same way, no law really prevented a racist owner from telling black or brown people (or anyone else he simply didn’t like the looks of) that the vacant apartment they’d looked at was, unfortunately, no longer available.

Donald Trump’s father made the bulk of his fortune exploiting the post World War II home building explosion. He was an expert at profiting from government subsidies that incentivized the building of affordable housing, he made many millions from these government programs. The government put conditions on these highly subsidized deals, the housing had to be affordable, widely available to working people. There was just a wink, an understanding, about renting to what were then called Negroes, Spics (Puerto Ricans), Kikes (poor Eastern European Jews), Wops (darker Southern Italians), “Ethnics’ of every stripe. Trump’s father had a policy against renting to such ‘unsavory’ types and there was no law against it, until the Fair Housing Act.

Donald was 19 when the Fair Housing Act became law, already (having successfully dodged the draft and the deadly jungles of Vietnam) being groomed to take over his father’s empire (an empire he’d sell at a loss after the old man died, in violation of the dead man’s wishes, but that’s another story).

The younger Trump sat next to his father during the government’s case against Trump Properties and watched an unscrupulous master (eventually, too late, disbarred and indicted) named Roy Cohn work his magic. Cohn first countersued the Department of Justice for defamation of the Trumps (who, although they honestly hated the people they refused to rent to, arguably had every legal right to be selective in processing tenant applications). Eventually the Trump’s signed a settlement with the government, admitting no wrongdoing in marking applications “C” (for “colored”) and rejecting every applicant with a “C” on their folder, and agreeing to allow supervision by federal authorities to ensure future compliance with the Fair Housing Act, a law they did not admit they had violated.

It was an eye-opening, intoxicating victory for the young Donald Trump. He went on to become possibly the most litigious man in history, with over 3,500 lawsuits (before becoming president) and literally hundreds since (at least 300 prior to the 2020 election and, at last count, 43 since — his record in those Stop The Steal! cases is 1 win, 42 losses).

The simplest explanation for why Trump is involved in all this protracted litigation is The American Rule. We learned about this in law school, and many of us were shocked to learn it, though, after you think about it for a moment, it makes perfect sense.

In most countries, if you bring a weak lawsuit designed primarily to vex, harass, cow, intimidate, delay, bully, pauperize, manipulate, exploit or outright cheat another person, and you lose the case — or withdraw the suit after bankrupting your opponent with legal bills or otherwise proving your point — you must repay the legal fees of the person you brought to court. In most places this repayment of what can sometimes be vast legal bills is part of the principle of making the person “whole” after they suffer a legal injury. The American Rule is all about “fairness”– each side is responsible to pay its own costs in court and the winner may not be compensated by the loser for legal fees, except in specific, fairly rare cases.

As the inheritor of vast wealth, Trump, history’s greatest beneficiary of the American Rule, has never had any problem financing every possible lawsuit imaginable. Many of these expensive lawsuits are deductible as business expenses and, over decades, he has profited handsomely from the delays, favorable settlements and the bankrupting of hated adversaries. As the sitting president, and rightfully feared head of the Republican Party, he no longer has to finance his own lawsuits, that burden falls on we the taxpayers (for cases brought by Sessions’s and then Barr’s DOJ), his donors and the Republican National Committee war chest.

There are many things in life that are plainly wrong, although not, strictly according to the written law, illegal. Men like Donald Trump are experts at exploiting the fact that it is impossible to write down enforceable prohibitions of every form of evil and abuse.

The Supreme Court ruled against Richard Nixon when he claimed executive privilege in his attempt to withhold evidence during his impeachment. They ruled the same way against Bill Clinton when he tried a similar thing during his impeachment. Trump, advised by the equally unscrupulous Bill Barr, made the same arguments Nixon and Clinton lost in their attempts to hide evidence of their wrongdoing. Trump’s many defenders said Trump was only doing what other impeached presidents had done (conveniently omitting any reference to the legal outcomes or the elemental principle of justice behind them).

The Supreme Court would eventually have to rule against Trump’s absurdly broad claims of limitless immunity too. Only in Trump’s case — delay was the key. What he did in openly obstructing the impeachment may be found, in the end, to have been unlawful, but it worked! When the Supreme Court eventually rules that it was illegal for Trump to block all legally issued subpoenas for testimony by his employees, current and past, on the grounds of an inviolable expansive blanket protective presidential immunity (Barr’s genius concept), Trump will be involved in some other lucrative scam (or in prison for tax-related crimes).

Presidential pardons are about to burst forth in a gusher. The president’s right to grant pardons is practically unlimited, though self-dealing pardons may be subject to review, particularly the pardon of a presidential co-conspirator in federal crimes, like Louis DeJoy. Or the faithful Rudy Giuliani, if he survives COVID-19, for his role in the long pattern of mutually beneficial shady, illegal political shenanigans/business deals in Ukraine that led to his old friend’s impeachment.

Jared Kushner, perhaps the greatest walking illustration of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ (a completely ordinary idiot can do very evil things, if he has the power to do them), will be at the front of the line for a full presidential pardon. Jared is totally innocent, the president will announce, but because the sick, vindictive radical left Democrats are so intent on revenge after stealing the election, nothing Jared did while in power, no profits he personally made while a government employee (a reported $82,000,000 last year, along with First Daughter Ivanka), may be investigated, no crimes, even if evidence is found, prosecuted. The pardon will most likely protect Jared in all related federal lawsuits — good luck in state courts, JK.

The most unprincipled and stupid of Trump’s accomplices will all certainly get pardons– as long as they’ve been loyal to their famously disloyal boss. Pardon me, folks, but this is just another expression of the American Rule.

Crimes Against Humanity

Human beings, capable of the most heroic acts of generosity, mercy and kindness, are also nature’s most feared killers. Whenever we organize to kill other groups of human beings, the history of the killing is written forever in the blood of the losers. The terms “Crimes Against Humanity” and “genocide” are used with a delicate selectivity as refined as the greatest works of Mozart. These arguable atrocities are seen as fit subjects for debate, often involving a cost/benefit analysis that always argues how many good lives were saved by killing however many had to be killed, however regrettable their deaths may otherwise have been.

Millions of Americans are currently worked up about a lame duck president who golfs, rage tweets lies and plans super-spreader Christmas parties, while fighting the recommendations of our top epidemiologists, as our pandemic numbers soar, the American death rate 500% our proportion of the world population. Millions of other Americans defend their leader’s dedication to freedom from tyranny. The president is right in abdicating his so-called duties to a nation of traitors after power was openly stolen from him by a nationwide conspiracy of dangerous, sick individuals — AND MILLIONS ARE ACTING LIKE THIS STOLEN ELECTION IS PERFECTLY FINE!

This debate, by itself, shows how fucked up homo sapiens are, how intractably many will defend demonstrable lies, defend even the most wanton public homicide. If you believe the first job of government is to protect the health and safety of the citizens who elect that government, well, the debate seems unfairly one-sided — a president who weaponizes rage while hospitals and morgues overflow and medical precautions are desperately needed to curb mass death is, at best, a failed leader.

I was surprised to learn that as many Japanese died in the little known American fire-bombing of Tokyo as in either of the two cities famously vaporized by American atom bombs at the end of the war [1]. I wasn’t surprised to learn that after Genghis Khan’s army had taken a city, sacked it, raped the women, took slaves, they returned a day later, two days later, to find and execute anyone cowering in hiding. The infamous My Lai Massacre, the March 16, 1968 slaughter of as many as six hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, ended in the court martial and conviction of the lieutenant who ordered the massacre. Nixon quietly let the lieutenant off the hook [2].

Vietnam veterans, and Vietnamese survivors, have stated that countless such massacres took place in the course of that insane war, My Lai was the only one that was ever front page news, with a photo spread of the terrified and the dead in LIFE magazine. The My Lai massacre is only known today because of the heroic actions of an American helicopter crew who faced down the soldiers who had gone berserk– and an award-winning war photographer, embedded with the unit that slaughtered the inhabitants of My Lai, who captured the killing in progress.

We all know the savagery our fellow “wise apes” are capable of. Look no further than a few months back: three policemen pulling a black man out of his car, on suspicion that he’d passed a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, handcuffing him and kneeling on his neck, minute after agonizing minute, until he was dead. You can google it now Killing of George Floyd video and count down the eight minute and forty-six second lynching documented on a high school girl’s unflinching cellphone video. As Nixon said about sparing Lt. Calley, the man convicted for ordering the atrocity in My Lai, “nobody gives a shit about more dead gooks, Henry.”

Here is the well-born Jared Kushner, the boob that Mr. Trump relates to so much, so similar are their origin stories (alongside two photos from March 16, 1968 in My Lai). Kushner and Trump are two self-made multi-talented geniuses who had minimal help from overbearing billionaire fathers. Let us forget (and really, why mention it?) that, but for incredible luck and considerable cunning, Jared’s grandparents could easily have been featured in black and white photos similar to the ones above, in the Nazi ravaged Europe of the early 1940s.

Jared’s portfolio, as Hand of Mr. Trump, included solving the opioid crisis, making peace in the Middle East, reorganizing the federal government and, most recently, leading the American federal effort to rein in a highly infectious, deadly novel virus.

In his role as Pandemic Czar, Kushner publicly chafed at the idea that the federal government needed to give the states any of its stockpiles of PPE or anything else needed to curtail the virus which will soon have killed 300,000 Americans. “Those are OUR stockpiles!” he insisted nonsensically, with a whiny idiocy that is impossible to unhear.

Then, on April 30, 2020, over 220,000 COVID-19 deaths ago, Mr. Kushner announced:

And blah blah blah. I know you are but what am I? Make me! Suck it, CUCK! Loser!

America boasts 614 billionaires. During the less than nine months of the official pandemic their total net worth rose from $2.95 trillion to $4 trillion. Four trillion looks like this: $4,000,000,000,000. It is four thousand billion– each billion is a thousand million.

Unthinkable, and unfair, as it is for me to mention this, a tiny fraction of this enormous windfall of over $1,000,000,000,000 could go a long way toward easing the misery of millions of Americans more desperate, hungry and in legitimate fear of homelessness and death than at any time since the Great Depression. What I am suggesting, as we all know, is Marxism 101. The most powerful forces of our great nation, the best of us, idealists intent on preserving unlimited liberty above even human life, have an instant and irrefutable rebuttal to my sick and dangerous suggestion: Fuck You.

I suppose that’s a gentler response than a firebomb with a 16 mile radius.

[1]

On the night of March 9, 1945, U.S. warplanes launch a new bombing offensive against Japan, dropping 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo over the course of the next 48 hours. Almost 16 square miles in and around the Japanese capital were incinerated, and between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the worst single firestorm in recorded history.

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The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible. It is not unlikely that the estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are over conservative.

At no time during the period between 1943 and 1946 were facilities allotted, or time provided, for the Medical Section of the Manhattan Engineer District to prepare a comprehensive history of its activities. Regulations forbade notetaking. Official records were scanty. There were few charts and photographs.

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[2]

The day after the verdict, Nixon ordered Calley released from the post stockade and placed under house arrest in the Fort Benning bachelor officer quarters. Appeals would eventually reduce his punishment to time served.

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