The Right to Violence

A brutal method some humans with power use to dominate others is violently punishing them for understandable anger that they themselves provoked in the other. You treat people unfairly, even brutally, and ruthlessly keep the pressure on them. Then, when resentment finally turns to anger, use violence to “put down” that anger and restore “law and order”.

We can see this same mechanism at work in our personal lives, when somebody insists we have no right to our strong feelings — no matter what may have caused them.

On a political level, it works the same way. Subjugate them, abuse them, make them mad, when they get mad point out that they are dangerous and insane, then surround them with the now ubiquitous SWAT teams empowered to use any violent means necessary to “keep the peace”. SWAT, we learn from the internet, is Special Weapons and Tactics, and these highly militarized police teams originated in Los Angeles in the late sixties in response to the Watts Riots.

Works every time, if you have a monopoly on state violence, make and enforce the laws, you have nothing to fear but the injury and death of as many people you don’t care about as needed to maintain the status quo. If the enraged bastards don’t like it, fuck ’em, bring in the militarized anti-insurgency riot police.

You can’t read any serious history of the United States and not understand that most of today’s American blacks are the descendants of chattel slaves (property with “no rights a white man is bound to respect”[1]) and, after the end of slavery, the victims of more than a century of unpunished, state-tolerated terrorism by white supremacists. You’d have to be Bill Barr to insist that open racism, upheld by law and traditionally enforced by deadly violence, is not a large part of our history as a society. Law enforcement and our legal system have been integral to this arrangement, always steadfastly protecting private property, if not always human life.

In law school our Constitutional Law casebook had a footnote to a case called US v. Cruikshank. The footnote was one sentence, to the effect that federal enforcement of all race-motivated violence had been left to the criminal codes of the individual states as a result of Cruikshank. Since every case in our system has a number for citation, and Cruikshank’s is 92 U.S. 542, I was able to read the legalistic Supreme Court decision that decided:

that the Bill of Rights did not apply to private actors or to state governments despite the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Wikipedia

The case arose from a massive racist pogrom in Grant Parish, Louisiana where a huge army of angry local whites attacked and slaughtered at least 150 blacks who were in Colfax, some of whom (a small group of armed black Civil War veterans) were defending the duly elected government. The whites were not having this, killed the black defenders as they surrendered, went into a frenzy of murderous violence that left dozens of mutilated, burnt bodies — the corpses of men, women and children– all over Colfax on Easter Sunday, 1873.

Ninety-eight perpetrators were identified and eventually charged by the newly created US Attorney in Louisiana (the DOJ was created to enforce citizens’ rights under the Fourteenth Amendment). By the time the case got to the Supreme Court only three or four defendants were still involved — charges against the rest had all evaporated. When the case got to the Supreme Court our unappealable justices ruled — uh, nothing to see here, the indictments were faultily drafted, riddled with fatal flaws — for example, the DOJ’s absurd contention that defendants evinced:

an intent to deprive the same persons of the ‘free exercise and enjoyment of the right and privilege to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property’ enjoyed by white citizens.

plus, the new laws were confusing, unenforceable, an intrusion onto the constitutionally protected criminal prosecution monopoly of the individual states, further, it is the right of each of the defeated Confederate States to decide how best to accommodate their own Negros to full citizen status and equal protection of the privileges and immunities newly conferred upon their, until recently, chattel, selves (not to say ‘persons’).

The Supreme Court case ruled strictly on the law, made almost no mention of the underlying racially-motivated massacre of blacks by a racist white “militia” of former Confederate defenders of “the Lost Cause.”

This case became the unappealable legal framework for the hundred years of anti-black terrorism that followed — let the states decide how to deal with their own citizens, black and WHITE alike. Notably, (as in Kavanaugh’s recent ruling banning extension of mail-in voting in Wisconsin that made only a glancing reference to the pandemic) the case stuck to a narrow question of law. There was no mention of the massacre itself, only of two or three murdered individuals, two blacks (one named Tillman, as I recall) and a white, and whether Cruikshank et al’s killing of them constituted an enforceably unconstitutional deprivation of a legitimately protected federal right [2].

I was gratified to see that someone has finally written a full book-length treatment of this atrocity (there was almost complete darkness on the subject when I was in law school, right before the turn of the century), it is referred to in this excellent (and horrific) short opinion piece The Massacre That Emboldened White Supremacists from the New York Times.

The citizens of our nation are famously inattentive to our history. For example, from the above opinion piece:

As Americans debate the merit of tearing down monuments to founding fathers, a monument to the men who massacred Black Americans in Colfax 147 years ago stands unopposed and largely unnoticed. Two blocks off Main Street, a 12-foot marble obelisk is the focal point of the Colfax cemetery. An inscription carved into its base declares it was “erected to the memory of the heroes” who “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy.” On the north side of the present-day courthouse, a historical marker reads, “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain” and added that the episode “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

During an ongoing nationwide protest over the continued brutality toward and killing of unarmed blacks by police, unarmed blacks continue to be brutalized and killed by police. Last week, a Wisconsin man named Jacob Blake was shot by police seven times, in the back, for … as far as we know, being an alleged domestic violence perpetrator with a warrant out for his arrest — who may have been in possession of a hidden knife.

A Kenosha police spokesman told the news media that Blake was reaching into his car for a knife, or perhaps even had a knife on his person, when police shot him seven times, in the back. Maybe that accounts for why the man, who amazingly survived seven bullets in the back, had been shackled to his hospital bed until yesterday– you can’t be too careful with a man who might have been reaching for a knife after having an arrest warrant for misdemeanor domestic violence and third degree sexual assault filed against him last month. Never mind that he is currently paralyzed with a spinal injury caused by a police bullet– we can’t be too careful with potentially violent perps like Jacob Blake!

As often in these cases, the sordid-sounding history of the man killed or severely injured by the police is immediately brought into the story. Police usually don’t shoot innocent people, the familiar story goes, this guy was a THUG. He had a KNIFE and CRIMINAL INTENT. He had an arrest warrant against him for A SEX CRIME. Trayvon Martin, the teenager killed by a white vigilante who shot him to death “standing his ground” under Florida law, was reputed to have had marijuana in his system when he died. Michael Brown, the kid shot to death in Ferguson, Mo., was shown, on store surveillance video, stealing a box of cigars or something mere hours before he was killed by a police officer. George Floyd was a convicted FELON! Even though he was meekly cooperating with the police when they killed him, he was BIG and REALLY SCARY!! Breonna Taylor, the Emergency Medical Technician shot to death in her own apartment in the middle of the night by plain-clothes officers who broke down her door pursuant to an erroneous no-knock warrant? Suspected (although mistakenly, as it turned out) site of an illegal drug storehouse!!!

I don’t know how a black person in America bears this kind of regular, obscene outrage, day after day, year after year, century upon century. I am not black, and my head keeps threatening to explode every time I hear the latest fucking variation on the same goddamned story about some guy who might be reaching for a knife who needed to be shot over and over by those duty-bound to serve and protect.

Humor break (c/o a friend earlier today):
A racist, a hypocrite and a liar walk into a bar.
The bartender says: “what are you having, Mr. President?”

Of course, every American knows that joke is bullshit and totally implausible bullshit, at that. The president famously doesn’t take a sip of alcohol, having seen his older brother die of alcoholism (and being too nice, which is what really killed him, according to his little brother). The president is high on life, obviously, and gets his joyfulness the natural way — by being a good person and leading a great life.

Still, there’s that small kernel of truth in the joke since the man is a racist, a hypocrite and a liar many times over. He can’t help it, that’s just the way he is, has always been, nothing he can do about it.

Except to proclaim himself the Law and Order President. The most lawless man ever to sit in the Oval Office, a man openly contemptuous of all rules, traditions and norms, and many laws as well (all of those things are for LOSERS), positions himself as the Law and Order candidate. He’s running against his own failure to end the American Carnage he warned of in his first State of the Union, in every dark, divisive, incendiary speech he’s made since. Presumably, since he’s the infallible strongman who broke it, he’s the only one who can fix it.

ROTFLMAO!

[1] From no less an authority than Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court, in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that was one of the factors leading to the Civil War.

[2] The Cruikshank court dismissed the indictments against every remaining white man who rode into town as part of that enraged army and participated in the indiscriminate slaughter, after delineating the charges in its opening section:

This was an indictment for conspiracy under the sixth section of the act of May 30, 1870, known as the Enforcement Act (16 Stat. 140), and consisted of thirty-two counts.
The first count was for banding together, with intent ‘unlawfully and feloniously to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate’ two citizens of the United States, ‘of African descent and persons of color,’ ‘with the unlawful and felonious intent thereby’ them ‘to hinder and prevent in their respective free exercise and enjoyment of their lawful right and privilege to peaceably assemble together with each other and with other citizens of the said United States for a peaceable and lawful purpose.’
The second avers an intent to hinder and prevent the exercise by the same persons of the ‘right to keep and bear arms for a lawful purpose.’
The third avers an intent to deprive the same persons ‘of their respective several lives and liberty of person, without due process of law.’
The fourth avers an intent to deprive the same persons of the ‘free exercise and enjoyment of the right and privilege to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property’ enjoyed by white citizens.
The fifth avers an intent to hinder and prevent the same persons ‘in the exercise and enjoyment of the rights, privileges, immunities, and protection granted and secured to them respectively as citizens of the said United States, and as citizens of the said State of Louisiana, by reason of and for and on account of the race and color’ of the said persons.
The sixth avers an intent to hinder and prevent the same persons in ‘the free exercise and enjoyment of the several and respective right and privilege to vote at any election to be thereafter by law had and held by the people in and of the said State of Louisiana.
‘The seventh avers an intent ‘to put in great fear of bodily harm, injure, and oppress’ the same persons, ‘because and for the reason’ that, having the right to vote, they had voted.
The eighth avers an intent ‘to prevent and hinder’ the same persons ‘in their several and respective free exercise and enjoyment of every, each, all, and singular and several rights and privileges granted and secured’ to them ‘by the constitution and laws of the United States.’
The next eight counts are a repetition of the first eight, except that, instead of the words ‘band together,’ the words ‘combine, conspire, and confederate together’ are used. Three of the defendants were found guilty under the first sixteen counts, and not guilty under the remaining counts...

I got one word for QAnon

I don’t believe I’m going out on any kind of moral limb denouncing this secret and unknowable, yet shocking, theory (anything can be a “theory”) that only Mr. Trump can save us from a massive deep state conspiracy led by Satanist pedophile cannibals intent on — well, that’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?

So just one word for these viral creeps (and bear in mind the word is coming from a New York City Jew with a toilet bowl mouth) and their irrational cult of paranoid hate, after this short Wikipedia description of the cryptic conspiracy theory:

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Trump, who is battling them. No part of the theory is based on fact.

This is just wrong

As the US Supreme Court (in Shuttlecawk v. United Shayssh) and the Bible (everywhere) both rule — a powerful public white man’s private life shall remain completely private at all times— yea, and none shall be compelled to give testimony, (which is de facto false witness and a violation of the Ninth Commandment [God] and First and Second Amendments [U.S. Constitution]) in a conspiracy to trample this inviolable right of absolute privacy (for the powerful) [1]. While the Supreme Court stopped short of outright sanctioning death by stoning for this offense (though the majority was openly coy in suggesting it might be not inappropriate in certain cases), the Bible is quite clear about the Lord’s chosen remedy for those who expose the privacy of the most powerful among us. Thus it has always been.

And yet:

Jesus Christ Himself is stewing up in heaven over this treacherous and unsolicited attack on his chosen imperfect vessel, you can be quite sure of that!

[1] As someone on Twitter recently observed:

it’s hard to win an argument with a smart person, it’s impossible to win an argument with a stupid one.

Dismaying that NOBODY is covering this crucial lawsuit!

I realize the “news” under our vulgar distractor-in-chief is a constant torrent of diarrhea coming at us through high-powered spray hoses and at this point most of us reflexively turn away from it. Still, the news media has not been following what several of them have fairly characterized as a crucial election 2020 story, teasing a federal ruling– by a Trump appointee– on the virtual non-existence of frequently claimed voter fraud.

I should make a separate category for this case so you can have my many posts on it all in one place. I’ll do that now. OK, click the link to view my several posts in order HERE.

The Trump campaign and the RNC brought a federal lawsuit in key swing state Pennsylvania to stop the expansion of absentee voting, which included provisions for the widespread use of drop boxes for mail-in ballots. The lawsuit was filed on June 29, 2020. There were hundreds of documents filed in this case, (410 as of last filing) you can see them all here. Click on any entry to read the public filing (any news service, incidentally, could do the same).

You can, for example, read the judge’s entire short August 13 order to Plaintiffs, granting Defendants’ motions to compel the production of actual evidence of the RNC/Trump campaign’s claims. JUDGE RANJAN’S ORDER IS HERE and at the bottom of this post for your scrolling convenience [1].

You will notice, if you read the judge’s order, that he orders Plaintiffs to produce specific, responsive evidence and that “if there are no responsive documents, Plaintiffs must state as much.” The judge details exactly what specific evidence (or admission they have none) Plaintiffs must provide in section 2) of his order.

He gives them until the close of business the following day, August 14th, to provide the evidence (which has never been produced anywhere) of the massive voter fraud and abuse they predict, or admit they don’t have evidence.

Reading the order I at first believed I may have been seeing another encouraging judicial profile in courage: a judge, appointed by Trump, telling him that his case would not go forward without evidence. Then the media went silent on this case.

I did my own research (tip of the hat to my old friend from law school who provided me the link to the docket). In light of further reading, Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan does not appear to be performing any kind of profile in courage, as I will explain in a moment.

The bold-faced type below is from the August 14 New York Times report of the order. Facing that is a section of the August 23 Reuters account of the same thing, phrased not as an “order” but as the judge asking the campaign to do something they simply declined to do, assuring the judge they’d win the case without evidence.

Both of these reports can’t be true. The judge’s order of August 13 was clear and explicit. It was actually an order, and not a polite ask the party could politely decline by telling the judge their case would be just fine without the evidence. You can see for yourself below [1] or on the actual docket of the case (above) that the “ask” narrative is ridiculous. How does a mainstream news organization make that kind of rookie blogger error?

Reviewing the filings on the online docket, we can see that Plaintiffs filed nothing on August 14, in spite of being ordered by the judge. Contempt of court? They don’t seem to have filed anything responsive to the judge’s order after August 14th either, which is surprising and confusing, since the only two stories updating the progress of the case (Reuters and this one, from the Intercept) cited their submission of hundreds of pages (“over 300 documents”, “524 pages”) of non-responsive documents containing no evidence of voter fraud.

Judge Ranjan writes well, and his analysis of the applicable law appears to be sound. He appears to be a qualified judge, unlike some of his recently appointed extreme-right ideologue colleagues (some deemed unqualified by the non-partisan American Bar Association). Yet he crafted a few beautifully tell-tale lines in his opinions in this case which suggest he may not be as dispassionate in this matter as his August 13 order might make him appear. Here are two.

The first is from his August 13 order to Trump 2020 and the RNC to produce evidence (addressing defendants’ request for attorneys fees for being forced to fight a lawsuit brought without evidence, to suppress the vote):

4) Pursuant to Rule 37(a)(5)(A)(ii), the Court finds that Plaintiffs’ positions were substantially justified, and so will not award reasonable expenses or attorneys’ fees.

That might be fair enough, if that subsection of Rule 37 states some legal ground for presuming a lawsuit “substantially justified” until proven otherwise or something like that. On the other hand, if the cited rule is not so generous, Judge Ranjan summarily concludes that the RNC/Trump positions were “substantially justified” even without seeing any of the evidence he ordered them to produce. In that case — hmmmm…

As to Trump’s “substantially justified” lawsuit, this next bit is as close to analysis as we get from the judge. The audacity of this amazingly supple sentence would make legalistic wordsmith and prose contortionist Robert Mueller III blush and fall on the floor:

In the context of recently analyzing why the law compels him to “stay” the case until the resolution of related state law cases, he crafts this wonder of a sentence, which I have carved up a bit, for emphasis and ease of appreciation:

…while Plaintiffs do assert one facial constitutional challenge and allege a few violations of statutory provisions

that are probably not ambiguous,

these claims are intertwined with those that are less clear. [2]

Dig it, I’m not saying every one of these assertions are necessarily legally ambiguous, a few of them are probably not, one is arguably an actual constitutional claim, but those claims that are probably not ambiguous are freely mixed in and entangled with claims for which we have even less confidence of their probable unambiguity, if you know what I’m sayin’.

I read that abortion of a sentence, the truth of what I was actually reading hit me hard and my heart sank. The words that came into my mind next were these, uttered recently to a cheering audience in red MAGA hats by the innocent and heroic non-perjurer Michael Flynn (and much in the news lately as well):

Where we go one, we go all.

[1]

ORDER GRANTING MOTIONS TO COMPEL [ECF 366, ECF 368]

After considering the parties’ submissions on the motions to compel, the Court hereby ORDERS as follows:

1) As to the motion to compel filed by the Democratic Party Intervenors [ECF 366], Plaintiffs shall respond fully to the Democratic Intervenors’ Interrogatory Nos. 1-9 and Document Requests Nos. 1-4 and 9 with specific information or documents requested and/or specifically identify by Bates number which document(s) produced are responsive to each Document Request and Interrogatory. If there are no responsive documents, Plaintiffs must state as much.

2) As to the motion to compel filed by the Sierra Club Intervenors [ECF 368], the Court finds that instances of voter fraud are relevant to the claims and defenses in this case, particularly since Plaintiffs are reserving their right to introduce such evidence or retain an expert regarding the same. Plaintiffs shall produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much. More specifically, Plaintiffs must respond fully to the Sierra Club Intervenors’ Document Request Nos. 1 and 15, “as narrowed to include documents, data, analysis and communications relating to allegations Case 2:20-cv-00966-NR Document 374 Filed 08/13/20 Page 1 of 2 2 in the Amended Complaint concerning potential or actual fraud or voter misconduct,” including as relates to: a) “non-uniform procedures concerning drop boxes in Pennsylvania”; b) “fraudulent voting resulting from the use of drop boxes, absentee ballots, or vote-by-mail in Pennsylvania”; c) “fraud resulting from the use of third-party groups to collect absentee or mail ballots in Pennsylvania”; d) “the existence and/or prevalence of fraud, ballot harvesting, ballot manipulation or destruction, or duplicitous voting in Pennsylvania”; and e) “the prevalence and/or counting of absentee or mail ballots in Pennsylvania that lack a secrecy envelope, whose envelope contains any text, mark, or symbol which reveals the elector’s identify, political affiliation, or candidate preference, or whose envelope does not include on the outside envelope a completed declaration signed by the elector.”

3) Plaintiffs shall provide supplemental responses and documents consistent with the foregoing no later than August 14, 2020.

4) Pursuant to Rule 37(a)(5)(A)(ii), the Court finds that Plaintiffs’ positions were substantially justified, and so will not award reasonable expenses or attorneys’ fees.

[2] Judge Ranjan concludes:

Thus, the state court’s resolution of the uncertain questions could narrow even these claims, or at least cause Plaintiffs to present them in a different posture. Under these exceptional circumstances, the mandatory elements of Pullman abstention are satisfied.

oops…

FOX headline:

Graham shares newly declassified FBI docs showing ‘clear’ bias toward Trump

What Lindsey Graham is touting on the spot is new proof of the clear bias AGAINST the innocent Trump and all of his associates that were unfairly prosecuted, convicted, sentenced. Not only did the FBI not protect Trump, as they did Hillary, but Graham purports to have irrefutable proof that Hillary Clinton got preferential treatment while FBI leadership was actively persecuting and illegally spying on Trump and his best people.

The long “Libertarian” campaign against the US Postal Service

In their single-minded determination to privatize every aspect of American government, outside of the military and the police (and possibly local fire departments) wealthy lovers of Liberty have long eyed the popular United States Postal Service as ripe for privatization. The history of this well-engineered plan is discussed here. It is laid out in an article HERE

Ridding us all of the US Postal Service was a longtime dream of America’s most aggressive and influential Libertarian, Charles Koch. Koch-funded institutes, think-tanks, candidates and other organs of influence have moved his once extremist vision into mainstream Republican politics Here is a short history of the recent, organized Republican/Trump administration attempt to bankrupt and dismantle the public postal system.

The skinny: 2006 the lame duck Republican Senate (rascals voted out in the blue wave that preceded Obama 2008), a few days before Christmas, in the dead of night, by voice vote, passed the crippling , Postal Accountablity and Enhancement Act, forcing the Postal Service to fully fund all pensions 75 years in advance, eventually creating a $72,000,000, hole in the USPS budget.

It turns out that, during the Obama administration, of course, Mitch McConnell blocked the nominations by Obama for the USPS Board of Governors. This left the board vacant and allowed Trump to fill all vacancies. This allowed the USPS Board of Governors to appoint Louis DeJoy, until May the finance director of the Trump 2020 campaign, during the pandemic, when voting by mail became much more crucial to ensuring everyone’s right to vote safely. This appointment allowed DeJoy to remove mailboxes and high-speed sorting machines and institute strict rules about overtime in order to hobble the timely delivery of mail.

As always, nothing to see here. Nothing to fucking see here!

In other news:

Both of these things cannot be true

A federal judge ordered Trump to produce evidence by August 14th, a judge politely asked Trump if he felt like producing evidence. Both cannot be true.

President Trump, as part of his open national effort to suppress the “Democrat” vote, has gone to court to challenge the use of drop box voting in Pennsylvania. He won that key state’s twenty electoral votes in 2016 by a whopping 0.7 percentage points, 44,292 votes. The more people he stops from casting ballots, the better his chance to win the Electoral College votes of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Trump knows that his best, likely his only, chance of re-election lies in motivating his diehard base by constantly stoking their anger, their most extreme fears, driving them to the polls in their full 40% numbers, and making sure large numbers of voters for the other party do not get to vote. He is also setting things up to contest the results of another “rigged” election if he loses. He will do this in court and by “Second Amendment” means, if necessary. Those who believe Trump is fighting a cabal of Satanic pedophile cannibals will take up arms, as they did recently against the tyranny of a “Democrat” governor who attempted to force them to wear masks during an extremely infectious pandemic.

Trump’s legal team in the Western District of Pennsylvania made explosive claims about widespread voter fraud, claims they offered no evidence to support. As Bill Barr has said when questioned about what proof he has of voter fraud: “it’s obvious!”. The judge in the Pennsylvania case was appointed by Trump and McConnell. It seemed Trump might have another Neomi Rao, the loyally partisan DC District Court of Appeals appointee, overseeing his claims that to allow widespread absentee voting in Pennsylvania would inevitably lead to massive “Democrat” fraud.

On August 13 the federal judge in that case ordered the Trump campaign and the RNC to submit evidence of fraud or admit it had none. As reported the following day in the New York Times:

Screenshot_20200815-003724_Messages

Though this order appeared to be a do-or-die profile in courage by this 42 year-old Trump appointee, drawing a line in the federal court sand against the president’s constant abuse of the court system to delay and bully (in cases he almost always loses in the end), there was no media follow up on this case. Over the following days I wrote to news directors at several outlets, was in communication with the news director at WESA, the public radio station in Pittsburgh, where the district courthouse is. The only article I saw was published on the Intercept website. It is headlined:

TRUMP COMES UP EMPTY WHEN PRESSED FOR EVIDENCE OF ELECTION FRAUD IN COURT:

The Trump campaign’s 524-page response to a discovery demand turned up precisely zero instances of mail-in vote fraud.

WESA published this piece earlier today.

This morning a friend sent me this Reuters piece which contains this, eh, analysis:

The Trump campaign says the ballot drop box invites fraud. The federal judge asked the campaign to provide evidence of actual fraud, but the campaign declined, arguing it did not have to do so in order to win the case.

The upshot of the Reuters update is that federal judge Ranjan put the federal lawsuit on hold to allow state lawsuits to resolve the state law issues. Presumably, on the advice of his superiors, the new judge chose to “stay” the case rather than dismiss the complaint outright as a flagrantly political stunt submitted in bad faith and without any evidentiary basis. Reuters reports:

The Republican president has repeatedly and without evidence said that an increase in mail-in ballots would lead to a surge in fraud, although Americans have long voted by mail.
There is perhaps no more consequential lawsuit than the one in Pennsylvania, which Trump won by less than 1 percentage point in 2016 and is considered essential to his re-election effort.
J. Nicholas Ranjan, U.S district judge for western Pennsylvania, said the federal case brought by the Trump campaign would not move forward until similar lawsuits in state courts are completed or unless they are delayed.

But what’s with Reuters’ ridiculously anodyne statement of Trump’s apparent defiance of a court order?

but the campaign declined, arguing it did not have to do so in order to win the case.

The federal judge didn’t “ask,” he ordered the campaign and the RNC to produce evidence or state that they had none, according to every report I read a week earlier. A judge does not ask when issuing a court order. That’s why it’s called an “order”.

The powerful plaintiffs respectfully disagreed with the judge’s “request” and said they’d win even without evidence, like in the rigged Senate “impeachment” “trial”.

What the fuck, man, is everybody asleep?

On His Way Back from Epstein’s?

World-class instinctual expert on propaganda, Adolf Hitler, applauded the Allied propagandists who, during the World War (the first, and at the time, only one) created incendiary, aggressively lying captions for news photos. These captions effectively inspired hatred, rage and terror, three things needed to make an army fight a hated enemy (or civilian group, for that matter) to the death. Mr. Hitler could not endorse this tested and effective technique of creating lying captions strongly enough. He sang its praises lustily in the pages of Mein Kampf.

So, using this principle, I could take, say, an otherwise innocent picture of somebody, like this one:

And simply provide a scandal-evoking caption like:

Coming home from Epstein’s?

to suggest, without a shred of evidence (and with perfect deniability– it’s just a question!), that the man pictured here is with a child prostitute, solicited and groomed by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell [1], for the use of wealthy, influential pedophiles. The girl is a takeout order.

It is a small step from producing fake photographic “proof” (the kid is actually a young self-made entrepreneur-in-training named Ivanka Trump) to spinning the rest of the conspiracy– not only does this evil pervert pay a sex-trafficker to kidnap this young girl so he can take her away in his limo to sexually abuse her, but, even worse, not long after this picture was taken he murdered her and drank her blood.

And, of course, as the mysterious and all-knowing oracle named W preaches: only Joe Biden can save us from this dastardly plot hatched by this depraved sex-pervert cannibal and his likeminded followers!!!

[1] The above link will take you to a long Guardian article about Maxwell’s father, Ian Robert Maxwell, controversial self-made millionaire media titan and politician and his influence on Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend. In Ghislane’s larger-than-life father’s defense, and you have to love it, his widow had this to say:

In her autobiography, Betty, who died aged 92 in 2013, described Maxwell as bullying, unfaithful and frequently absent. But she insisted he was “not the degenerate monster” many said he was.
source

There will be those who will try to refute this

The more I think about the coalition of conservatives who formed the Lincoln Project , their political views, the efforts they’ve made in the past to bring something like this about (Trump was an unintended consequence for them, though predictable) the less I like this group — though I respect that they’re trying to atone for bringing the nation to the brink of totalitarianism. And, as their type always has, they make very powerful political ads.

This hard-hitting spot is not going to sit well with the pro-evil forces, I can tell you for sure. It can be refuted only by calling all reports of federal action and inaction in a pandemic, all death and infection numbers, all comparisons to other nations, all reports about political calculation by the most nakedly “transactional” administration in history, all “news”, the product of vicious, lying partisans intent on destroying the greatest genius that has ever led a nation in the history of the world.

It’s perhaps worth noting that the teenaged daughter of Kellyanne and George Conway, Kellyanne perhaps the loyalest and most savage of Trump defenders, he of the Lincoln Project– and a man who holds that Trump suffers from an extreme and malignant form of narcissistic personality disorder — effectively forced both of her parents out of politics for the foreseeable future. The fifteen year-old “influencer” announced her intention to “emancipate” herself, to get out of the madhouse she’s been growing up in. Kellyanne and George both publicly agreed to a public ceasefire, Kellyanne announcing that she’s stepping down as Trump’s loudest mouthpiece, George stepping away from the Lincoln Project.

May the most malignant conspiracy theory… not win.

A Few More Thoughts About Time

When I got the call from my sister, during a festive meal at the home of old friends, that my father had been admitted to the hospital after being brought to the emergency room, time changed.

“When I saw the doctor’s face I knew this was it,” my sister told me, “he looked like the malach ha mavet (Angel of Death).” The specialists my father had been seeing regularly — cardiologist, endocrinologist, hematologist — collectively had no clue that their patient was in the last stage of liver cancer, days from death. The ER doctor, assessing my father’s jaundiced color, difficulty moving and tapping his stomach, distended with ascites (liver-related fluid build up in the abdomen) [1] knew at once that this man was in the last days of liver cancer.

Two doctors were at the dinner table when I got the news. When I mentioned the ascites they both told me not to worry, that ascites can be from many things [2], that I should wait and talk to the doctors at the hospital. I consider their reassuring lies to have been a kindness, under the circumstances, and always think of their unspoken, united determination to shield me from extra worry with great fondness.

“If you have any family who want to see him before he goes, you should call them right away,” the ER doctor told my sister.

A couple of days later I arrived in Florida. My father was attached to a bag hanging off the side of the hospital bed. The bag was filling with the most unhealthy looking liquid I’ve ever seen. It was the color of cancer. It dripped away, along with what was left of his life, for the three or four days I was in Florida before my father breathed his last breath.

My father was eager to see his little brother, a man he had always bullied and dismissed. Once, late in his life, when my father was returning from a short visit to his brother I asked him how my uncle was doing. My father paused for a few seconds to reflect then uttered this great line: “let’s just say, he remains unchanged.” At the end my father was anxious for his brother to be there and his brother rushed to Florida.

I went to pick my uncle up at Ft. Lauderdale airport. When we got to the hospital he immediately stopped the doctor, who’d met us in the hall to update us about the patient’s condition, to ask if there was any chance of a liver transplant for his dying 80 year-old brother. I had to take my uncle by the arm to let the uncomfortable doctor get away. The way the two brothers clung to each other at the end was poignant to see.

My uncle was a bossy man and he instructed us all, at around nine pm, that it was time to let the dying man rest. For some reason we all left the hospital. I even attempted to get to sleep, hours before my natural bedtime, which is around four a.m. Suddenly I sat up, thinking “what the fuck?,” got in the car and headed back to the hospital.

My father, who’d told me earlier in the day that he wanted to talk to me, that he was still assembling his thoughts, was wide awake when I arrived around one a.m. He appeared to be expecting me. I’d always had an adversarial relationship with my father, one I’d tried many times to improve, but my father was so deeply, fundamentally wounded that meaningful peace with him was pretty much out of the question.

I’m a fairly creative person, with an active imagination, and, once I left my parents’ house, I’d tried everything I could imagine over the years to make peace with my old man. In the end, when he angrily told me that if he ever told me what he really felt about me it would do “irreparable harm” to our relationship, I saw that his desperation was too great for him to overcome. He would “win” by destroying what was left of our ability to discuss things beyond the weather, baseball, history and politics. I stopped banging my head against the locked door at that point.

I am writing about time. Two years passed from that final slamming of the vault on any hope for real dialogue with my father. Nobody knows from one minute to the next how long the rest of their life will be. I can measure it now: two years elapsed from the time I became certain that no true peace with my father was possible.

During those years I was in psychotherapy, and I finally reached a point where I was able to understand that my father was incapable of doing any better; that he was actually, sad as it was, doing the best he could. Knowing this allowed me to let go of a lot of the anger I had toward him.

Luckily, I had this revelation a few months before I got that call from my sister than our father was not long for this world. I was ready, in a sense, in a way I couldn’t have been holding on to the pain and anger my father’s righteous prosecutorial rage inspired in me.

Now, on April 29, 2005, it is after one a.m. on what would turn out to be the last night of my father’s life. The first question he asked is if I’d brought the digital recorder I’d bought for him earlier in the day. I’d left it with the nurse, got it, turned it on, propped it on his chest.

The next thing he said was that his life was basically over by the time he was two. He didn’t mention why, it was something I already knew (though not from him) — his angry, religious mother had whipped him in the face from the time he could stand. Add to that “grinding poverty” and turning five as The Depression began, being the poorest of the poor in a small town as everyone in your family back in Europe is being rounded up and killed, you begin to get the picture. Betrayal by a mother, shame and humiliation are not easily overcome. I can’t imagine the struggle my father had, to appear strong, infallible, while making only glancing references to the “demons” we all must deal with.

Because I was no longer that angry, because my father was dying, I knew my purpose in that room was to make his death as easy as it could be. I was not there to challenge him, I was there to comfort him. I understood without needing to think about it that these moments were not about me, they were about him.

When he apologized for putting obstacles in front of my sister and me, making our lives harder instead of helping us in times of need as a loving father should, I told him he’d done the best he could.

When he told me he’d felt me reaching out many times over the years, I nodded, thankful to hear him finally acknowledge it. He lamented that he’d been too fucked up and defensive for us to have this kind of conversation fifteen years ago.

At the time the number seemed off to me — thirty years of war, fifteen of peace? Later I realized that fifteen days, or even fifteen hours, of this kind of honesty would have been an amazing blessing.

We spoke quietly for several hours, the door to my father’s hospital room open, everyone else on the floor asleep. The nurse, an angel in human form, sat outside the room. The look of love she gave me when I left I will never forget.

Early next evening, as the sun was beginning to set, my father told my sister, my uncle and my mother that since I’d arrived it was a good time for them to take a break, go to the cafeteria and get something to eat.

As soon as they were gone my father said to me “I don’t know how to do this.” I assured him that nobody did, that it would be fine. The nurse helped take down the bar on one side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father. I don’t remember if I had my hand on him, or arm around him, or anything like that, but I sat close by.

His breathing got shallower and shallower, death from liver cancer is supposed to be one of the gentler ways to go. After the liver goes, the kidneys shut down and you go to sleep, only forever.

A friend later told me the Talmud poetically compares the moment of death to removing a hair from a glass of milk. It is an excellent description in the case of death from liver cancer.

Within twenty minutes or so my father took his last breath. I reached over and closed his dead eyes with the fingers of one hand, like I’d done it a thousand times.

[1] A 0.66 second search reveals:

Ascites is when over 25 milliliters of fluid fills the space between the abdominal lining and the organs. It’s usually caused by cirrhosis.

[2] It turns out they were misleading me, not lying:

But the most dangerous problem associated with ascites is infection, which can be life-threatening. Ascites may go away with a low salt diet, and with diuretics (water pills) ordered by your provider.