Tommy Tuberville, adroit as Senate veterans, not holding up ouster of DeJoy

We already know that Coach Tuber (Mr. Potato Head?) blocked hundreds of Biden military appointments on behalf of Christian Dominionists who were outraged that the US military condoned murder by allowing female soldiers to make healthcare decisions regarding their pregnancies. These radical Christians consider the military’s policy of allowing women in the military to murder the “unborn” a moral abomination. Tuberville was a one man filibuster, making the pious Christian ghosts of the old enslavers proud.

I realized just now that Tuberville, asshole that he is, is not the guy blocking Biden’s three nominations to the Postal Board of Governors. Those nominations, one dating back to February 29, 2024, have been hung up in the Senate committee, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, that must approve the nominees and send their names out for a full Senate vote. Fist raising/fleeing Josh Hawley could be blocking them, or Rand Paul, or perhaps Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, or maybe creepy looking Florida Senator Rick Scott, sassy Independent Kirsten Synema, or all of the above.

I called the number on the committee’s website and spoke to an intelligent sounding receptionist for the Committee who had no public information. She heard me out, took my number and held out the neutral hope that a supervisor would look into my five unanswered on-line contacts and possibly get back to me.

I guess the next person to contact directly is Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mi). Here is the contact information for this august body, our direct representatives in our great, if generally nonresponsive, corporate sponsored democracy. Give them a call, they are always delighted to hear from taxpayers.

Here’s what I wrote to the chairman:

I wrote to your committee numerous times in the last month looking for an explanation of why a partisan postmaster who has slowed mail delivery to all-time lows nationwide is allowed to decide when to deliver upwards of 50,000,000 mail-in ballots in 2024.

No news since March 2024 on the nomination of Marty Walsh to fill one of the vacancies on the USPS board of governors. Friday’s nominations of two more leave me no more hopeful.

Here’s some data. I would love to hear back from you.

In November 2020, when DeJoy had been postmaster for a few months, less than 50,000 mail-in ballots were delivered too late to be counted. Now it is four full years, full-steam ahead on “Delivering for America” (DFA), the Postal Regulatory Commission’s urging DFA be suspended until after the election be damned.

In 2020, during the depths of Covid, 66,000,000 votes were cast by mail, 43% of all ballots cast (US Census).

34,248,000 mail-in ballots were cast in the 2022 midterms, 31.8% of 107,700,000 total votes cast in that high turnout midterm election (Pew Research)

Beyond that, numbers for mail-in voting have been on the rise in all elections since 2008. (US Election Assistance Commission)

DeJoy claimed, in his recent PR piece in the Washington Post, that in August 2023 there was a 98% on-time rate for mail delivery coast to coast. He is silent about what the current on-time delivery rate is. I wonder why.

We note that Senator Jon Ossoff reported on-time delivery from the new Atlanta processing and distribution center was 98% in 2022, 52% in 2023 and 72% YTD 2024.

This is not something to be concerned about?

Do American voters not have the right to know how nominations are killed in a Senate committee?

Yours in the fight to preserve democracy,
Eliot Widaen
phone number (after 1 pm)

see also

Terror of humiliation leads to violence

Some people who experience trauma as young children never escape the cycle of emotional violence and neglect they were raised in.   Parents who routinely neglect or humiliate a child do this because of their own inescapable pain.  Why wouldn’t a parent incapable of nurturing a young human being seek help?   It is humiliating to them to admit they are not perfect and all-knowing, and besides, our culture doesn’t offer this kind of help to “losers.”  The child, therefore, is the problem, demanding, weak, selfish, needy, emotionally draining, never happy, critical, hypochondriacal, crazy, ungrateful, unfair, vicious, etc.

Much easier for someone who can never be at fault to have a long list of their child’s critical defects, never mind that the child is three months old, or a year old, or three days old, for that matter. It is well known that some babies are born placid and “easy” while others are more agitated and “difficult”. It is the pure bad luck of a parent who can never be wrong to have the latter kind of baby and absolutely no fault of their’s if the child grows up to unfairly harbor ill will toward them.

I don’t have much sympathy for the authoritarian personality.  I have almost none.  It is a shame, terrible, regrettable, lamentable and to be mourned, seeing a parent like this with her child, but sympathy for the moral dilemma of the snarling, other-blaming autocratic parent?  None.

I’m sure most childless cat ladies and cat men, and many parents, feel the same way about domineering parents who angrily insist on blaming their children for the parents’ unresolved issues and inadequacies.

Imagine my horror, sharing a vacation house with a couple of old, dear friends who were seething at each other day after day.  Watching the manic discomfort of their oldest son when he came by, the mother’s clear inability to connect with this unconventional young man, the father’s amiable attempts to be a good guy, even though he was unable to protect the kid from even the worst abuse when his son was young, or ever. 

As their anger at each other simmered and escalated, and I later found out they often go days locked in a silent battle of the wills, I fell deeper and deeper into the quicksand of someone else’s unresolvable pain.  I had seen too much, too clearly, too horribly, humiliatingly.  In the end, if I didn’t stop insisting on my own right not to be abused, which I eventually was, I would have to be killed.  They made it crystal clear.  Every single time.  They would rage, storm out, insist the only problem was me, that I am unloving, unforgiving and disloyal.   I suppose witnessing their rage at each other made me all of those things.

So when the lynch mob of the rest of my old friends came for me, disorienting and painful as it was, I could only thank God for a neck made super strong and resilient by decades of working to restore my neuroplasticity, the ability of the emotions and intellect to roll with the fucking punches without getting destroyed.

I find it is helpful, when facing an unfair attack, to keep in mind that “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.”

Your medical files speak the truth

Dr. D. talked me out of the biopsy my urologist had sent me to have. He’d looked over my medical records and told me he was confused about why I’d been sent for a biopsy. He said if he was me, and I just had a clean MRI, and my PSA had been steady for years, that he would put off having a biopsy of his prostate unless there was clear indication that one might be diagnostically helpful.

Since there was no indication that a biopsy was immediately necessary, the doctor told me, and since at my age any prostate cancer is going to be slow growing, there is no reason not to put it off until there is a clear indication of the need to do a biopsy.

Then he described the pain of the procedure and week of discomfort that is the normal after a needle biopsy takes twelve slices of your prostate, through your anus.   He convinced me there was no medical urgency to the biopsy, I thanked him and left without having the needles delicately inserted up my ass. 

The next time I saw my long-time urologist he immediately asked me why I didn’t have the biopsy. I told him the doctor he sent me to had talked me out of it.  I described our conversation. He pointed at his computer screen and read from my medical notes: “patient refused.”

Of course that’s what my medical record at the corporate hospital said. Phrasing it that way was the prudent, liability-avoiding way to notate our conversation. It was not false that I’d declined, or refused, the biopsy, though misleading. The medical record, after all, never lies. Put it on the witness stand, if it comes to it, and it will always say exactly the same thing.

The bit of self-protecting wording is also a nice snapshot of the essence of corporate narcissism.   The corporate bottom line, and only line, so ruled by the Supreme Court while creating this “person” out of legal fiction and political calculation, is profit and avoiding accountability/loss, after all.

What kind of person is a corporation, if not a single-minded, predatory psychopath?

Still, nice of Dr. D. to spare me the unnecessary hassle of that prostate biopsy. I sure hope he was right and I didn’t make a mistake refusing the treatment he was offering and ready to provide.

Louie Louie

There is almost no current public information available about Louis Dejoy’s destruction of on-time mail delivery in the US or what anyone is doing to actually to stop it in time for tens of millions of mail-in ballots to be delivered on time to be counted in November. Try googling it and you’ll see what I mean. Why can’t the Postal Board of Governors fire Louie fucking DeJoy?

This is from a February 2021 article noting the then difficulty of Biden removing DeJoy (this was before several turnovers — and two ongoing vacancies — Tubervilled? — on the nine member Postal Board of Governors). It notes the tens of thousands of mail-in ballots delivered too late to be counted in 2020 as among the reasons for concern with having a corrupt, arrogant, defiant partisan mega-donor as US Postmaster General. Since then, mail service has been slowed considerably, and targeted by zip code, but even after six months in office, DeJoy’s achievements in slowing mail from selected “anarchist jurisdictions” was impressive.

. . . Improving the Postal Service would have an immediate, beneficial impact on almost every American’s life. But it can’t happen while DeJoy is in charge, and there’s no easy way for Biden to get him out of office. The new president will remain saddled with Trump’s postmaster general for at least a year—unless he decides that rescuing the Postal Service is more urgent than respecting its independence. . .

. . . In the week of Dec. 26, [2021] the last period for which USPS publicly disclosed its delivery rates [as of this Feb. 2021 article], only 63.87 percent of first-class mail made it to its destination on time across the U.S. The on-time delivery rate was even worse during that week in certain localities: It was only 29.97 percent in Baltimore, 32.32 percent in Central Pennsylvania, and 27.82 percent in Northern Ohio. Overall, in the fourth quarter of 2020, USPS never came close to the 96 percent on-time delivery standard that the agency sets for itself. . .

source

Here’s an April 2024 letter signed by a bipartisan group of 26 senators, urging DeJoy to consider the recommendations of the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) that he pause his Project 2025 Postal Service Rescue Plan (“Delivering for America”) until its delaying effects could be fully studied. DeJoy would not commit to abiding by the PRC’s recommendations. He did not.

Here is the sneering piece of shit’s May, 2024 reply to the policy-driven deterioration of mail delivery:

“Has anyone in Congress or the PRC ever worked to stem $160 billion in projected organizational losses, while overcoming the devastating impact to an organization that nearly $100 billion in previous losses inflicts?” DeJoy asked, before emphatically answering his own question. “The answer is no.”

He apologized for the “deteriorated performance” that has occurred and vowed to soon reverse it, while adding the change that is necessary is “hard, uncomfortable for everyone and encounters errors of varying magnitude.”

If USPS does not see a turnaround quickly, Congress’ patience could run thin and opt to take matters into its own hands. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., has introduced legislation that would place new restrictions on the Postal Service’s changes.

source

That May, 2024 article begins:

In the face of mounting pressure from lawmakers of all political stripes, watchdogs, stakeholders and even members of its own governing board, as well as another financial quarter in the red, leadership of the U.S. Postal Service is doubling down on its controversial plan to overhaul the agency. 

Didn’t one of our greatest genius billionaire job creators buy the newspaper whose slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness”? While Democrats and anti-fascists celebrate Biden’s selfless decision to let Harris run for president, and many are flushed with excitement over her record fundraising in just a day and a half, there’s more than enough darkness here to allow a quick, choking death for democracy, come election day, when delivery tens of millions of ballots is in the hands of the psychopathic, partisan CEO pictured above and below.

Triumph of the Will, USA style

Those who need to control others always use force to inflict their will on the resistant. Whatever force is at their command will be used to crush the will of others. The ultimate weapon is making people good and dead — either physically or by destroying their good name among the people who love them. The terror of death is the last thing you want to have visited on you, once you see it in action. It tends to keep the ones not brutally killed, not made gruesome examples of, in line with the leader.

You will grimace at the soul ripping power of this violent force if you’ve ever had your good name assassinated. You will also know the force of maniacal will if anyone you love has been bullied, beaten or killed, physically or spiritually, after insane accusations of defiance or heresy. There is only one kind of sick fuck who gladly inflicts pain on others, though there are many variations in style. The common theme is force, and their willingness to use unlimited amounts of it against others in the user of force’s desperation to command obedience.

Use force to make ten year-old victims of rape carry the rapist’s baby to term and deliver it alive. Use force to punish any doctor who performs the abortion on the already traumatized girl. Use force on the cab driver who takes her across the border to a state where abortion for rape victims is still available. Use force to rip children from the arms of their asylum seeker/migrant parents at the border. How about this for force — keep no records of where you send these poor kids so the parents have no hope of ever seeing them again. Revive the death penalty, make it as common and normal as political lobbying. Use force to make people obey your religion, post its Ten Commandments in every classroom while you abolish the Department of Education. Forcefully abolish affordable health care for millions because, just because — if a poor person wants health care, beg your boss for it, bitches. Abolish the right of labor to organize, while we’re at it. Permanently end a child tax credit that took millions of children out of poverty while that credit was lawful. Promise to take millions of people, at gunpoint, to concentration camps for mass deportation.

The party of personal freedom, local control of government, limited government, law and order, no regulations on businesses, the MAGA party, embraces the violent coercion of people they hate. Americans are free to obey, or die. Local government is perfect, if it agrees with our pious national will. Limited government is necessary to command obedience, for those who would be obeyed. Strict, inviolable law and order for the poor and dispossessed, complete immunity for the ruling elite. Agents for the super-wealthy will decide if anti-pollution policies cost their patrons too much to be enforced. Religious Christians will decide what can be taught in schools, publicly debated, and what is heresy that will be strictly punished. Argue with the will of God on pain of death, accursed heretic!

We’ve seen fascism in many places in the last hundred years. It is an updated variation on the absolute right of history’s bloodiest Divine Right kings, fighting Popes and the unquestionable rule of our superiors and the armies that enforce their will. The main demonstrator of political superiority, as far as I can tell, is an open willingness to use deadly force to destroy anyone who would contest your incontestable will. I have seen these motherfuckers in action many times in my own life, and in the end, once conflict arises (and this taype can only react to conflict with aggression and threats of force) each must be met with rejection. To tolerate someone forcing you to abide by their beliefs, violently requiring you renounce what you know is right, is a worse death than the one those who must be obeyed will try to inflict once you walk away from them.

One trick turds

If someone needs to always be right, prevail in every transaction, never be at fault for anything, they will always resort to the same trick. If they can’t prove themselves right by some kind of evidence, or if they’ve obviously come out on the short end of some deal, or it is ridiculous to claim they played no part in the fatal conflict they are blaming the other person for 100%, they default to lying.

Their reply is always the same: an indignant, confused, confusing stream of nonsense, messy word salad, constantly shifting, contradictory stories, incoherent and liberally spiced with nice, juicy lies. Because the main thing, the only thing, is not to lose, never, NEVER, to be a loser, and if the truth hurts your case (which it often will), fuck the fucking truth, anything goes, the ends always justify the means, winning is the only thing.

So our former president has one move, it is the same one every time. From a baseline of stream of consciousness non sequiturs, it moves to grievance, talk of revenge, retribution, terrible crimes being committed against him by satanically evil fucks, persecution, the need to round up people at gun point and put them in camps, because they are drug dealers, from prisons and insane asylums, rapists, killers, vermin, blood poisoners.

The stream of his steaming bullshit is remarkably consistent, even if he introduces a new character from time to time. Rosie O’Donnell was eventually replaced by Crooked Hillary, Crazy Nancy (make hammering gesture for crowd, a wink to her 85 year-old husband being attacked by a hammer wielding Trump lover) Adam Schiff, Mueller, the January 6th subcommittee and so on. He brings in new friends and soulmates like Kim Jong Un, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin and Hannibal Lechter.

If the Provigil and Adderall have been injected into a pink buttock and are fully on board, and he is particularly focused that day, he would say, in a cogent few sentences, what he scatters across rambling stretches of his last few hundred interchangeable speeches:

“I am the victim, I suffer for you, like Jesus, and I have the wounds to prove it, trust me, trust me, I could take off my shirt and show you my gorgeous double Ds, but then they’d say I was an exhibitionist, “Trump’s a narcissist,” they would say, because they miss no opportunity to literally crucify me, think of the twenty-five years of baseless witch hunts against me, all with no evidence, all fake, like the news, like your face, unlike my beautiful, thick, luxuriant head of blonde hair that no shower gives me enough water to lather and get the soap out of. I have to take like five showers in a row, and then flush the toilet fifteen times, because the Democrats, with their Marxist fascist water pressure regulations, they want to regulate everything, they want to tell you what to do, down to flushing your own toilet, so that a simple toilet becomes useless, refuses to flush documents, no matter how small you tear them up, blah blah blah”

Coprophagous [1] corporate media laps this insane, disgusting swill up, disgustingly, and its wealthy talking heads glibly normalize it all, talking about it like this is perfectly regular, all political candidates are rambling, insane criminal maniacs, n’est-ce pas? They lie to the citizens about the normalcy of radical extremism for the profit of their executives and shareholders. Whore culture is an ugly thing when it is in the service of a Nazi-like cult, and Leonard Leo’s wet dream of a devoutly Christo-fascist America is nothing if not Nazi-ish, but, what are you going to do? Such is the base profit motive that rules our Exceptional nation.

Time to minimize exposure to the aggravating profit-driven hysteria stirring of the corporate media. If it bleeds it leads, if it’s ugly it gets clicks, if its scary it get clicks, engagement equals gigantic CEO bonuses and elegant platinum parachutes when scandal hits. Fuck corporate media.

Here’s just two things on the recent news.

One: that Supreme Court presidential immunity case means only one thing — crimes committed by a criminal president, including all efforts to cover it up and all pardons of co-conspirators, no matter how corrupt, or even if the pardons are sold outright — are protected from public view or use in litigation of any kind, without the express consent of the Supreme Court, the entity that decides what criminal behavior falls within the highly arguable scope of ‘the outer fringes of the perimeter of arguably official duties’ which enjoy a presumption of legality, even if they involve, say, political assassination.

There is only one ex-president in American history who benefits from this ruling and he is running to figurehead Project 2025. First order of business, put these 6 Leonard Leo putos back in the tiny minority they are actually part of. These privileged fucks don’t speak for the average citizen, they are bought and paid for by our most unscrupulous psychopath billionaires.

Thing Two: Whoever the Democrats wind up running in 2024 (and I’m with Bernie and AOC, Biden did a great job, he’s been able to work well with all sides, he’s got the skills, the temperament, he’s earned the right to run, and he can kick Trump’s ass, but I’ll vote for whoever the cringing weasels wind up running) should win the election by a huge margin. The trouble is the fucking Electoral College, which can be gamed by anyone with the money and power to arrange a small number of votes in select districts.

I’ve been on a mission to alert people to the danger of a MAGA megadonor/sleeper in charge of the Postal Service, somehow still, who has crippled mail service nationwide and has the power to slow delivery, or halt it altogether, based on zip code. DeJoy in position to suppress 50,000,000 votes, if needed, seems to me the reason these Nazi dickheads are seeming so overconfident about not needing to attract more than 35% of the vote.

Very important to get some action on removing the fucking Postmaster before the election starts…

[1]

(adjective) 1: Feeding on excrement “coprophagous beetles.” 2: Feeding upon dung, as certain insects.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

Irrational faith vs. reasonable conversation

It is impossible not to notice the ungodly strength of irrational “arguments”. Just scan the alarmingly skewed headlines and editorials of the fucking New York Times. Once an irrational belief is embraced, that’s all she wrote, boys and girls.

A person of unquestioning faith cannot be persuaded by facts, videos, secret recordings, written evidence, sworn testimony, a mountain of reasonable arguments for doubt or skepticism. This is the beauty, and unparalleled horror, of true belief. If you believe, say “amen”, and you no longer need to care in the least about the so-called “truth”. The truth you now believe will set you free (from ever needing to argue about truth again.)

That other truth, let us be clear, is the truth of heretics, infidels, God deniers, Christ killers, pedophile cannibal left-wing billionaires, libtards, cucks, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.

Every tyrant, every leader around whom a cult of personality is built, every psychopathic CEO, every greed demented luster after thousands of millions of dollars, requires a belief system in which their quirks and abuses are seen as unquestionable virtues. You may not question this belief system without being portrayed as [insert your favorite dismissive expletive]. Now let us all say “amen”, it is so [1].

The horror is that humans, under pressure, will act as cleverly as lemmings in their desperation to save themselves, to survive, thrive, be part of something bigger than themselves, part of a true religion, true cult, true family or true couple. There is no human collective too small to be immune to this unilateral imposition of will, and demand for unwavering faith, from someone claiming the right to rule.

It is the shame of being human, witnessing the constant, thoughtless embrace of angry, sometimes murderous, irrationality. The worst of it is that these murdering mobs truly believe that all-mighty, all-powerful, all-merciful GOD told them it is their holy duty to slaughter. Holy shit, my friends.

[1] amen (interjection): used to express solemn ratification (as of an expression of faith) or hearty approval (as of an assertion). [Merriam Webster]

Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ explains Project 2025

These radical right wing activists are always referred to as “conservatives”. They are radical reactionaries, determined authoritarians, future American Nazis who have waited since 1954 (when an “activist” court ruled American apartheid in education unconstitutional) with saliva on their fangs. Check out Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, his casual remarks in the Wall Street Journal’s explainer about Project 2025 translated directly from the German.

Postal Regulatory Commission v. DeJoy

The following is from one of very few recent articles about our partisan postmaster, who comes across as pugnacious in his dealings with the Postal Regulatory Commission, and whose disruption of dependable mail service has, apparently, even aggravated House Republicans. This is from an organization called Government Executive, [govexec.com] (link below)

. . . The [Postal Regulatory Commission, PRC] commission made its recommendation after finding in the report that USPS in fiscal 2023 missed most of its goals for high-quality service performance; three of its eight goals related to customer service; and all of its goals related to maintaining a safe workplace, engaged workforce and financially healthy organization. 

DeJoy and PRC have been at odds for years, as the postmaster general has accused the regulators—and other stakeholders—of standing in the way of essential steps he must take to save the agency from insolvency. The new recommendation, however, marks the first time PRC has called for a pause to DeJoy’s signature plan. It follows the introduction of bipartisan bills that would restrict the Postal Service from carrying out its changes. 

In a recently introduced fiscal 2025 spending bill, House Republicans said they were “deeply concerned about the potential negative impacts” of DeJoy’s reforms. 

PRC flagged other aspects of DeJoy’s plan, including suggesting USPS consider whether its decision in recent years to increase prices twice annually “may accelerate electronic diversion resulting in adverse volume effects.” While postal officials have repeatedly highlighted its efforts to engage with its customers and employees over its plans, the commission said it has concerns about the “limited transparency” regarding the DFA and their “effects on service performance.” PRC recently pushed back on DeJoy’s rate increase strategy, saying postal management should exercise more discretion before continuing with its approach that “may be unprecedented in the history of the Postal Service.”

Many lawmakers and stakeholders across the postal community are imploring PRC to go further, calling for it to issue an “advisory opinion” on the totality of DeJoy’s DFA plan. 

Large-scale mailers and others that interact with the Postal Service regularly are hopeful an advisory opinion—while not enforceable—would provide a third-party assessment of the agency’s plans, evaluate its assumptions and potentially offer additional fodder to motivate either the USPS board of governors or Congress to intervene.

source

Why is this imperious MAGA mega-donor still in charge of crippling mail delivery ahead of an election with an expected 50,000,000 mail-in ballots? [1]

[1]

In 2020, during the depths of Covid, 66,000,000 votes were cast by mail, 43% of all ballots cast. (US Census)

34,248,000 mail-in ballots were cast in the 2022 midterms, 31.8% of 107,700,000 total votes cast in that high turnout midterm election  source 

Beyond that, numbers for mail-in voting have been on the rise in all elections since 2008. source