Tag Archives: news

Status quid pro quo

Hard as it is to swallow this much shit at one time, we need to start rousing ourselves for the fight against what is about to come.

The corporatization of society, with a narrow focus on the stock market’s sacred bottom line, means both parties are run by corporate/billionaire interests and the vast majority of us can fuck off and kill each other. Although both parties do very well for the rich and powerful, neither corporate party is really looking out for the tens of millions of powerless, basically screwed citizens of the United States. Hence 70,000,000 votes for MAGA, at least Trump acknowledges screwed people’s right to be mad as hell about being treated like shit.

A little history/context, then.

89 year-old Charles Koch, son of abusive Hitler admiring John Birch Society founding member Fred Koch, has been hard at work with his billionaire cronies brilliantly engineering this nightmare moment for fifty years.   His dad would be so proud of Charlie’s accomplishments.   

Thanks to the efforts of Koch’s network of think tanks and far right fraternal organizations (with a tip of the cap to Rupert Murdoch), corporations are people, minorities and individual humans not so much.  Unlimited dark money in politics is now protected free speech.  Billionaires can give uncounted billions to PACs to elect their chosen candidates to public office. What could go wrong?

Well-regulated militia: regulating guns unconstitutional!  Partisan gerrymandering is fine and perfectly legal, unless overtly racist speeches are made by legislators in full Klan regalia while they draw the districts, and there is video tape of it and fifty or more Republican witnesses present.   Voting Rights schmoting rights, majoritarian tyranny must be stopped, enough with the vicious accusations of white nationalist racism already.   

Quid pro quos are fine, as long as the quid gratuity comes after the quo.  Medieval witch burning theologians are fine to cite as irrefutable authorities in a Supreme Court decision to force raped girls to give birth.  Women only have full bodily autonomy if they are wealthy or the wives of right wing extremist Supreme Court justices. 

President may now commit crimes in office if he uses the Dershowitz/Nixon/Nuremberg defense: he honestly feels he is battling inhuman monsters in his official capacity.  If he orders a murder, or a dozen, he can preemptively pardon the murderers, no questions asked.   

This checklist would have been Hitler’s wet dream.  No need to burn down the German Reichstag and seize emergency powers to be a dictator on day one if you had a series of unappealable legal rulings like that to work with.

I think Rebecca Solnit nails why fervent belief in a lying, predatory, raping, revenge crazed, born wealthy, transactional, bigoted, criminal, slightly demented con artist, fiercely held by tens of millions of Americans, has been able to go mainstream enough to put the man and his best people back in power:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga

Time to wake up, voters

My concern about the power of a pugnacious partisan postmaster to not deliver millions of ballots, a guy who has already crippled mail delivery nationwide, has been met by silence or dismissal from every one of my elected officials and everyone in progressive media I’ve contacted. Here’s what a Democratic strategist I contacted wrote back to me.

I’ve read the proposed headlines below. This is out of my area of expertise, but these sorts of fears were very prominent in 2020 when Trump was president and Covid was making mail in ballots central to the election. When we looked into them then, they didn’t materialize. I don’t have more information than that. 

Here were my proposed headlines:

headline one:  Trump megadonor Postmaster General has the ability to halt delivery of millions of mail-in ballots from selected zip codes

headline two:  Federal Voter Suppression Scheme, under color of law, in full effect

This guy clearly suffers from smartest man in the room syndrome. There’s a lot of that myopia going on among our best and brightest public champions of democracy these days. Dismissing concerns about a corrupt partisan postmaster using his discretionary power to help his candidate, since it didn’t happen four months into his now four year reign, is as asinine as insisting that, clearly, since the January 6th attack on the Capitol didn’t bring democracy down, there is no reason to be concerned about it or anything like it anymore.

I intend to write back to him like so:

Subject: Instant expertise:

You dismissed this concern when I raised it the first time, since, in spite of similar fears, it didn’t happen in November 2020 when DeJoy had been postmaster for a few months.  Now it is four full years, full-steam ahead on “Delivering for America”, the Postal Regulatory Commission’s urging DFA be suspended until after the election be damned.  You conceded a lack of expertise in this matter.  Here is some information you need:

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

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 since 2008.  source

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, smartest man in the room? Do sixty seconds of research by clicking the links above to become an instant expert.

Please pass this on to your contacts, I can’t get anyone in government or media to give a rat’s ass about it and I’ve been trying for a solid month.  Hopefully someone in your network has a connection that can break through and get this issue public attention.  Otherwise we just have to trust that a MAGA partisan will not bend any rules, laws or norms to get his candidate elected.

Your best, most brilliantly targeted campaign donation advice will be in vain if my concern is even 20% true.  We’re talking about nationwide, easily targetable vote tallies 5-10 times larger than Biden’s robust margin of victory in 2020 (leaving aside the slim Electoral College margin).

Yours in the fight to save our fragile, problematic experiment in democracy,

Eliot Widaen

A little data on ratfucker Louis DeJoy’s power

I guess Senators Chuck Chuck BoBuck Schumer and Kirsten “Let’s lynch Al Franken” Gillibrand are too busy fretting over the Democratic candidate for 2024, in spite of the expressed will of a giant majority of Democratic voters, to read their hair on fire constituent emails, even if sent five times. My Congressman has also been silent as a sphinx, though the woman I spoke to at his office today seemed to share my concerns about DeJoy. I suppose every able bodied Democrat on Capitol Hill, if corporate media is to be believed, is clenching their collective anuses too hard to read constituent emails and have a staffer do five minutes of follow up google research.

My expressed concerns about Trump mega-donor Postmaster Louis DeJoy might be validly dismissed, if only a tiny number of American ballots were actually cast by mail. If mail in votes did not constitute a margin that could swing a close election, my worries would be stupid and a distraction. What if the number of mail in ballots in recent elections were in the 30 to 66 million ballots range? It turns out they are.

Read on, from a United States government website:

The number of by-mail ballots sent to voters nationally increased from 28.5 million to 42.4 million between 2008 and 2018, while returned ballots rose from 23.1 million to 30.4 million. Although the totals rise and fall based on the type of election held that year, examining the data when separated as midterm or presidential election shows that the ballots transmitted and returned nonetheless increase within the election categories.

source, also source of the graph below

In the 2020 election, 43% of all votes cast, more than 66 million ballots, were cast by mail (per US Census Bureau).

In the 2022 midterm elections there was a 31.8% vote by mail rate, over 34,000,000 votes, in a historically large turnout for a midterm. This is also from the US Census:

For the 2022 election, the survey found that nearly one-third (31.8%) of all voters cast ballots by mail, up from 23.1% in 2018. Almost half (47.1%) voted before Election Day, up from 37.8% in 2018.  

Other highlights:

  • Among those who were registered but did not vote in the 2022 elections, the most common answer given for not voting was, “Too busy, conflicting work or school schedule.”
  • The most common way people registered to vote was at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV); 29.8% of respondents reported registering at their DMV.
  • Among the citizen voting-age population, homeowners had higher voter turnout than renters, with 58.1% of eligible homeowners and 36.5% of renters voting.
  • Turnout rates for the citizen voting-age population differed by length of residence, 67.6% for those living in the same place for five years or longer and 40.5% for those in their current residence for one year or less.
  • Turnout was higher among the married (61.2%) than unmarried (42.5%) citizen voting-age population.  
  • Turnout was higher among veterans (62.7%) than among nonveterans (51.3%).  
  • Native-born citizen voter turnout was 53.4%, greater than the 41.4% turnout of naturalized citizens.
  • The South had the nation’s lowest voter turnout (48.9%), while turnout in the West (54.7%), Midwest (54.1%) and Northeast (53.8%) were not significantly different from each other.

More information about voter turnout for the election is available in the America Counts story, High Registration and Early Voting in 2022 Midterms.

source

You can’t expect a spineless man like Chuck Chuck BoBuck to step up and do the bold thing, he never has. Neither does it profit you to put faith in a female Senator who calls for a colleague who asked for an ethics hearing in his alleged misconduct to be ousted from the Senate immediately, without a chance to clear his name. As for my Congressman? Fuck that fucking puto, I’ve been in contact with his people several times, in addition to the papers I put in the mail to him and the sympathetic woman I spoke to at his office today. She promised she’d pass it on to her busily fundraising boss. So I am holding my breath, of course,

This corporate democracy we have here, where corporations and mega-wealthy donors can get any politician they want on the phone immediately to deal with their concerns, is rotten, corrupt and pathetic. We are in position to fix it, but we have a lot of hard work to do if we’re going to. Our first order of business is putting aside the petty squabbles to show a little unity and just a drop of fucking courage and soundly defeat Donald “Project 2025” Trump in November.

Then we have to remember how fucked up our corporate democracy still is and start fixing it, from Day One.

Gray Lady offering “context” to Hur’s report declining to prosecute Biden but emphasizing Biden’s supposedly feeble mental state

The Grey Lady, with one of her more mealy mouthed pieces of spotty reporting:

Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for including what some have described as disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state might come across to a jury as relevant and proper to discuss. . .

. . . Still, at several points, Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania induced Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like, “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.”. . .

. . . The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-scrutinized line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller made no decision on whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, only writing, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice. . .

. . . Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest person elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters from both parties. He and his allies have rejected those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.

No mention in the New York Times report of lines in the recently released transcript, spoken by Robert Hur, that directly contradict false assertions he made in the report. For example, at one point Hur noted Biden’s “photographic” recall of the layout of a house. Hur also claimed Biden didn’t even know the month or year of his son’s death. The transcript shows that Biden said “oh, God, May 30th…” and agreed when a staffer added it was 2015.  No mention in the New York Times of this rather glaring bit of partisan Bill Barr/John Durham-style lying. Making inaccurate or false statements is New York Times-speak for lying, but there is no note of even false or inaccurate statements by Hur in their article.

The Times also doesn’t report that one of these recorded sessions took place during the international negotiations immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel October 7th.

Nor does the Times include this fairly important fact for assessing Hur’s candor and his agenda, (or allude to anything like an immolation of former Trump DOJ partisan Robert Hur):

House Republicans asked Hur to testify before the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan (R-OH). Hur prepared for his testimony with the help of Trumpworld figures, and he resigned from the Department of Justice effective yesterday, so he appeared before the committee today not as a DOJ employee bound by certain ethical guidelines, but as a private citizen. . .

. . . Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote on social media: “I think Biden’s State of the Union address last week and Hur’s immolation today will go down in political history as Reagan’s ‘I am not going to exploit…my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment…only on steroids.” Conway was referring to Reagan’s response in a 1984 presidential debate to a question about his own age; Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.

Heather

This is another more intelligent assessment of what happened at the hearing, immolation or no.

No hint about any of this is given to readers of the New York Times report on the latest backfired attempt by MAGA diehards to magnify their wild claims that, unlike very stable genius Donald Trump, Biden is a feeble, stuttering old dotard who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, even when he is handing MAGA hecklers their asses on a platter in front of a live national audience.

Just say Biden is corrupt and leave it up to my lackeys in Congress

Trump was impeached the first time for making an improper political demand as he held up American arms and extorted the new Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He told him on a perfect call that many people heard, and that Bill Barr subsequently tried to hide, that all Zelensky needed to do before Trump would release military aid to Ukraine was announce an investigation into Biden corruption, and that he and his allies in Congress would do the rest. No need to actually open an investigation, America’s Greatest Liar assured Zelensky, the main thing is just to announce it, on American television, so we have a big Benghazi-type scandal to run with before the election.

Zelensky turned out to be a man of principle and a skillful politician with a bit more mettle than Trumpie counted on. Barr was still Trump’s most ardent and capable legal enabler and, after trying unsuccessfully to bury all records of the perfect call, he appointed a diehard rightwing DOJ official (who had refused to serve under a Democrat but came back to be appointed by Trump) to dig more deeply into the scandalous sounding matter that Rudy, Igor and their crew were trying to stir up in Ukraine. This DOJ investigation led to FBI informant Smirnov (now in prison awaiting trial for peddling Kremlin lies to the FBI), who took the bull by the horns and planted the entirely false Russian story that both Putin and Trump wanted out there about Biden’s corruption and bribe taking from corrupt, lying, Nazi Ukraine. Then they could let Trumpie’s myrmidons in Congress do the rest. And they have been doing the rest relentlessly. Incoherently, much of the time, but with characteristic blustering Nazi-style vigor.

Recall that after losing the election in 2020, incessantly transactional Trumpie told the DOJ just to announce that the election had been corrupt and leave the rest to him and his henchmen in Congress. You remember that one, right?

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump sought inside help from the Justice Department to execute his campaign to reverse the 2020 election, according to evidence presented by the House Jan. 6 committee Thursday.

“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump implored top Justice officials in a Dec. 27, 2020, conversation memorialized in then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue’s contemporaneous notes.

source

Counting on the disgusted exhaustion of people of average intelligence to prevent them from keeping a thousand hideous details in mind and the angry credulity of people of below average intelligence, the Nazi machine grinds on, doing exactly what it always does — marching behind the insane, iron will of the infallible narcissistic Leader who believes that he alone has the right to decide who gets rich, who gets lynched and who goes to the death camp with Rosie O’Donnell, Mike Pence, Bill Barr and the rest of the gutless pigs who have defied, insulted, betrayed and misunderestimated [1] him.

[1] With a tip of the yarmulke to eloquent language stylist George W. “Dubya” Bush

Alabama finds fertilized frozen egg is human life

The sordid history of the ignorant yet calculated movement of bigoted political domination by America’s most militant white Christians (sometimes called Christian Dominionism) is laid out here by the great Heather Cox Richardson .  I’m just adding a few telltale stats that should be noted in relation to the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that a fertilized egg that is then frozen is human life and anyone who destroys such a human life maybe held criminally liable, essentially for murder.  If a state like Alabama leads the way in enforced so-called Christian morality, heaven help us!

Alabama ranks third in the nation for highest infant mortality rates. The only two states with higher infant mortality rates are number two Arkansas, and America’s greatest state, Mississippi, in the number one position as far as most deaths of newborns. In fairness to both sides, it must be said, of course, that this is according to the CDC, a government agency that Jesus Christ himself long ago warned is full of lying commie cucks, who will do anything to make good Christians look bad. infant mortality rates US states

Alabama ranks fifth in the nation for highest rates of child poverty. Once again, Mississippi leads the pack. child poverty by state

In terms of education, Alabama does much better, coming in at #44 out of 50, a respectable sixth from the bottom. In this case, Mississippi, at #41, beats them, being nine from the bottom. Education by state

Per capita murder in the state of Alabama, which is double the rate of rootin’ tootin’ Texas, is the third highest in the country. Once again, Mississippi makes them look a little better by comparison. Murder by state

In terms of executions, Alabama kicks Mississippi’s ass, by a margin of two to one! Executions by state.

A word to out of state men visiting Alabama: avoid jerking off in your motel room. While killing a spurt of sperm cells might not technically qualify as murder, it could be seen as assault with a deadly weapon. I would advise you to consult with a pious Christian expert like MAGA Mike fucking Johnson about this before randily reaching for the old johnson. Peace out.

Black prosecutors on trial in Georgia

I made the mistake yesterday of watching a bit of the questioning of Fulton county DA Fani Willis by the lawyer for a scumbag co-defendant of Donald Trump‘s, a practitioner of Roger Stone’s rat-fucking dark arts, channeling Roy Cohn by putting his prosecutor on the hot seat, having her sworn to tell the truth under the penalties of perjury and asking her intimate details about her personal life. Fani Willis did fine, but the spectacle turned my stomach. Another sickening glimpse into the narcissistic worldview of MAGA-world.

“Fani Willis put me on trial? I put HER on trial, judge! She’s guilty, not me! She’s a corrupt and sex-crazed criminal animal, and a total racist, and I am INNOCENT! That vicious liar needs to be put under oath and forced to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, not that she would know the truth if it bit her in the ass, about this witch hunt!”

If we look back at American history, there’s nothing more common in a place like Georgia than Black people who make legitimate complaints against white people being taken out behind the courthouse to be whipped and worse. In a postbellum courtroom no self-respecting white man with the means to prevent it will allow himself to be put on trial by an accursed Black person under any circumstances. Especially in a case where the defendant has no factual defense to criminal charges backed by overwhelming evidence and the damning sworn testimony of witnesses who are all former members of his inner circle.

This is especially the case when a powerful white man, with unlimited money to spend on his legal defense and a 24/7 public relations offensive, is accused of crimes by a Black woman.

So if a black woman is prosecuting a powerful white man, she must be called a racist, her right to bring the case must be challenged by any means necessary, a whiff of corrupt motive sniffed out, no matter how faint the trail, no matter if there is no trial to sniff. So much the better if this involves making her prove, under oath, that she’s not a sexed-up, thieving, manipulative, lying bitch who can’t control her overpoweringly disqualifying sexual nature. As long as the focus is on her, I get to smirk like a klansman dipping Red Man chaw as the jury fixes to let me off for recent lynchings and delay things until I can get the power back to exact humiliating retribution on Rosie O’Donnell, Taylor Swift, Hillary and their disgusting ilk.

I’m tempted to just say, again, fuck that fucking puto, Donald Trump, and the well-paid fucking whores he rode in on, but WordPress is having some fun with me by inserting random, unwanted highlighting it is not apparent how to defeat and… ah, you know.

But I must add that this conservative Republican judge down there, for holding an evidentiary hearing instead of having dismissed this shameless race baiting, delay tactic stunt for lack of any credible evidence of wrongdoing, or asserting any grounds for disqualifying the DA under Georgia law, is showing his ass more than a bit.

One vote GOP majority impeaches Biden cabinet official

Today the House voted 214-213, on party lines, to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, vindicating their humiliating recent failure to impeach him. It is the first time in history that a sitting American cabinet member has been impeached. The tiny GOP House majority was in an admittedly tight spot on the issue of immigration, the party having demanded legislation on border control by tying it to Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Taiwan aid, getting it from the Senate after months of negotiation, and refusing to bring it to the floor for a vote, on orders of their boss, an impulsive man with a very busy court schedule.

Prior to the vote the NY Times ran a related article, using uncharacteristically direct language to describe the political party that is a big tent for every kind of American hater and bigot (along with the millions of very fine people who are neither haters nor bigots). The very un-Times like headline and lede reads: On Capitol Hill, Republicans Use Bigoted Attacks Against Political Foes; House and Senate Republicans have denigrated fellow lawmakers, Biden administration officials and witnesses in racist ways, both in casual comments and in official settings. The article offered a sampling of bigoted spoutings by the GOP, all in the course of a week. Here’s the bit about Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: 

Around the same time, House Republicans released their report on impeachment charges against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Cuban-born homeland security secretary who is the first Latino to lead his department. Using unusually loaded language for a committee report, the panel described its action as “deporting Secretary Mayorkas from his position.”

In private, the language was uglier. During a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and the panel’s chairman, referred to Mr. Mayorkas as a “reptile with no balls” because of his refusal to resign from his post, according to Politico. A White House official condemned the statement, noting that Mr. Mayorkas is Jewish and that the comment echoed an antisemitic trope.

source

A reptile with no balls. What are you going to do with a creature like that?