Tag Archives: politics

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

A few thoughts for 5785

This is from a happy new year email to my cousin who lives on a moshav in Israel, not far from Jerusalem.

Your assessment of Jewish values and the reality of living in an antisemitic world was very good.  If only the values you rightly attribute to us were practiced by all Jews.   It is a trap, like antisemitism, to believe that just because someone is in your tribe they are motivated by only the best of the tribe’s moral code.  The bulk of humans are somewhere in the middle, with the best and worst being small minorities of any group (although the worst have the biggest influence, it often seems). 

I have experienced a Jewish lynch mob, composed of my dearest old friends, all good people and fine Jews, all of whom now consider me dead and have cut off their adult children from me as well, and I have to say, there is nothing more horrific.  To have a rabbi friend (who merely held a torch and remained tactfully silent during the lynching) tell me, when I asked him under what circumstances is it permissible for one Jew to angrily tell another who comes to make amends during the ten days of repentance to buzz off (as my closest friend had), that only HaShem [God] is allowed to do that — the idiotic, blasphemous icing on a disgusting cake.

The mark of a good person is treating other people fairly. No group has any monopoly on this excellent trait.

I just wrote a chapter about the difficulty of learning lessons you don’t want to learn, such as that your closest friends will abandon you en masse when a charismatic member of the group spreads a vicious lie about you (in my case that I am a sadistic, unrepentant torturer who tries to bend others to my will and is totally incapable of love or forgiveness). I certainly didn’t want to learn what I learned about my only sister, about most of my closest friends.  I resisted learning it for decades, believing in the undefeatable power of goodwill, humor, kindness, patience, extending the benefit of the doubt, until the power of those things was eventually defeated by a determined will never to be wrong, at any cost.

I’ve been forced to learn (much against my will) that there is a personality type who can never be wrong, no matter what, who will fight to the death if made to feel insecure, and if they are able to, will always exact fatal revenge for defiance of their will (this can be almost anything, this type is very thin-skinned).  Trump is an example that comes readily to mind.  

I had to finally understand that this also, tragically, defines my sister’s worldview.   My sins against her can apparently never be tallied and so she’s been required to lie to her children a few times to protect herself from the existential threat I pose to her and to them.  It’s awful, it’s terrible, it’s like antisemitism — reason, fact, cause and effect, love, kindness, patience, giving the benefit of the doubt, appeals for empathy — poof!  A desperately held belief may never be changed in this personality type (and others loyal to this type) it seems.

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.

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

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.

Louis DeJoy, stand back and stand by, redux

While corporate media, and panicking Democrats, are obsessed over why a successful president refuses to step aside even though wealthy donors are threatening to withhold $90,000,000 in pledged campaign funds unless he does (NY Times headline today), I am wondering about a more direct threat in the 2024 election.

Consider the ease with which a MAGA “public servant” with the power to easily do so, can nullify millions of mail in ballots by simply delaying their delivery for a few weeks, after four years of practice with random, inexplicable nationwide month-long delays in mail delivery.

Do you trust a Postmaster appointed by the “transactional” Orange Quid Pro Quo, a man who donated $2,500,000 to Trump and the RNC in 2016, to deliver millions of mail-in ballots in time to be counted in 2024? Personally, I’d like to see a little oversight of this smug, smirking corporate fucker.

The media, we should note, is silent about the threat DeJoy’s nationwide mail slow-downs pose for an election expected to be unaccountably close. Google him, not much recently written about the arrogant dickhead, in spite of years of controversy, ethics probes, Congressional hearings. The watchdog groups I’ve contacted in the last few weeks are silent, my elected officials are silent, in spite of repeated contacts with them. I suppose there will be media silence, if Trump manages to engineer an Electoral College victory, when millions of undelivered votes are discovered right before the Dictator on Day One is sworn in for his revenge tour.

Which is more important for the outcome, for the future of democracy, endless criticism of the effective incumbent because he is old and walks like an old man, or stopping a massive voter suppression scheme conducted under color of law?

Here are the two most recent media pieces about Trump megadonor Postmaster Louis DeJoy. The first is a July 8 op ed by DeJoy himself, published in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post. All I was able to read (not climbing that particular paywall) was this wonderful opening:

Louis DeJoy is the postmaster general. I am fascinated by the U.S. Postal Service and its opportunities to serve the American people. Each day, our 640,000 employees operate 32,000 retail and …

The only other recent update on the pugnacious, partisan Postmaster is this report about the Postal Regulatory Commission urging DeJoy to put off his experiments with more budget cuts and policy changes to slow mail delivery until after the 2024 election. Predictably, the arrogant dickhead is doing what the hardcore right wing always does, staying the course.

Meanwhile, corporate media, keep doing your job to advance the interests of corporate persons. Those judicially created psychopaths are people too, with feelings, just like real, God-created people!

And now, let’s repeat, with the Orange Polyp:

Louis DeJoy, stand back and stand by.

Justice riddle I can’t solve

How is a judge who has already shown bias towards a criminal defendant, the former president who appointed her to her lifetime position, by unlawfully taking his case and abusing her discretion in bending over backwards to accommodate her benefactor, not easily disqualified from sitting in judgment in a criminal case against him when she has already demonstrated reversible bias in the case he brought to prevent the criminal case she is, again, the sitting judge on?

Former President Donald Trump, in possession of dozens of boxes of government documents he unlawfully retained after leaving the presidency, brought a case in federal court to block the government’s ability to touch him for the ongoing criminal act he was engaged in. He filed the case in a federal courthouse where the only sitting judge was the one he appointed after losing the election. He had picked Federalist Society endorsed Aileen Cannon because of her extreme loyalty to the cause, presumably MAGA.

His incoherent case was captioned Trump v United States. It sought a ruling that a former president is entitled to do anything he feels like doing regarding government documents, secret or not, as he leaves office and forever after. It was his Roy Cohn style attempt to go on the offensive to preempt the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice charges Jack Smith brought after massive evidence of Trump’s crimes was recovered at one of the crime scenes, the open and shut, now maddeningly stalled United States v. Trump in federal court in Florida.

The crack Trump legal team’s largely incoherent pleadings in Trump v. US, his attempt to block Smith’s case, failed to establish what Aileen Cannon‘s jurisdiction was to hear this case. Without a basis for jurisdiction, a federal judge cannot hear a case. Cannon returned the papers to Trump’s attorneys directing them to fix this fatal flaw in its paperwork, suggesting several dubious theories of jurisdiction to them.

Trump’s attorneys returned the papers without providing grounds for jurisdiction, so, instead of dismissing it, as any law-abiding judge would be obliged to do, Aileen Cannon provided a grounds for jurisdiction for team Trump herself. She would take the dubious case as an exercise of the court’s equitable jurisdiction, basically to avoid what would otherwise be a grave injustice. Then she continued with the proceedings, ruling for Trump at every turn. The only problem was that the case still had no basis in law, except for the judge’s extremely shaky claim of a certain kind of special jurisdiction.

In the end, after an appeal by the DOJ, she was forced to dismiss the case. Here is the reversal and order to dismiss Trump v US concisely described by legal experts.

The 11th Circuit found that Cannon “improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction” in hearing the case and that the entire proceeding should be dismissed. Notably, the court also found that regardless of the status of a document in question (personal or presidential), the government maintains the authority to seize it under a warrant supported by probable cause.

The panel wrote, “The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”

source

I am left with only one question now, as Aileen Cannon continues to dither and delay, postponing hearings, inviting far right third parties to make oral arguments for Trump, refusing to gag a violence threatening, lying defendant, threatening the DOJ with sanctions, postponing trial indefinitely and holding off ruling on a long line of incoherent and frivolous motions by team Trump. It is a question I’m sure I share with tens of millions of aggravated Americans:

What the fucking fuck? I mean, seriously, Jack, Merrick, nothing can be done about this glaring appearance of demonstrated judicial bias/incompetence/disdain for law in our republic of law?

What, me worry?

Party of Putin

It’s hard to overstate how in-your-face the MAGA/GOP/Trump party is in their support of murderous war criminal Vladimir Putin. Putin and the 2016 Trump campaign, although not found to have left evidence of a chargeable criminal conspiracy, colluded in at least 140 instances, as documented by Robert Mueller. Trump loves the taste of Putin’s nether regions as much as Lindsey Graham loves the taste of Trump’s. As president Trumpie routinely took Putin’s side against US intelligence agencies. Why wouldn’t he?

At a news conference, a day following a secret personal meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Trump clarified his “I don’t know why Putin would” do anything to corrupt the 2016 election, by saying that, obviously, he’d meant the exact opposite. After all, how often do all of us accidentally say the exact opposite of what we mean and are then unfairly given shit about it?

Trump’s PERFECT CALL to newly elected Ukrainian president Zelensky in 2019 asked for help smearing Biden with a fake announcement about Burisma and, by the way, none of the weapons authorized by Congress months ago will be released to Ukraine until you go on US TV and announce a fake investigation into Biden’s criminal activities in Ukraine.

Trump instructed his loyal, Christ loving puppet MAGA Mike to hold up aid to Ukraine while Putin makes advance after advance in his war of aggression against Ukraine. MAGA Mike held up this aid for many months, along with aid to Gaza, Israel and Taiwan, until Democrats promised to shield him from removal as Speaker. Today MAGA Mike lied about it, of course, (doing it this way, he said, was the only way to get Democrats to support aid to Israel, among lies) because, presumably, that’s what Christ would have done.

Here’s Heather Cox Richardson on what MAGA was doing in the House right before MAGA Mike treacherously betrayed them by working with Democrats:

The extremist House Republicans were adamantly opposed to the plan because of their staunch opposition to aid for Ukraine. They wrote in a memo on Wednesday: “This tactic allows Johnson to pass priorities favored by President Biden, the swamp and the Ukraine war machine with a supermajority of House members, leaving conservatives out to dry.”

Extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) vowed to throw House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) out of the speakership, but Democrats Tom Suozzi of New York and Jared Moskowitz of Florida have said they would vote to keep him in his seat, thereby defanging the attack on his leadership.

So the extremists instead tried to load the measures up with amendments prohibiting funds from being used for abortion, removing humanitarian aid for Gaza, opposing a two-state solution to the Hamas-Israel war, calling for a wall at the southern border of the U.S., defunding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and so on.

Greene was especially active in opposition to aid to Ukraine. She tried to amend the bill to direct the president to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and demanded that any members of Congress voting for aid to Ukraine be conscripted into the Ukraine army as well as have their salaries taken to offset funding. She wanted to stop funding until Ukraine “turns over all information related to Hunter Biden and Burisma,” and to require Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to resign. More curiously, she suggested amending the Ukraine bill so that funding would require “restrictions on ethnic minorities’, including Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools are lifted.” This language echoes a very specific piece of Russian propaganda.

Finally, Moskowitz proposed “that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene…should be appointed as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” 

Many congress members have left Washington, D.C., since Friday was to be the first day of a planned recess. This meant the partisan majority on the floor fluctuated. Olivia Beavers of Politico reported that that instability made Freedom Caucus members nervous enough to put together a Floor Action Response Team (FART—I am not making this up) to make sure other Republicans didn’t limit the power of the extremists when they were off the floor.

The name of their response team seems likely to be their way to signal their disrespect for the entire Congress. Their fellow Republicans are returning the heat. Today Mike Turner (R-OH) referred to the extremists as the Bully Caucus on MSNBC and said, “We need to get back to professionalism, we need to get back to governing, we need to get back to legislating.” Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios:  “The vast majority of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives…are sick and tired of having people who…constantly blackmail the speaker of the House.”

source

J6 hostage profile

Insurrectionist morons like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Lyin’ Ted Cruz and their ilk, taking their cue from the Big Orange Turd, keep referring to the rioters arrested for their violence on January 6, 2021 as hostages. According to this deranged theory the indicted and convicted rioters are political hostages, unfairly arrested, subjected to bogus political prosecutions, illegally locked up and being badly mistreated for merely engaging in forceful protest that the RNC officially designated “legitimate political discourse”.

Everyone knows what hostages are, they’re people taken prisoner by force, kidnapped and held for ransom, usually by criminals or terrorists, in order to extract concessions from the loved ones of the hostages they are holding. The civilians kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th, being held as pawns in a negotiation, are hostages.

By contrast, and in direct contradiction to compromised Speaker of the House MAGA Mike’s recent lie, no protester walking in the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, no matter how peaceful, was innocent of, at the very least, criminal trespass. The entire MAGA crowd right wing fabulist Tucker Carlson called “respectful, peaceful tourists” entered after a violent armed crowd overran the police lines, sending dozens to the hospital, and broke into the locked building where a joint session of congress was in progress. Leaving aside the disgusting detail of how many of these innocent patriotic citizens defecated and pissed in the halls of the People’s House, while sacking it.

Many of these militant, right wing, white nationalist motherfuckers, like the ones who chanted “Hang Mike Pence (bring him out!) hang Mike Pence (bring him out!)” were guilty of crimes much more serious than trespass, in spite of Ronna Romney McDaniels’ alternative fact styling of their activities as “legitimate political discourse.”

Here is a very short description of one of Trump’s so-called hostages, the innocent patriots that he is fixing to fully pardon in his syphilitic fever dream of a second term when he would be a dictator for one day.