Tag Archives: politics

Federalist Society Endgame

The Federalist Society, a rightwing judicial fraternity, was created and is funded by ultra wealthy, right wing privilege holders. It was established to use the law to better protect the privileges of our best citizens, which is to say, inheritors of vast wealth, and those who join their ranks through their own efforts. It is devoted, by strict doctrine, to giving their political benefactors political wins in every possible case. Their judges often do this, especially in cases otherwise lost, by going well past what they need to find in order to make their rulings.

Their style of activist judging always includes a political victory for their agenda, to dismantling the regulatory/administrative state, limiting “majoritarian tyranny” (will of the voters) and ensuring full rights of citizenship only for our best citizens, corporate and human, regardless of the facts, the law, a 98-0 vote in the Senate.

For example, the Supreme Court Federalist Society contingent went much further than necessary to overrule the Colorado courts where Trump was disqualified as an insurrectionist. Without touching the facts of his insurrectionist plan and shameful, criminal behavior they made a ruling that allows every elected federal official who aided Trump in his insurrectionist plan to overturn election results forever immune from disqualification under the constitutional clause designed for that purpose by the framers of the 14th Amendment. The Federalist Society Six effectively wrote one of the most important democracy enforcing clauses out of the 14th amendment. In the name of demented Originalism, or some other Federalist Society endorsed doctrine pulled out of their collective, doctrinaire ass and protected not only Trump but his wide circle of elected insurrectionist henchmen and henchwomen.

In Georgia, Federalist Society member and political appointee Judge McAfee ruled correctly that there was no actual conflict of interest between the DA prosecuting Donald Trump and his criminal co-conspirators, and anybody else involved in the case. He did this after a long delaying circus in which the DA was asked extensively about her sex life and her father was interrogated about it too. The Klan itself could not have staged a more amusing spectacle than the one McAfee allowed.

Then after ruling properly, so as not to be overturned on appeal, he went out of his way to besmirch Fani Willis by writing of her “unprofessional” demeanor on the stand , a “stench of mendacity” and recommending a host of ethical and disciplinary remedies for her uppity attitude. He made these disparaging, jury poisoning remarks in dismissing an unsuccessful attempt to smear the district attorney, who, it turns out, had no conflict of interest of any kind. The Federalist Society spin, smearing a political opponent he could not legally remove from the case, is perfectly permissible among these endgame motherfuckers. McAfee gave his team the smear the frivolous motion was intended to create, after providing team Trump with a healthy and distracting delay.

Take Federalist Society member and former DOJ official MAGA Robert Hur. The finding of his report was that Joe Biden did not have the requisite intent to commit the crimes that Donald Trump has clearly demonstrated, as proved by his many attempts to cover up the crime and his repeated obstruction of justice. Hur distinguished the behavior of the two presidents to make the contrast and show that Biden lacked Trump’s clear criminal intent. That was the take away, Biden has not committed the crimes Trump stands accused of and that was all Hur was appointed to decided.

But a report stating that Biden was innocent of the crime Trump is a criminal defendant for was in no way helpful to the MAGA, or as I think of it, the American Nazi, cause. Hur therefore made the focus of his report, and the Breaking News headline takeaway, Biden’s cognitive feebleness. Based on lies? Going well beyond the scope of your appointment? Call me pisher!

The Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida (who assumed office after Trump lost reelection, talk about letting the voters decide), Aileen “Loose” Cannon, who, giving her the benefit of the doubt, is probably too stupid and inexperienced to handle a high profile, politically charged espionage case against her benefactor regarding his illegal retention of top-secret government documents, at least has experienced, brilliant Federalist Society counsel available to her.

This allows her to endlessly delay a trial that Trump will 100% lose with little risk to herself or her already damaged professional reputation. By not making any final orders about anything, Cannon has been able to spin this straightforward case out with no end in sight. And arguably because she has made no final orders of any kind, she has not given DOJ grounds for an appeal. Things she has done, no matter how stupid (inviting amicus briefs from the likes of Stephen “Death to immigrants” Miller and Citizens United), how biased toward one party (and against the federal government) or how clearly designed to give a criminal defendant the delay he always demands, are protected under her discretion as the trial judge.

If you had any cause to wonder whether allowing the widespread appointment of members of a doctrinaire right wing extremist judicial fraternity could cause any problems for democracy, the rule of law or the fair administration of justice, look no further than the loyal judicial fraternity members referenced above.

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.

Another unappealable John Roberts special

As he did in striking down enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act simply by ignoring inconvenient facts, like many sessions of vigorous debate in Congress, thousands of pages of data considered, ongoing attempts by states with a history of racist laws to disenfranchise voters and suppress the vote, the unanimous Senate vote to re-authorize the Act, the near unanimous vote in the House, and the Republican president’s warm public embrace of the Act as he signed it into continued law, Roberts made the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment a matter of Federalist Society opinion about whether an insurrectionist is eligible for federal office, absent a specific, constitutionally sound law passed by Congress.

In the Voting Rights Act case the holding was 5-4: the Voting Rights Act worked beautifully to eliminate racially discriminatory voter suppression and no longer needs enforcement.  In this Colorado decision to disqualify an insurrectionist, textualists and liberals apparently agree that Colorado had no right to remove Trump from their ballot, no matter what their factual findings may have been, and therefore that no state may remove Donald Trump, or any candidate for federal office, from the ballot, absent Congress passing a new law to enforce section three of the 14th Amendment. 

Leave out a few key facts, ignore the central one (Trump planned, advertised, aided and gave comfort to participants in a riot that shut down the government in a violent attempt to keep him in power), reframe the narrow issue that you are looking at, et voilà, you can pull any politically expedient holding you would like out of your corporate “balls and strikes umpire” ass.  You can even broker a deal to make it a unanimous 9-0, including the spouse
of a powerful participant in the attempt to overthrow the election of 2020.

The Court declines to intervene in many cases because of their Political Question Doctrine and professes, under federalism, to defer to states on abortion, criminal law, family and business law, voting rules and procedures and many other matters, but reaches the conclusion, without touching the finding that the candidate in question, at minimum, aided and abetted insurrection, or Colorado’s evidence-based finding that he did, that this political question is one they can unanimously decide, bindingly, on behalf of all fifty states. The plain text of their sacred originalist Constitution, and the expressed, well-documented intent of the framers, be damned.

What I don’t understand is how this dog shit decision was 9-0. This time nobody on the Court has a word to say about the stench?

Here is Jesse Wegman’s right on analysis from today’s NY Times.

Authoritarianism 101, February 26, 2024 edition

Project 2025, written by the far-right ideologues of the influential Heritage Foundation, sister think tank to the rightwing judicial fraternity the Federalist Society, The Institute for Humane Studies, The American Legislative Exchange Council and dozens more funded by Charles Koch and every fascist billionaire in the country, begins with these words:

 It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration. 

see footnote

Winning elections, at this apocalyptic moment in human history, against the “Radical Left” already in control, due to the irreversibly rising tide of ignorant majoritarian hordes, is simply not enough to preserve their sacred values of unlimited wealth and uncheckable power for the privileged.

Also, they cannot win honest elections anymore and they know this very well. Hence, Project 2025, a plan to go for all the marbles, once and for all.

Charles Koch learned in 1980 that his “libertarian” beliefs could not win elections, at best, his brother and his presidential running mate were barely able to get one percent of the national vote, which was appropriate since those were the only interests they represented. The far right’s project, seeing they could never prevail through fair democratic elections, became to capture the religious extremist vote, and the vote of every angry, lost soul, to make the vote look competitive, and to seize power by extra-electoral means.

Brilliant, privileged, covetous men like Charles Koch understood their ideas would never win elections, being of benefit only to a tiny fraction of the top 1% of Americans. So they began the long game of Making America Great Again (for Robber Barons, Monopolists and families of inherited wealth) by funding strong rightwing candidates in local elections, taking control of state houses, gerrymandering to keep control of state legislatures, churning out political philosophy and propaganda from “think tanks,” generating model legislation like Stand Your Ground and other gun protection laws, anti-voting, anti-labor, anti-environment and anti-abortion laws and bringing carefully constructed ideological lawsuits that would be heard in captured federal courts and ultimately decided by graduates of their far right, religious extremist judicial fraternity, the Federalist Society.

Their bigoted, polluting, oligarch-empowering ideas cannot win democratically, so their project is to destroy democracy with a very firm-handed minority rule, enforced by carefully vetted loyalists to a strong leader. They are authoritarians, or, as I always see it, regular ambitious folks always ready to go full Nazi on the citizenry.

Heather Cox Richardson lays out the connection between Putin, Trump, the forces of global authoritarianism and its angrily righteous partner, religious extremism, tying together recent events and a little bit of recent history, which is worth noting again, including this:

The use of Russian disinformation to destabilize democracy in the U.S. looks much like the information warfare Russia has used to establish Ukrainian leaders that worked for the Kremlin. It was the ouster of one of those leaders, Viktor Yanukovych, in the 2014 Maidan Revolution ten years ago that prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine later that year. Yanukovych won office with the help of American political consultant Paul Manafort, who advised and, briefly, chaired the Trump campaign in 2016, when it weakened the Republican party’s platform plank that supported arming Ukraine against Putin after his 2014 invasion.

Seeding lies about corruption that came from Russian-linked Ukrainians was central to Trump’s 2019 impeachment: his phone call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky demanding Zelensky announce an investigation into Burisma and Joe Biden’s son Hunter was part of an attempt to create dirt on the Bidens. That call happened after Trump’s advisor Rudy Giuliani went to Ukraine, where he talked to “an active Russian agent,” according to the FBI. FBI agents warned Giuliani that he was a target of Russian disinformation.  

That poison has now spread from Trump’s rogue team in the White House to the Republican Party itself, which has apparently been carrying water for Putin at the very center of our government. 

The whole piece is here, very much worth reading in its concise entirety, and thinking about as we prepare to preserve democracy and prevent Project 2025, the billionaire funded plan to make Bill Barr’s theocratic worldview the permanent government of our nation of immigrants.

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

The unbreakable Putin-Trump pact

The longest lasting relationship in Donald Trump’s life appears to be his strong bond with Russian strongman, murderer and war criminal Vladimir Putin. The KGB began cultivating Trump as a Useful Idiot back in the late 1980s when they found out he had presidential ambitions and that he was supremely vulnerable to flattery.

Just call Trump a genius and you become his best friend at the moment, do this decade after decade and you’ve made a lifelong friend of a man so insecure that he spends most of his time bragging about his (inherited) wealth, his brilliance, the size of his enormous, virile member (contrary description by Stormy Daniels is just another hateful, jealous lie!) and his claim that the laws don’t apply to someone as great and special as him.

On the second anniversary of Putin’s old-style total war invasion of a neighboring democracy, which he justified as liberating Ukraine from Nazis, and in which he called for the killing of Ukrainian government officials who had thrown out his puppet Yanokovich eight years earlier, Trump‘s handpicked Speaker of the House, a cherub faced hard right Christian fundamentalist theocrat who loves the taste of the big orange guy’s ass, has lawmakers on vacation.

Every effort to keep the Ukrainian military armed and fighting Putin has been blocked by the Trump/Putin MAGA faction in the House. Every MAGA member of Congress takes their orders directly from Trump, as evidenced over and over, and the rest of the GOP is too spineless and afraid of violent retribution against them to vote with the hated Democrats, even after they announce they’re not running for reelection.

No money has been allocated for the continued defense of Ukraine by Ukrainians, even as Putin continues to kill his political rivals and anyone else who disobeys him. These billions of dollars in American military aid, by the way, go directly to American munitions manufacturers, and the people that work for them. No humanitarian aid to the people being slaughtered, and starved in Gaza, in the Israeli far right’s righteous Jihad against terrorism. Trump simply doesn’t care about Muslims, or anyone else, frankly.

Global Nazi types like Steve Bannon, and white Christian Dominionists, assorted fascists and haters of every stripe are united beyond national borders. They slyly use the word “globalist” to refer to the time honored slur against Jews, who they claim control the world to the extreme detriment of good Christians everywhere. This popular Q-Anon-like theory is fleshed out in the 120 year old Czarist forgery The Protocols of The Elders of Zion, still a brisk international seller. But today globalist more accurately describes a worldwide coalition of authoritarians and religious fundamentalist bigots, Putin, Trump, Xi, Orban, Modi, Netanyahu and their ilk. Their propagandists energetically wield their high-pressure fire hoses of excrement, spraying random shit everywhere to keep everybody disgusted, distracted, overwhelmed and trying to clean clingy fecal matter off of themselves.

And so today, after the second anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we find ourselves talking about the latest instance of Christian Dominionist Idiocy, Jesus Christ ruling in Alabama (according to a theocratic state Supreme Court) that a fertilized egg is a child. Ukraine is under renewed siege by a modern day Stalin, or Hitler, take your pick, close to 30,000 Gazans are dead as the rightwing/religious coalition in Israel continues its righteous, civilian slaughtering War on Terror, and the US government can offer no help to Ukrainians, Gazans, or anyone else, blocked by the will of one man, Putin’s best ally in the West.

Meanwhile Trumpie hawks a line of Chinese-made gold spray painted sneakers, brags about his luxuriant head of golden hair and praises a leader like Putin who can boldly kill anyone he fucking wants to. And lines up mega-wealthy fascists to pay the almost $500,000,000 he now owes to New York State. Elon Musk was his guest just a few days ago, but there’s also Putin, or Mohammed Bin Salman. There is no shortage of immense piles of shit with billions of dollars to burn to serve their own rabid egos, who might, someday, want Trump to do them a favor, though.

Both sides of Putin v Ukraine

Controversy has been manufactured here in the USA in the case of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The angry MAGA minority has declared itself firmly on the side of no aid to Ukraine and full support, mainly by silence on the matter, for Putin. The vast majority of Americans favor continued aid to embattled Ukraine, an underdog democracy battling a much larger authoritarian invader. Presenting both sides of this fake controversy gives us an opportunity to see how strong a purely emotional story is, and how resistant to Reason, facts and cause and effect the right emotional appeal is.

The case for Putin’s invasion. He has every right to take back territory that he claims is historically his, because — history! As for the claimed lack of a casus belli, Russia’s indiscriminate killing of civilians, the discovery of mass graves, the mistreatment, torture and murder of prisoners of war — it’s war! War is hell. To pretend otherwise is to be a libtard cuck. From an American point of view, why should we spend money we need here to help one side in a war that has nothing to do with us?

For Ukraine — the country was invaded by a foreign power in a war of aggression. Ukraine committed no act to provoke this foreign power, other than resisting that foreign power’s political efforts to overthrow its government, and make it a satellite of Russia as it had been at times in the past. Ukraine is a democracy defending itself against the aggression of a neighboring dictator, one who routinely kills his political opponents in a political system he controls in the manner of an iron-willed Stalin, Mao or Hitler. Putin is using this war against Ukraine to press his larger territorial ambitions, and assert his right to conquer other countries, as countless megalomaniacal conquerors have done in the course of brutal human history. A Putin victory in Ukraine would be a major blow to the safety of the other surrounding NATO countries. NATO has largely kept the peace in Europe since the end of World War II.

Which side you take will be determined largely by the color of the baseball cap you wear to political rallies. For those in red caps, the fact that no chargeable criminal conspiracy was found between Putin and Trump‘s 2016 presidential campaign, in spite of 140 documented instances of coordination between them, in spite of Trump’s pro bono then-campaign manager’s years working for ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanokovitch (who fled Ukraine for refuge in Russia after being overthrown for corruption by pro-democracy, Ukrainians), in spite of proven coordination between Trump’s former campaign manager and Russian agents, and the exchange of sensitive polling data for the states Trump later narrowly won, in spite of Russia’s massive social media interference and successful hacks of voting systems (though no votes were changed this time), in spite of Trump having a Russians only meeting in the Oval Office immediately after his firing of James Comey for publicly speaking of allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia, and Trump destroying all notes of his one on one meeting with Putin in Helsinki, proves that “Russia-gate” was a complete and total hoax, political hit job and classic witch hunt and that there is nothing wrong with Putin or his methods.

For everybody else,  Ukraine was illegally invaded by a relentless force that also meddles in American elections, as set forth in detail in the Republican controlled Senate investigative report on Putin-related irregularities in the 2016 election, written in response to the Mueller Report.  Most Americans, and even a majority of Republicans in Congress, it appears, believe that Ukraine needs and deserves the support of every other democracy in a position to help. The sole argument for denying the support is iron-willed Trump’s unwavering loyalty to Vladimir Putin.

People sometimes give me crap for comparing MAGA to the Nazis. For me, the main point of comparison is that the most illogical argument you could possibly make is good enough for these folks if it rings the bell that stirs their lowest impulses and makes them angry as hell. Once a mass of people is enraged, and that rage can be stoked at will, and they are following an implacable, emotionally infallible leader, they can be convinced to do anything, and they feel right and just and perfect doing whatever is asked of them. Many of them will feel this way even after the wars and mass destruction their leader causes, when history writes the damning verdict on their unfathomable indecency and their willful inability to see what was directly in front of their lying eyes the whole time.

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?

MAGA 1861-style

Fascinating, disturbing but not surprising bit of American history I’d never heard about, from an op-ed in yesterday’s NY Times by Akhil Reed Amar (link to full piece here)

Mr. Trump’s lawyers legitimately ask what counts as a disqualifying insurrection. Section 3, they note, was clearly aimed at oath-breakers who had backed insurrections akin to the Civil War. In that calamitous insurrection, more than half a million people died. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot, they argue, pales in comparison.

But Section 3’s authors actually had not one but two recent insurrections in mind. Before the bloody insurrection that began when cannons roared at Fort Sumter in April 1861, there was the first insurrection of the 1860s, led by cabinet members of outgoing President James Buchanan, including John B. Floyd, the war secretary, and Philip Francis Thomas, the treasury secretary, among many others. A shadowy network of affiliates and co-conspirators aimed in several and nefarious ways — including mayhem, military subversion and even murder, if need be — to prevent the lawful counting of President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s electoral votes and to thwart his lawful inauguration in early March 1861.

From one angle, the first insurrection was even worse than the giant insurrection that followed. It aimed not merely to shrink the union, but to undo a legitimate presidential election for all Americans.

On Feb. 13, 1861 — the closest equivalent of Jan. 6, 2021 — Congress met to certify Lincoln’s victory. Malicious anti-Lincoln men congregated near the Capitol. But thanks to Gen. Winfield Scott’s steely defense, the Capitol held.

In some ways, the insurrection of 2021 was worse than the first insurrection of 1861. The Capitol did not fall in 1861, but it was breached in 2021.

source

Lincoln won the Electoral College in the election of 1860, although he was not on the ballot in any of the eleven states that seceded and formed the Confederacy (to get on the ballot a certain number of signatures was needed, people collecting signatures for Lincoln were run out of town or lynched). I’d never heard, until today, about the MAGA-like machinations of sitting government officials, their henchmen and a mob to try to keep Lincoln out of office, two months before full scale Civil War broke out. The second time Lincoln won, of course, during the Civil War, he was shot in the head at close range, days after Lee surrendered to Grant, by an enraged Confederate shouting “sic semper tyrannis!” thus may it always be with tyrants. 

History comes up with very similar ugly scenarios over and over, like disgusting burps from a meal that was right on the edge of food poisoning. The traitor who led the Confederate army in a war that killed more Americans than any other was honored years later with his likeness on a US postage stamp. The president of the Confederacy was tried criminally, for treason, but the trial was too divisive and political and the new DOJ, I guess, finally just threw up its hands on prosecuting him. Old Jefferson Davis walked away with a wry smile, no harm, no foul. Here’s a piece about that shameful failure of justice, first long delayed, then shadily negotiated, then denied.

During World War II pro-Nazi gangs in America and pro-Nazi members of Congress, literally calling themselves America First, who propagandized for, aided and gave comfort to actual German Nazis who had declared war on the United States, an enemy the US was then fighting… uh, no convictions, because there were passionate, angry people on both sides, particularly the violent, pro-Nazi side. Rachel Maddow did a brilliant audio series on this shit show, called Ultra, highly recommended. Steven Spielberg immediately bought the screen rights for this suspenseful film noir tragedy.

No trial for the antidemocratic masterminds, Bannon, Eastman, Giuliani, Kerik, Flynn and their ilk, who sat in the War Room at the Willard Hotel coordinating the “Green Bay Sweep” the plan by MAGA congressmen and senators to block the certification of Biden’s election and swap in fake electors, including incitement of a violent riot, based on incendiary lies believed by millions, to discard the ballots of millions of Black people and voters in Anarchist Jurisdictions and keep their leader in power? The stink of it all is sickeningly familiar. 

Like the ongoing racist, misogynist attacks against the Black, female Fulton County DA who is now under fire, in our craven corporate bottom-line media, for calling the attacks against her racist. Her private life, her sex life, is fair game for these scumbag defendants, and the media takes it seriously, rattles on about some undefined appearance of impropriety and maybe she should walk away. 

As I was taught early on in law school, if you have the facts, pound the facts, if you have the law, pound the law, if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table. These table-pounding fucks are trying to stir up enough of a foul stench that the court system itself walks away, as has happened before in our storied, often erased history.