Danilo Perez - Alfonsina y El Mar

 

 

Piano:  Danilo Perez, Sax: Joe Lovano, Bass: Santi Debriano Drums: Jack DeJohnette

How Dangerously Stupid The Language Of The Constitution Potentially Is

Listening to Margaret Colgate Love, expert in executive clemency under the U.S. Constitution, on Lawrence O'Donnell's show, talking about the astonishing ability of a Donald Trump to absolve his family, his criminal co-conspirators, all of the thugs who committed insurrection at thee Capitol on January 6th, INCLUDING THOSE WHO MURDERED AND TRIED TO MURDER POLICEMEN TRYING TO DEFEND THE ENTIRE FIRST ARTICLE BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT! all I can say is anyone who pretends the "founding fathers" were anything but idiots for writing the thing the way they did is, themselves, either an idiot or a thug.

Of course for it to mean the incredible things that she says it does requires that judges and, even more so "justices" of the Supreme Court say that that's what it means so they are thick as thieves with the worst of the criminal presidents or they're just as thick as they like to pretend they are when it suits their purposes.

We absolutely need that power to be removed when it comes to a. family members, b. members of presidents' administrations, c. their funders and supporters and associates. d. potential funders and supporters and associates in the future. That last group, the amendment should specifically say that if a pardoning president at any time in the future, or their family derives benefit from the one pardoned, that pardon is null and void.

Since most of the active "founders" were lawyers, themselves, they certainly knew they could be letting a criminal president get away with everything up to and including murder with their idiotic loose language. Their reliance on the courts to sort out their lazy language was certainly dumb if not grotesquely irresponsible.

I'm Hoping To Get Back To Radio Drama After Real Life Calms Down Enough To Make It Effective

It's a story I've told before, how the composer Arnold Schoenberg, after he'd fled the Nazis and relocated to Southern California was approached by a Hollywood director or producer to compose music for the movie of The Good Earth.   Schoenberg's colleague and friend Eduard Steuermann said that he said he was glad he asked for more money than they wanted to pay him, rescuing him from the temptation of becoming a Hollywood hack. 

 

Schoenberg hadn't read the book and he asked what it was about. When they described a scene they'd want music for, of the woman working in the field going in to give birth and then going back out to work in the field he said with great artistic integrity, "Who needs music at a time like that?" 

 

I did lose track of the day of the week last Saturday so I didn't go looking for a play to post and the ongoing crisis made it seem inappropriate the next day. I hope I'll get back to it next week but it's still too soon. Real life right now is providing us with more than drama can. I'm not going to distract from that.  

"if they hadn't already made that up in their minds" The Role of Media Fed Make Believe In The Insurrection Of January 6th

"How do I survive this situation. And I thought about, you know, using deadly force. I thought about shooting people. And then I just came to the conclusion that, you know, if I was to do that, you know, I might get a few but I'm not going to take everybody and they'll probably take my gun away from me and that would definitely give them the justification that they were looking for to kill me if they already hadn't made that up in their minds. So the other option was to appeal to somebody's humanity and I remember yelling out that I've got kids and it seemed to work."

Michael Fanone: DC Metropolitan Police Officer who was attacked and nearly murdered by the insurrectionists at the Capitol, among other things attacking him with a "Blue lives matter" flag.

Listening several times to Officer Fanone's stunningly chilling account, which he played down, he didn't mention he suffered a heart attack as he was nearly murdered, I noticed that he appreciated the role that the imaginations of the insurrectionists played a huge role in what they did, "the justification that they were looking for to kill me if they already hadn't made that up in their minds". Of course none of those insurrectionists had any real cause to attack the Capitol, none of them were endangered by the counting of the votes, none of them were under any real danger from Joe Biden becoming president, their entire insurrection was a product of make-believe in the fascist media, lies peddled on cable-TV, hate-talk radio, on completely fictitious podcasts, YouTubes, psychotic QAnon style online cults, the ACLU championed media such as Parler. It is remarkable how, in the United States, it is the middle-class and the affluent who are the greatest danger to domestic tranquility and egalitarian democracy even as they enjoy enormous comfort and privilege. The protection of their privileged position is their primary motivation.  And in the case of a lot of them, the suckers who got gulled into going along with it, all of that privilege was as imaginary as the greatness that Trump claimed he was going to bring America back to.  All of those chumps would certainly have been better off under the Biden administration.  I'll bet all of them would have welcomed the support checks that Democrats would give them and the other things that will be passed in the Democratic Congress.

A fact of American life is that the consumption of honest news is a minority thing. Most Americans don't read real newspapers, they don't listen to media that follows professional ethics or which make an effort to confirm the truth of what they report. Most Americans get most of what replaces the truth from entertainment TV, movies, videos, radio and a little of the same thrilling junk in the form of read text.

Anyone who thinks there is a bright line that separates "journalism" from "entertainment" divisions in the news is buying into a self-serving corporate myth, one joined in with full enthusiasm by those who make money from babbling and scribbling in the media, who produce both the junk headed under "entertainment" and those who produce the loss-leader, always in need of demonstrating their profitability as the bottom line of profit, the "news".

Morning Joe and Mika may have come to understand, to their horror, what Trump was relatively early but they were as much as any people in the media a part of the rise of Trump, having him on as a reliably entertaining diversion on their "news" show. I may have some respect for their belated realization of the danger they were a part of creating, I wish I had full confidence that they and their colleagues who were as and, in too many cases, far more guilty of that would change their behavior in the face of future liars and opportunists.

I am absolutely confident that NPR won't change anything about what they do, I have every confidence that C-Span will continue its role in promoting Republican-fascism on its repulsive morning show. If there is one thing I wish Democrats in the Congress would do it would be to replace C-Span with something that doesn't run Washington Journal type shows, that would defund NPR and PBS for their roles in promoting Republican-fascism.

The role of journalism in producing depravity, led in that direction by what is called in American journalism "features" has long been noted. It's most developed critique in Karl Kraus's monumental play, "The Last Days of Mankind" is nearly a century old. I see no evidence that that blistering satirical work has had the least effect in reforming journalism or even the alleged intellectual culture that runs the scribbling class. The only protections against it is the ability of those lied about in the media to sue those who lie about them WHETHER OR NOT THEY CAN DEMONSTRATE THE IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE MENTAL STATE OF THE LIAR or a financial loss due to the lie and the ability of the state to remove a broadcasting license to the mass media. As things have developed, especially the ability of cable and online media to destroy lives and egalitarian democracy, all mass media should be subject to punishment for lying, especially that which targets entire races, entire genders, etc. for oppression.

I will bet you my last quarter that that crowd of insurrectionists had a far higher percentage of Clint Eastwood fans in it than a random sample of Americans. I'll bet lots of them watch lots of Cop shows, including COPS.

Correction And Expansion

IN yesterday's posts a word got deleted in editing that was rather important, I've put it in capitals and in blue here.

There is absolutely no reason to suspect that if Americans who are other than egalitarian democrats would succeed, it would NOT be fascists, white supremacists, the ones who have actually ruled in many states, in regions and, in the past, actually wrote the foundational documents and governed up to and even after the Civil War. 

That the United States has ever been in any real danger from Marxism is a superstitious fear that the fascists are reviving, perhaps under the influence of the meat-headed (literally now) pudding-head Jordan Peterson who proves how hungry for stupidity the man-boy hate association that is the internet right is.  That the United States has any danger of becoming Marxist is about as great a danger than it universally becoming saturated with a knowledge of advanced math.  The rump of American and European Marxists, such as exist in only the artificial hot house atmospheres of universities and the scribbling industry, are no danger to anyone except the real left who get tarred by wrongheaded association.   Marxism has even been given up by the Communists except as a cover story.  I doubt you'd find a single real Marxist in any of the dwindling number of allegedly Marxist governments.  They're too busy implementing Victorian capitalism on steroids and making jillions for themselves off of it.  The Putin model that Trump wants to emulate.

No, the danger to egalitarian democracy in the United States is, now, as it has been since before the Revolution from white supremacist, anti-egalitarian oligarchs and those members of the under classes who are turned on by patriarchal racism.  They govern a majority of American states, they win elections often with the help of idiots, Green or otherwise, who hold stupidly romantic and anachronistic affection for the sterile absurdity of American Marxism, as endlessly romanticized in Hollywood and the small magazines of that secular, materialist left. 

Materialism in its elite form, such as Marxism, such as much of anarchism, is really not different from the vulgar materialism of America's indigenous form of fascism.  Not a little of that vulgar materialism saturates what is dishonestly called "Christianity" which I am reminded of whenever I look at a picture of the odious Raymond Cardinal Burke in one of his more gaudy liturgical costumes or read about this or that protestant hallelujah peddlers buying a jet for themselves with Covid relief money given to them by Mnuchin.  

Liberals and people on the left who think we owe it to the fascists to let them lie with impunity lest they not be allowed to peddle their own brand of malarkey are idiots who are the fascists' best friends.

Canadians, your hate-speech ban is a great protector of equality and democracy, and so legitimate freedom.   Don't let the Staters gull you into giving it up through your own Supreme Court. 

Hate Mail

The other day I had to take off  my glasses in the kitchen.  Instead of putting them in my pocket as I usually do I put them down somewhere.   When I needed them again I couldn't find them, I had to go get my spare pair of glasses to see where I put my glasses down.  

That's the person who is editing what I write.   Take it or leave it.

Like It Or Not Today's Reality Is What We Must Take Into Account As We Live Our Lives, Not The Words Of The Slave-Owners and Slave-Profiteers

There is a certain kind of eccentric who spends a lot of their life pretending they are living in some age past.  If I recall right, the eccentric Tasha Tudor, illustrator, artist, writer of children's books liked to make believe she lived in the 1830s.  Others pretend they live in the Victorian period, complete with gaslit homes, others in some totally imaginary medieval period or the time of the Civil War.   

The hobby-lifestyle of anachronistic pretense is, of course, silly.  No matter what people pretend they cannot reproduce the lives of people in the past because they are doing that while being people of the present with a knowledge of the present, the knowledge that unlike those people, they can step out of their pretend into the real present.  They can't undo their knowledge of life during their lifetime, ideas and things which were entirely unknown to those in the period they imagine they would have liked to live in, instead.  Which I doubt they really would if they could really go back.  But we can't go back to even the past we once knew. 

How ridiculous it is depends on the extent to which the person demands that other people go along with their pretense, how they manage to interact with the everyday reality around them.  If they pretend that they really can live in the past it goes from eccentricity to mental illness and,perhaps, can even become a danger to them or others. 

That kind of make believe is far more dangerous in our legal system which is structured on the pretense that we live in 1787, that we have a kind of moral obligation to pretend that we do, that the conditions that held then  are to be the ones that govern our lives and our government now.  If you think that's a statement not tethered to reality, consider how much of our Supreme Court holds it as their ideological pretense, that the ideas and words of men who died two centuries ago, the last significant one of them, James Madison, should govern us even as we never agreed to.  By the time he died in 1836, the original words and ideas of the Constitution had already needed radical alteration to their meaning to meet the changed reality, not a little of that change having to happen almost as soon as the thing started to be implemented.  If I had the time I would look up the passage in which Franklin Roosevelt noted how dangerous the first decades under the Constitution were, how easily it could have pitched the United States into despotism, so badly did those amateurs do at founding a republic which would, at the same time, favor their own interests, as, in fact, the thing did do more successfully.   

There will be no pretending that the free-speech-free-press absolutism of the 1960s, or 2021 will be workable in the future.   In discussing the taking down of Parler, intelligence officials are already talking about how the worst of the insurrectionists were already using encrypted communications, no doubt  communicating mostly with their dupes, suckers and true believers through Parler and other apps.  

I don't think the future will find that they can allow the use of encrypted electronic communication, I'm not even certain they will be able to allow anonymous communication on the regular internet.  So useful for organized criminals, terrorists, the enemies of the common good or even a manageable non-egalitarian, even tolerably awful world that it will be necessary to find ways to thwart their use of the internet or whatever succeeds it from using encrypted messaging.  That's already a problem, as police fighting organized crime have found, there are always computer scientists and techies, even some working for the police who have been entirely willing to sell out society and democracy for money, not caring who gets hurt or killed in the process.  Democracies will have no choice but to reject absolutist civil liberties positions on such things because they are simply not possible in today's world anymore than the things allowable when neighbors lived miles apart could be tolerated in the middle of a residential neighborhood.  When the courts, when regulators pretend that you can keep things as they once were, they sacrifice the lives, the safety, the rights of far more people.   I see absolutely no virtue of any kind in allowing the mere preferences of the few to overwhelm the needs of the many, that the 18th century aristocrats, slave-owners-slave-profiteers who wrote that document didn't consider those problems is no reason for us to live with the pretense that their assumptions can rule us today. 

I Will Never Stop Pointing Out That The Left Has Had An Unwitting Hand In Enabling The Very Fascists Who They Allegedly Oppose

Blogger on my machines was glitchy yesterday and I couldn't get the dashboard to come up so no post.   I got here from a different route today so I can vent more of my outrage at those who paved the way for fascism, the ACLU, the "civil liberties" industry, the Supreme Court. 

I really do have to wonder what the "free speech" "second amendment" members of the Supreme Court are thinking, as they are the ones with the most actual power who paved the way, the ones who accepted the arguments of the ACLU that gave a privilege to liars to lie which is under no rational argument a right, the ones who piously declare that those who want to harm Black People, Latinos, etc. to deprive them of everything from their right to vote to their right to live must always be allowed the chance to succeed in destroying equality and democracy, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO EQUAL STATUS UNDER THE LAW. 

That is the reason that we have this media and social-media propagandized, incited, empowered and organized very real chance that they could do what they clearly want to do, good luck ACLU with arguing to an overtly fascist court on behalf of those whose cases you cover up your fascist enablement with. 

I'm wondering what Rachel Maddow, the writers for The Nation, The Progressive, etc. are thinking about their role in enabling this fascist putsch, not a few of them out of a pretty sleazy secular-lefty tradition that, I'm convinced, originated in a lame-brained attempt to get us the gangster goverance that goes under the Marxist label back when those lame-brains believed that was achievable.   That they stupidly thought Americans were going to go for Marxism is made more understandable in that they also wanted what Lenin and Stalin had brought to the Soviet Union or, belatedly, Mao had brought to China.  They knew that even while ignoring American history in which the actual habits and traditions proved that the form of gangsterism that would succeed here was white-supremacist fascism, we know that because there has not been a second of American history in which that was not a massive power that has had to be contended with.   There is absolutely no reason to suspect that if Americans who are other than egalitarian democrats would succeed, it would NOT be fascists, white supremacists, the ones who have actually ruled in many states, in regions and, in the past, actually wrote the foundational documents and governed up to and even after the Civil War. 

The idea that we owe our indigenous fascists a very real chance to impose their will on the Country, certainly on Black Americans, Native Americans, Latino
Americans, LGBTQ,  the American poor and working poor, that we are never to interfer with their ability to lie us into violent, oppressive enslaving fascism is not only total luancy, it is collusive with that fascism, that white supremacy, that Nazism that fanatical hatred.  The ACLU, the "free speech" members of the Supreme Court are, in fact, the enablers and, as can be seen from their support for Parler against a private corporation, they are actively collusive with the fascists who stormed the Capitol and, without the bravery and commission of their duty by the out-manned police and others, very well could have killed Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, AOC, certainly Ilhan Omar,  or  any others, who could have made good on their stated desire to put a bullet into the heads of some of them, of hanging Mike Pence.  

We know that because the ACLU wants Parler back up and running the better to plan the next attack, in DC or in state capitals or on the local level.   

I won't stop pointing that out because I hope people realize that the ACLU, the "civil liberties" industry, the "free speech" absolutists in and out of the Supreme Court are actively colluding with the fascist mob even as they are actively planning their next act of insurrection.   The least the left can do is to dump the ones who depend or actively seek our funding of them.   

The fascists of the Sedition Caucus of the House, some in the Senate tried to shift blame for the insurrection on January 6th on the left.  Of course, they being liars and scum in league with the fascist insurrectionists, they were lying in their overt meaning.  But in a deeper and historical sense they were right, at least of that part of the left which bought into the "free speech" absolutism of the likes of William O. Douglas and, remarkably enough, Hugo Black, the absolutism which is practically a trademark of the ACLU and so many a reputedly lefty money-raising advocacy group.  Those groups, many of them even as the victims those whose "rights" to lie into existence and organize the fascists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis were being treated for serious, perhaps life threatening injuries, even as the funeral for officer Sicknick was being planned, were already declaring the right of the neo-Nazis, fascists, white supremacists and the social media platform that was an essential part of their organizing the attack to have the "right" under the First Amendment to do it again.  That they were extending the responsibility to give them that ability to non-governmental entities, corporations who wanted no more role in the further attacks planned with Parler and other twitters for terrorists shows just how collusive they are with them.  

DEFUND THE FUCKING ACLU

I think that one thing we can safely assume is that Kate Ruane, senior legislative council of the ACLU believes she will never be in clear and present and right up in her face danger from the activities of American neo-Nazis, KKK, etc. as organized on the Parler and other apps which she is whining about being taken down now that it is undeniable that they are a clear and present danger to America's Congress, its President and Vice-President elects, Congressional and other staff, etc. She and the other preening, sanctimonious reflexive enablers of fascism could not do what they do if they really believed they and their loved ones had real skin, real flesh and blood on the line.

I don't wish harm to anyone but I wish they could have the experience that the hunted members of the Congress did on January 6th. No, they'd probably learn about as much as the Sedition caucus did from that. I wish they could have had the experience of the heroic members of the Capitol and DC Metro police who took the full force of what was a result of the kind of "free speech" that the ACLU has turned into an all consuming fetish and brand name. I wish they would know, first hand and undeniably that their advocacy has gotten many people killed and maimed and terrorized.

I have been warning about the dangerous, violent-fascist enabling ACLU for the entire time I have been doing this public writing, even before then on message boards and comment threads. And for that entire time I've had push back from their suckers on the left who have bought their PR campaigns and pious, sanctimonious habitual enabling of the worst of the far right. They literally are, in the face of the violent, murderous insurrection at the Capitol to overturn the election of the President, arguing for the continuing ability of the fascists and neo-Nazis and white-supremacist murderers to easily communicate their continuing plans to do it again as early as anytime in any state.

The ACLU has forfeited its phony reputation as a protector of freedom, a protector of democracy through its serial enabling of the most viciously violent of our indigenous fascists, especially those who have every intention of murdering People of Color, of disenfranchising them, of oppressing them in the old American way WHICH WE KNOW IS POSSIBLE HERE BECAUSE THEIR SUCCESS IN DOING THAT IS THE LARGE DOWNSIDE OF AMERICAN HISTORY.

The white, affluent, largely safe and secure lawyers and staff of the ACLU have a financial interest in their "both-sides" which always seems to enable mostly the fascist side advocacy.

The next time I see Rachel Maddow or some other liberal have them on to posture over some of their minor work of representing something decent, they should be reminded that as they do that they are far more ably enabling the fascists, the liars, the fascist media, the very gun-toting thugs who really do kill people with their far more effective work.

The ACLU should have to answer for what they do, they should be defunded by the left, any idiot lefty or liberal who sends them a dollar should know that they are enabling the very fascists who stormed the Capitol and tried to install Donald Trump as the dictator of the United States.

I have waited a day to write this because I am so furious with those largely white lawyer assholes, so many of them from elite prep-Ivy-Ivy equivalent schools, Ms. Ruane credentialed, I believe, from the same minor-Ivy that gave the Trumps their credentials.

Rachel, please, stop participating in the ACLU fraud. They are not our friends, they are the enablers of those who want to destroy us, to rob us of our rights, our freedom, our democracy.

I'm tempted to write about the too-late death of the mobster, pimp and financier of fascism Sheldon Adelson but I'm too tired from obsessing about the putsch to keep his good friend and beneficiary Trump in power to think of anything bad enough for the occasion. 

Open Questions About How Dangerous The Courts Will Be Going Forward And Lesser Dangers They Protect

IN the news it says the fascist friendly platform Parler is suing a private corporation because in the wake of the seditious insurrection that was likely planned using Parler, it kicked them off their intenet platform.

First, I hope there is extensive discovery that will answer the suspicion by some that Parler is a Putinist front or merely a domestic fascist threat as well as other possible interesting facts about the Twitter for Trump's traitors.

Second, if some idiot judge or judges or "justices" say that "free speech" requires even belatedly ashamed corporate entities to carry the vehicle of seditious, treasonous, incitement for insurrection, that pretty well closes my cases that a. the judiciary shares a large responsibility for bringing us to the brink of fascism, b. that the badly written Bill of Rights joins other badly written and stupidly constructed parts of the Constitution are a clear, present and continuing danger to all Americans, even as, through most of our history, they were exactly the same kind of danger to Black People, Native People, Latinos, LGBTQ People, etc.

I hope that Parler gets any wrong doing it was a part of exposed in this process though I know it's nothing like a certainty that the real meaning of the danger such will prove is ongoing will make any difference in protecting us into the future. I have every confidence that the judiciary are capable of leaving us, if anything, even more exposed as the Supreme Court has in the past fifty-six years of them enabling the rise of fascism.

 

This Is A Damned Dangerous Outrage From The Free Press

 I don't know which reporter asked, dared really,  Joe Biden yesterday if he were afraid of taking his oath outside but whoever it was she was either knowingly or merely stupidly daring him to risk the, we now know, very real possibility that by doing so he will be a target of a very credible assassination attempt, putting Kamala Harris and every other person who will be on that ceremonial balcony at risk, as well.  While I think she was merely being massively stupid in the way of the DC press corps, I can't help shake the memory of those who challenged The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. to stay at a cheaper motel rather than a more secure one on the night he was assassinated.   

I hope that Biden will realize the far more dangerous moment the country is in right now and opt for an indoor oath taking without any higher risk events surrounding his inauguration, considering the fact that we are in the midst of a pandemic which the Republican-fascists within the government are doing everything they can to spread EVEN AMONG MEMBERS OF THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH they should be excluded from any gathering.   

If there is an attack on an outdoor swearing in, I hope that idiot reporter is grilled for possible collusion in it.

It's Time For Republicans To Make Their Definitive Choice Between Their Fascist Racist Party And Democracy

AS the new Senate even after (Dear God, please may it happen) Democrats are in control of it will not expel the traitorous and faithless Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, et al, it's time to tell the Lisa Murkowskis, the Mitt Romneys, that it is time for them to definitively choose between an overtly treasonous, traitorous Republican party in control of fascists, seditionists and insurrectionists and what they profess to support.

The Republican Party made a devils bargain in the Southern Strategy which predates the Nixon run of 1968, Barry Goldwater's campaign of 1964 was already more than moving in that direction as Jackie Robinson, a Republican delegate to the convention that year, attests in his memoir of that convention. That was a tactic based on the fact that the states of the old Confederacy were in the hands of white supremacists, America's oldest and indigenous form of fascist, quasi-Nazi ideology, so old that it is responsible for the worst parts of the Constitution that still prevent democracy. That crossroads where the Republican Party knelt and sold its soul has been the huge fact denied by the ever more obviously phony "moderates" from states such as Maine, other states which bragged of their allegiance to the Union during the Civil war, many of them previously governed by those who bragged to be members of the Party of Lincoln, the party of the largely legendary Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,  even well after it had become the party of Strom Thermond, Jesse Helms and Richard Nixon, Donald Trump. That the Republican Party was also the party of many a more Eurocentric fasict element, many of them with either real or merely ideological and emotional ties with various European fascists and Nazis merely points out that there were other devils bargains in the mix. 

Democrats had previously made the same bargain with the devil, as so many of the segregationist, Jim Crow Democratic Parties in the South were in control of Democrats, any Democratic president had to contend with that fact, one which the mainstream of the party started to move away from, certainly during the presidency of FDR and Harry Truman and which was definitively broken by the great and tragic Lyndon Johnson.  Democrats made that break and the Republicans saw it as an opportunity which Johnson knew would mean decades of hard rowing for his party.   

The backlash against the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws pushed through by Johnson has been in line with what he predicted as he did what was hard and what was right.  If he had not gotten hoodwinked by the Harvard boys into further involvement in the Vietnam war he would eclipse Lincoln as the greatest of American presidents in the field of equality.   That is even as "the party of Lincoln" which had long been in the hands of the financier class had no moral qualms about making common cause with America's indigenous forms of fascism and white supremacy anymore than they'd had problems with doing business with Hitler. 

But now history and time have brought us to the point where it is Republicans in the Senate, some in the House who have to make the same choice that faced Democrats.  Do you stick with Republican-fascists or do you break with them.   I have absolutely no confidence in Susan Collins doing so, having had decades to see her hypocrisy and duplicity.  She'll only do it if she figures it would be good for Susan Collins to do it. Though maybe I'll be proved to be wrong.  I'm always prepared to be pleasantly surprised. 

If they don't choose to leave the Republican Party as it really is on the pretense that they can change it back to how they imagined it to be, the rest of the world will know what they are.  The kind of people who figure they can do business with Hitler.   If Murkowski, Romney, Collins, etc. don't break with their party, we will know how to judge them for all time.

"Civl Liberties" As A Danger To Democracy - Exhibit

 "The Supreme Court basically said that what the president said on Wednesday -- as much as I disapprove of it and many people disapprove of it on its merits -- is protected by the First Amendment. It comes within core political speech. And to impeach a president for having exercised his First Amendment rights would be so dangerous to the Constitution."

Alan Dershowitz: Celebrity ambulance chaser, torture advocate, prominent "civil liberties" huckster, product of that factory of seditionists and, now, enablers of insurrection, Harvard Law

For a sitting president of the United States to not only run a months and years long campaign of sedition against the Constitutional system, then to foment insurrection against the Congress as it finished off the dangerously antiquated, baroque dance of our elections system, an attack that killed people, in which Trump's supporters sought out the Vice President to hang and in which people where looking for Nancy Pelosi to murder, in which policemen trying to stop them were viciously attacked and at least one murdered, this The Whore of Harvard Law calls "protected speech" as he, once again volunteers to enable the most dangerous and openly fascist president* that enabled lies as "civil liberties" put in the presidency.

Alan Dershowitz is worse than Rudy Giuliani and Lin Woods, it's his like that made them possible.  He's an exhibit of the intellectual decadence and moral degeneracy that mid-20th century "First Amendment" theory was.  A theory which is destroying democracy.  A lot of 20th century theory of that kind was overtly anti-democratic in that it overtly supported fascism or Marxism and in the 21st century we are seeing that even when that support is not overt and is even denied by the practitioner, it actually does work to support fascism in real life, Marxism having been long relegated to the dust bin.

I've Been Saying We Had To De-Nazify The Military And Police Like Forever

Army investigating Fort Bragg PSYOPs officer who led group to DC rally

 

 

Army investigating Fort Bragg PSYOPs officer who led group to DC rally

Commanders at Fort Bragg are reviewing Captain Emily Rainey’s involvement in last week’s events in the nation’s capital, but she said she acted within military regulations and that no one in her group broke the law.

“I was a private citizen and doing everything right and within my rights,” Rainey told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Rainey said she led 100 members of Moore County Citizens for Freedom, which describes itself online as a nonpartisan network promoting conservative values, to Washington to “stand against election fraud” and support Trump. She said the group attended the rally but she didn’t know of anyone who entered the Capitol and that they were headed back to their buses hours before an emergency curfew took effect.

 

The whole thing was an attempt at sedition, even if she's not guilty of the insurrection part of the entertainment she shouldn't be anywhere near the military of a democratic republic.  

It's Been Another Sleepless Night Witnessing The Possible End Of The Quasi-Democracy I Live In

IF the United States is to retain even the small measure of egalitarian democracy we have had won through the long struggle against the original, slave-owner-slavery-profiteer written 1787 Constitution of the United States we will have to look really hard at the parts of that Constitution which the fascists, the Trumpzis and the "civil liberties" lawyers and scholars and scribblers used to empower violent fascists.  Violent fascists who have grown powerful enough so that they installed one of their own in the presidency, put enough of them into the legislative branch, in state houses in, yes, a majority of the old Confederate states but in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania and, I'm disgusted to say, Maine, so they really are a continuing danger to even the pose of democracy.

I listened with interest to the CBC Sunday Magazine show interview with Tom Ginsberg in which he pointed to several of the really dangerous features of the American Constitution. He specifically mentioned the Electoral College, the baroque certification system that is a product of the Electoral College and allowing the States to run elections, the absurdly long period between the election and the inauguration of a new president, especially absurd when the Voters have thrown out the sitting president, that there is no real accountability for a criminal president or, as will become obvious in the coming weeks when the traitor House and Senate members won't be removed in the congress. He also pointed out that there is no stable independent institution within the government that is not open to political corruption and a devotion to maintaining democracy.

That's a pretty involved list of ways in which our quasi-democracy has been too weak to protect itself against the enemies of democracy, including the vast majority of the Republican Party who are, in fact, opposed to anyone winning an election other than themselves. Voter suppression measures have been installed in the majority of states in which Republicans have control of the State Government, even in Georgia where the great Stacey Abrams has managed to pull off two miraculous wins for democracy has a state government which has sought to suppress votes, largely on the basis of race. That is as old as the goddamned Constitution, itself, with the appalling 3/5ths provision, by which the Founders installed not only non-democratic provisions but grotesquely anti-democratic provisions into the thing. 

 

I will point out that what we are, collectively, in danger of losing, a government that is elected and an embodiment of the just consent of those governed by it was exactly the thing which the writers of the Constitution explicitly rejected, disenfranchising women, Black Americans, Native Americans, even the majority of white men who were not property owners.  What the Trump fascist attack on the Capitol is, it is an attempt to prevent Black votes from counting, the votes of those who want equality and democracy.  The anti-democratic system they want was what the Constitution provided through out most of its history, only being made anything like equal or democratic through the most difficult of struggle, a struggle whose past success has been under attack with great success through the Supreme Court overturning that progress and enabling its enemies through their "free speech" rulings. 

I have all of my adult life, once I'd really thought critically about the dangerousness of the United States Constitution against which all of that is best about American history has been a struggle, been entirely opposed to the conventionalized, required religious worship of the Constitution and the fictitious cult of the Founders because they are dangerous to the equality and so freedom of the large majority of Americans. The fetishizing of the document with those terrible flaws, the stupid granting of privileges to lies and to the buying of elections by millionaires and billionaires founded in the inadequate language of the Constitution and its earliest amendments has been what destroyed the greatest step forward in fixing what the Founders intentionally put in place to prevent equality and democracy during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. That the language of "civil liberties" talk is so seductively simplistic that it has become the favorite tool of Proud Boys, white supremacists, Republican-fascists as they destroy equality and democracy proves that.

And there is a large component of entertainment media in this. There is a straight line between the hate-talk comedy of the late 1970s and 1980s, alleged people such as Andrew Dice Clay to Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys. People who knew him said that all Gavin wanted was to be a kew-el stand up comedian. McInnes like so many of the male would-be comedians starting with the stupidly deified and totally unfunny Lenny Bruce wanted to be funny and when they found they had no talent for that, they used ourrageousness, instead. Even starting with Bruce using racist language in his stand up act to shock the idiot kewl-kids into laughing. As there is never much original in show biz of that kind, as it developed,they depensed with the pretense of ironic use of racist language and went directly to the hate talk instead. And the idiot civil libertarians claimed that it was a great thing for liberty. I have come to get my gard up when I hear someone use the word "liberty" because it comes so much out of the mouth of fascists and Nazis and their enablers these days.

Deport Gavin McInnes, deport Gorka and all of the others. If it were possible I'd say deport Ted Cruz, only Canada has its own problems with its indigenous fascists and a Supreme Court which is following the same idiotic enabling of hate speech that the U.S. Supreme Court has practiced.

I Need A Laugh - MAGA Gets Put On No Fly List - Only Don't Laugh This Is Going To Be The Right Wing Line For Months

 

Here's Why Nancy Pelosi Is One Of The Greatest Speakers Of The House In It's History And Her Play-Lefty Critics Are Languishing On Their Has-been Blogs

 

On The Speculation That It Was A Proud Boy's Lead Pipe That Murdered Officer Sicknick

They shouldn't even wait a week, they should, on the first day of the Biden administration revoke Gavin McInnes's green card and deport his ass back to Canada and make him 100% persona non grata for the rest of his life.  

I'm sorry Canada but you at least theoretically do a better job with muzzling hate-talk and he should have been muzzled more than a decade ago.  And you spawned him.  There must be fascists up there that you could deport back here.  You could keep Rand Paul from going to enjoy Canadian medical care from now on, I'd call that even-stevens.

 

Update:  FOX is threatening people who are calling for obeying laws and punishing law breakers that the insurrectionists they whipped up are coming back for more violence. 

If there is a second, hopefully real, this time, trial of Donald Trump on impeachment charges in the Senate after Democrats take control, I hope they take the perhaps unprecedented step  of declaring that Rudy Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz and other Trump lawyers who should be disbarred, some of them behind bars, are not fit to argue a legal case in front of the United States Senate. 

If Trump can't find real lawyers to argue for him - presumably because they don't want the stink of him on them and don't have any confidence he'll pay their bill - the Senate should do what courts do and appoint legal representation who can competently AND HONESTLY mount a defense.  Rudy and The Dersh most certainly shouldn't be trusted to do that. 

The Shooting Of Ashli Babbitt Was Totally Justifiable And She Should Have Known That Better Than Most People

 I got into an online brawl over the police shooting of Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot as she was at the front of the insurrectionists trying to break into the Speaker's Lobby at the Capitol, part of a group of hundreds of armed thugs who were rampaging as a third of the United States government were sheltering in place, many of them in the exact location which the police were trying to hold,  the door from the mob Babbitt was at the front of, the officers' guns drawn in full view of those at the glass doors which the mob was attacking.  

I have absolutely no problem with the officer(s) who shot and killed one of that mob, someone whose identity and intentions and abilities to carry out those intentions they had little idea of in the split seconds they had to react in fulfillment of their duties, to protect the members of Congress, Congressional staff, and other innocent people NONE OF WHOM WERE INCLUDED IN THE MOB ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR.

While the suspension and investigation of the officer(s) who shot her is an important and necessary formality, the incident as it happened could not have been more obvious an act of police hired to protect people from people who were not only reasonably believed to be a danger to them BUT AS THEY WERE PROCLAIMING THEIR DANGER TO THEM.    Officers who fired on the mob breaking in those doors WERE DOING THEIR JOB AS IT WAS REASONABLY AND OBVIOUSLY UNDERSTOOD.  They certainly had every reason to believe that mob was as much a danger to their fellow officers and themselves as to the Democratic Congressmen who were the primary targets of the violence.

All of the Capitol and other police who tried to defend the Congress, Congressional Staff, other innocent civilians at enormous personal danger to themselves - AS CAN BE SEEN BY ONE OF THEM BEING MURDERED DURING THE INSURRECTION AND OTHERS SERIOUSLY INJURED, all of those who fulfilled their duty deserve to be honored for what they did, including shooting one of the mob at the door.   

Ashli Babbitt had military training, she more than most of the Rexal Rangers and others whose training probably consisted of watching Hollywood movies should have known the possible consequences of what she was doing.  From what I've read, I think she was driven nuts by what she was obsessed with online and in other hate-talk media.   That's what fueled this insurrection, that and the Republcan-fascist party that is the beneficiary of the permission given by the Supreme Court for the media to lie with impunity.   If you want to see federal employees who should be suspended, punished and removed from their jobs, it's the Supreme Court who set off the match that may burn the entire thing to the ground.   

 

Again, as with the guy with the heart condition who died of over exertion while part of a law-breaking mob and the foolish woman who got crushed or trampled to death (accounts I read differed) while carrying a fucking stupid Don't Tread On Me flag, if their families and loved ones want to hold someone responsible, they can look at their loved ones who were breaking the law, endangering innocent people and the politicians and cabloid media and social-disease media that put them where they died.  From what I've read some of the families of some of them realize that.  Any who do are putting the responsibility for the deaths or harm to their loved ones in the right place.