Republican hits Buttigieg with disgusting slur, Buttigieg makes her REGRET it

 

Aileen Cannon Should Be Gotten Off The Federal Bench, That Stinking Gangster-Lawyer Should Be The Last Straw That Breaks The System

GEORGE CONWAY asked if Aileen Cannon belonged on the Federal Bench, there is no question that she is such a total and self-seeking sycophant to Donald Trump and the Republican-fascist party that she should never have been put on the federal or any other bench by the Republican-fascist, Moscow Mitch led Senate.   That there isn't an easy and sure way of removing the grifter skank from the federal bench shows just how bad the parts of the Constitution setting up the courts and the Supreme Court are.   There is nothing you can say about her that you can't say about sitting members of the Court, Clarence Thomas to Amy Coney Barrett regularly do things that should get them removed from the Supreme Court but the absurd manner of confirmed by the anti-democratically constituted Senate and the lifetime appointment of members, for all practical purposes impossible to force off the bench and impossible to impeach, means that once the fascists put someone like that criminal gangster-lawyer on the bench, We the People are stuck with them till they die and go to hell. 

We have got to fight like hell to keep the Congress in Democratic hands every election from now on.  And to change the rules of the federal judiciary as possible and to amend the Constitution to clean up the Augean stables presented as the most august of the branches.   Make John Roberts cry. 

Reality Is Real, Life Is For Living It And A Better Use For Internet Comments - Perhaps the first Tuedsay Shorts, Tuesday usually being my busiest day

IF I AM LOOKING for advice about how to meditate more efficiently, I would look at the Buddhist Scriptures.  The focus of the Buddha and his followers was, for the most part, concentrated on meditating towards the end of achieving liberation from pain and sorrow and, so, that's the area of expertise those excel in. Obviously they don't have much to say about God unless you, as I do, think that's pretty much what the experience of Nibbana that is their goal is.

If I am looking for information to inform me about living life in order to achieve a decent society and life and the salvation that would result from a diligent application towards those ends, I look to the Jewish Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments because that was the primary focus of that tradition.  I've tried both and ended up more convinced by the Jewish tradition which I hold is the real font of egalitarian democracy.  I think the pagan Greek and Roman cultures had far less to tell us about much other than math and a few good plays, primarily those by Euripides.  They contain a lot of information about what not to do, most of what is wrong in the history of Christianity is a product of the worst of European and other traditions and cultures.  

The warnings of the Prophets about Israel and Judea being corrupted by evils opposed to the Sinai Covenantal tradition might have warned Christians in Europe about things in the indigenous cultures and others that they couldn't adopt without falling away from the Gospel.  I think the wisdom of many other cultures of smaller groups on all continents have more useful information and advice and examples to live by than those which have the greatest hold on our elite culture, since they will be drawn to everything that enhances the lives of the rich and, so, powerful, the evils of oligarchy and gangsterism.  A lot of the conflict between those who maintain a romantic view of the British monarchy and those who come from places still experiencing the aftermath of English then British colonial gangsterism in the reaction to the death of Elizabeth II is that right before our eyes just now.  Little to nothing wrong with the British monarchy isn't present in conventional American Constitutional hagiographic pseudo-history.  Including many if not most of the evils of British imperialism and its history of slavery.  Only instead of directly giving formal governance of colonies through appointed gangster bosses, we allow the corporations and others to do it through corruption of local oligarchs and dictators.  Hey, I'm a political blogger, you can't expect me to not get into that. 

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I never knew who "Phila" was except for what information he gave about his activities on his blog and at the two blog comment threads where I encountered him.   I have not read anything from him in ten years when he abruptly stopped blogging and stopped appearing, at least under that name, where I went online.  He and his blog are one of the very few that I can say I have really missed.  There are certainly others on that short list, almost all of whom have given up blogging.  At least where I can find them.

One of the things I remember was when we agreed that one of the best uses of online comments was to test the strength of arguments, to see if we could defend our ideas as they were attacked by intelligent, informed commentators.  Unfortunately, the quality of online attack isn't high enough to sustain that in most venues, usually the attacks quickly fall into a rote pattern of cultural assumption based on no evidence and little logic.  I've learned a lot from that, too, mostly in how startlingly bad how many those with college-crendentials are at rigorous thinking.   I don't know if it was always that bad but it certainly is now.  And, if anything, the young'uns are worse at it than the olds are.

How To Deal With A Friggin' Liar - I Want Al Franken Back In The Senate, At Least

IF HEARING JOHN ROBERTS whining about the reputation of the court whose wrecking under his chiefdom is certainly due to his own Republican-fascist party makes you want to punch him in his his fat, smarmy disingenuous face, you might get some satisfaction hearing Al Franken refusing to sit silently as Alice Stewart lies her damned head off about the hypocrisy of Republicans in the Senate over the two stolen Court seats, the one denied to Merrick Garland because Republicans wouldn't even grant him a hearing and the one that they broke the "rules" they invented to do that to install Amy Coney Barrett in violation of that rule, one that Lindsay Graham pledged he would follow in exactly the circumstances of the Barrett speed-confirmation. 

 

This is the way for a Democrat on one of the damned talking-head shows to deal with a flagrant liar like this Republican shill.

This is why if it's at all possible, I'd love to see Al Franken back in the Senate refusing to idly and politely take the lies and bullshit of Republicans and others on committee and on the floor as he did so well and which others don't do at all.  

How Did The Idea of "Rights" Come To Mean Enabling So Many Wrongs?

THE SUPREME COURT of the United States in an act of monumental stupidity gave the media a "right" to lie about politicians and other public figures in 1964 and it is one of the least realized corruptions of our society and, so, our politics in every year since that. You may have caught me harping on this before because even as I do that I see every evidence it is the key to understanding the corruption of American life and, so, politics.  

The criminal who lost the presidency in 1960, Nixon, won the election in 1968  largely on the power of media lies told about Hubert Humphrey.  The common analysis that he lost it due to American involvement in Vietnam is certainly discredited by not only by Nixon's continuation but entirely illegal expansion of the American war into Cambodia and Laos, not to his political harm.  He won the next election in 1972, against the anti-war George McGovern, one of the most decent men to ever have gotten a major party nomination, even as Nixon's crimes were becoming obvious through even more lies told through and by the media. Lying has certainly worked far better for the oligarchs and the Republican, now Republican-fascist party who own the media and whose interest against the majority of The People needs lying to succeed.  Though that idea would have seem to have failed to gain the notice of the Warren Court who had lifetime tenure and didn't need to run for election or reelection to sit at a bench in position to make such stupid decisions.

I would like to get around to trying to research the etymology of that use of the word "right" to mean things we are entitled to do and have and how it once related to doing what was morally right and providing the necessities and goods of life to those who lacked them, trying to trace how that connection was corrupted to the point where "rights" are claimed by those who clearly are in the wrong and who are permitted by judicial pretenses of moral neutrality to get away with everything from petty conning right up to and including murder as a matter of "rights."  Especially when there is a demonstrable destruction of real and the most consequential of rights for far more People when such "rights" are invented.  Whatever that relation  is the whole notion of "rights" as they exist in the United States, under our federal and state Constitutions is seriously and dangerously screwed up.  

Our idolized Bill of Rights is highly problematic, even if my critique of the First Amendment makes you jittery consider the use of the Second Amendment by Republican-fascists to turn our schools into the shooting galleries of psychopaths.  If, as I suspect, that game is a consequence of 18th century enlightenment refusal to admit the practical consequences of immorality under the guise of judicial impartiality, such a study might be far more useful than it might seem at first.  Judges and, especially Supreme Court "justices" are never as impartial as they pretend to be, that's just another lie told with impunity like the ones Republican-fascists told during their confirmation hearings to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The idea that lying could exist as a right held, not only by individual human beings but the artificial corporate entities that "the press" are is an extreme danger to anything that depends on an effective majority of Americans knowing the truth.  We saw an extreme example of that in the media carried Trumpian-Republican-fascist lies surrounding Covid-19 and the efforts of those with the widest knowledge of what truth could be known about it to reduce and diminish the dangers and public and personal health consequences of the pandemic.  That is an ongoing consequence of the Courts and others pretending that there is a right to lie in the media which, fuck all else, will be the law of the land no matter how many tens and hundreds of thousands die as a consequence, no matter how long the promissory note of equal rights issued in the actual founding of the country is put off for members of oppressed minorities and Women and the working and unemployed poor.   And the American media, by and large, have been entirely irresponsible in that regard.

The lies in everything from the lowest of the gutter press to the New York Times against Hillary Clinton resulted in the United States having the loser of the 2016 election take the presidency.  Someone recently said Donald Trump was the man most investigated and least prosecuted in our history it is perhaps notable that known and proven con man and criminal that he is someone as obviously sleazy as he is was able to, even getting fewer votes, defeat the woman who is certainly the most investigated and most exonerated person in American history, and even more lied about than investigated.  The power of lies over the truth is something that is certainly proven in our history, our lived, experienced recent history, the danger of permitting the enormously powerful mass media and the social disease of social media to lie with impunity is as proven as any other mortal danger.  It is supremely ironic that telling the truth about the danger of free-speech-press absolutism is, effectively, one of the most forbidden areas of speech that there is.

The present regime of enabling and so empowering lies, especially lies amplified in the mass media and peddled by the expertise of advertising, a career of conning and carnival barking more effectively will destroy American democracy on behalf of organized criminals and billionaire gangsters intent on destroying democracy.  Even in issues where a majority of Americans seem to want one thing, the media and its effects on elections - mixed with the gaming of the corrupt American structure of government which has been so effectively gammed by those hired by the oligarch-gangsters - has thwarted equality, gun regulation, climate change policy, health care, etc. etc. etc.  Only a media freed from the entirely visible hand of the oligarch-gangsters has any possibility of telling the truth consistently. Though even such a press not required to try to tell the truth will be little to no help and will often be counterproductive in effect.  I would point to the old lefty media organs who were as apt to champion stupidly counterproductive policies and carry water for anti-democratic ideologies like Marxism as they were to really help in the struggle for equality and equal and economic justice.  We need a new lefty media that is totally and consciously free of that baggage.  Outside of some little financed and little read religious left sources, I can't think of a single one which is free of it.

I am not the most experienced reader of Scripture there is but I don't find much in the way of the promotion of the mass delusion present in our secular society that there is anything right about lying. About the only thing I can think of off the top of my head was the deception of the prostitute Rahab in concealing the spies Joshua sent to scout out how to take the city of Jericho.  And that's not exactly a good fit.  Perhaps there is something someone would like to point out in Scripture that gives the massive liars, the "christian nationalists" their Scriptural warrant to lie their heads off, not least of which is lying about who Jesus was and what Jesus said.  If there is something that shows just how reliant on a "right" to lie American-fascism is, that certainly makes the case.