He Shot Two Israelis... Thinking They Were Palestinian

 

Read how screwed up and hypocritical the rampant anti-Palestinian bigotry is when it's the motive in a gun attack on Jews on vacation in Florida.   And it's not just in the U.S. it's all over the place. 

Slightly Expanded Comment From Elsewhere

Universal suffrage starting with white men without property,  abolition of slavery,  Women's suffrage,  true equality for all, the rights of workers and economic justice, environmental protection, . . .  for crying out loud CHILDHOOD NUTRITION AND HEALTH CARE have all, ALL had to struggle against the Constitutional order and the "rule of law" as ministered by the courts and that most corrupt of all branches of the government, the Supreme Court.    It has been an oligarchy by design of the framers, all else, the best thing about the United States has been a struggle against that oligarchy. 

"Your Beef With Simels"

WELL, I'M A VEGAN so I wouldn't call it a "beef" and since it's Simps, at best it might be beef tea.   Weak beef tea.  I don't generally address Simps until he says something about me, generally at Duncan's blog though at times in things he wants me to post here.   If he didn't say anything about me I wouldn't bother.

You Might Not Think This Is Important For You But You'd Be Wrong

THE RECENT LETTER OF POPE FRANCIS openly, though diplomatically, opposing Trumpism and the pseudo-Catholic "trad-Catholic" looking out for #1 presentation of charity by VD Vance has led to an interesting piece by Michael Sean Winters comparing Pope Francis's letter which tells American Catholics to remember what is good about the American tradition to the infamous letter of Pope Leo XIII that condemned "Americanism" as heresy.  The history is interesting in that it presents how a polemical French translation of an American biography of Fr. Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulists, and especially the polemical introduction to it by the French progressive Abbé Félix Klein and the false claims of French reactionaries using that distorted view of Hecker found in a ractionary diatribe using the already somewhat distorted translation and introduction .   You might say that late 19th century "trad-Catholics" were the basis of Leo XIII's conception of "Americanism."  That despite the fact that just about everything in the "trad-Catholics'" case was false if not a fabric of lies.   I think that one of the most salient features of today's "traditional Catholicism" is that it is similarly riddled with blatant lies, many of them told by Bishops and Cardinals of the USCCB. 

It's interesting in itself, showing, I'd assert, how damaging the self-imposed sealing in of the papacy in the wake of the loss of the Papal States was to Catholicism for generations.  Another is the damage that the Euro-centrism of the Vatican has been and how until very recently the Vatican has been at the mercy of often dishonest ideological parties - generally conservative - in its understanding of the world.   If you intentionally cut yourself off, you only have yourself to blame when you don't understand things outside of your chosen sphere of influence.

The Unfortunate Consequences Of Calling Very Different Things By The Same Word

I would disagree with the article by Michael Sean Winters about one important thing, American liberalism - WHICH MUST ALWAYS BE DISTINGUISHED FROM EUROPEAN LIBERALISM - isn't a product of Madisonian theory, it's a product of People who took the radical egalitarianism of the Law, the Prophets and the Gospel of Jesus seriously.  American liberalism can't be divorced from the major issues that comprise it, abolitionism, Womens' suffrage, the rights of minorities, the rights of workers and none of those are the product of either the thinking of Jefferson or Madison, they certainly are not derived from the Constitution which is the very thing against which those movements have had to struggle and still do, today.  

Marilynne Robinson's theory that American liberalism is a product of People who took the commentary on economic and social justice in the Geneva Bible seriously may be a bit exaggerated - I think the very early non-Calvinist anabaptist calls for the abolition of slavery are a major part of that history - but she is much closer to what really happened than the common received POV that American liberalism  was an "enlightenment" product.   And I think that really is a major and important issue in the continuation of the American tradition of liberalism and its possible prospering into the future.  And it is an issue in the repeated failure of "liberalism" of the European kind in its failure to deliver economic and social equality. 

The 18th century European, largely French construction of "liberalism" in laissez-faire economics and libertarian liberty - as opposed to morally responsible freedom in the traditional American meaning of the word - is something that really is very  important to whether or not those issues that comprise that American liberal tradition succeed.  I think one of the major failures in American politics of the past 45 years is the European style liberalism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as opposed to a more traditional American style liberalism of Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter.  That Clinton and Biden were a product of the Ivys and, in Clinton's case Oxford is, in fact, important.   Biden and Carter aren't a product of those training grounds so congenial to oligarchy and its precursor supposed "meritocracy." That the corporate media went far harder against Carter and Biden - which resulted in them having single terms - is, I hold a product of their far different and humane liberalism, though, of course, other issues impinge on that as well.  I think the role of Biden's disastrous and, in the end, morally indefensible support for the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the State of Israeli are one such major issue that is unrelated to what I'm talking about here.   I think that the role that foreign entanglements, largely encouraged by economic elites and Euro-style "liberals" in the failures of Democratic presidents radically egalitarian domestic programs going back to LBJ is a major and woefully understudied phenomenon.   The role of the Republican-fascist abandonment of Ukraine is another issue, altogether, due to the Republicans' benefiting from the patronage and aid of Putin, as the Roberts Court opened up our politics USING CLASSICAL 18TH CENTURY NOTIONS OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH-PRESS to that in major ways after they were warned about the consequences of doing so.   Those "justices" who voted for Citizens United have the blood of the Ukrainan People on them.   Several of them including Roberts "trad-Catholics."

I think American academic habits which Winters demonstrates in the article share something of the late 19th century Vatican in the conventional thinking about America, in that they accept too readily that European definition of "liberalism" when the distinction between that amoral and ultimately anti-egalitarian and so anti-democratic ideology - the ideology of most of the media "liberals" - is destructive of the egalitarian-democratic basis of traditional American liberalism.   That a number of neo-fascists in American have styled themselves as "classical liberals" is an important thing to understand.  

I do think this is important for non-Catholics as well as Catholics to understand.   

If, as I fear is likely, the papacy of Francis is about to end, it's especially important who replaces him.   You might not think it does but it is of major importance in the world.  Any future Pope who is on the side of the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets will have to deal with the heresy of American style "traditional Catholicism" a major force in American fascism and the spread of fascism around Europe and countries in the Americas.  But I can't go into that much right now.

An elderly pop music critic, 

His columns, all copies, eidetic,

When seeing alternative

Thoughts, new, not derivative

Became quite unhinged and splenetic.

More On Kendrick Lamar's Half-time Show

I HAVE WATCHED the video of Kendrick Lamar's halftime show three times and, apart from the use of the "N" word which I don't think I have a right to get used to,  it's among the most remarkable pieces of live theater I've seen documented on video.

The complexity of the music alone, largely due to the complex structure and content of the text, would make a live delivery of it from memory a remarkable artistic and intellectual accomplishment.  The non-stop top speed of something that complex would make one number remarkable and it was one after another for the duration of it.

On top of that is the complex choreography with a huge cast of dancers-performers, some of them singers as well,  that those two aspects of it came of on such an enormous stage, live, is proof of the high intelligence, great talent and discipline of all involved.   And I haven't gotten into the extremely complicated intellectual content of it.  The mix of history, politics, morality, sociological ideas, as well as things like the feud between Kendrick and Drake - which is an extremely complicated thing, all in itself - was clearly understood by the major performers, Kendrick Lamar, Samuel L. Jackson, SZA, Serena Williams, and others whose name I haven't caught yet and, I'd imagine, most if not all of the chorus and dancers.   Samuel L. Jackson a mainstream actor took an enormous career risk in playing a malevolent Uncle Sam urging and threatening Kendrick Lamar to toe the mainstream line was extremely brave, especially as what I'd guess will be a new Hollywood blacklist is about to start.  Big media is certainly falling in with Trumpian fascism just as it did during the red scare.   I don't think I'll ever think of Uncle Sam in any other way from now on.   I was also extremely impressed with Serena Williams' performance.  

That Kendrick Lamar, his cast and his team came up with what was extremely subversive art one month into Trump II, with the entire mainstream, corporate media falling all over themselves and burning democracy not to mention equality to cinders is courageous.    I hadn't paid that much attention to the reaction to it, and the positive reaction is entirely more interesting than the predictable white-supremacist reaction (including a surprising number of Black media hacks.)  But now I can begin to understand what the excitement is about.   

That such an amazingly impressive performance of such a complex theater piece was created and performed by an All Black Cast is a blast against the Republican-fascist-media attack on Black People under the new "N" word, "DEI."   That the cast of drooling idiots in the Trump regime are being applauded by the mostly white corporate media - making a fool of the White Supremacist John Roberts with his lie that America is post-racist and so didn't need the Voting Rights Act anymore - are a complete contrast to the brilliance and excellence of the creators and performers seen by a record audience.   I think that's the reason that a remarkable number of People around the world are copying the moves they saw,  white People as well as People of Color.   I've seen commentary about how a remarkable number of white Women online have taken it to heart.   Certainly anyone who has been victimized by the same game that Kendrick Lamar and his cast  took on in the show would feel it spoke for them as well.  

I should have waited till I watched the actual thing several times before I commented on it.   I may not listen every day but I can say that I'll do what I hadn't done before, click on videos as they appear on my side bar because I want to keep up a bit.   Something I don't generally feel at all about pop music in general.  

Trump Secretary faces MASSIVE scandal DAYS after confirmation

 

Israel Is A Terror State Zionism Is An Evil Ideology

 

The Israeli Army is full of war criminals, it is led by war criminals who regularly commit crimes against humanity.  The majority of Israelis have kept fascists in power in that country for decades, now, its public relations have always been lies. 

Someone Apparently Thinks I'm Younger Than I Am

I'VE BEEN ASKED what I think of Kendrick Lamar's performance at the Superbowl.  Well, asking me that assumes I'd have watched the Superbowl which I am morally opposed to existing though I'm not opposed to the half-time acts, at least as a matter of general principle.   I'm more likely to listen to his than many of the previous acts, I'll forego going far into my anecdote of when my two young nieces who had been forced to sit through the thing with their maternal grand-dad thought that it was hilarious to see old men jumping around like rock stars when Mick and his old Stones did it.  And that was a long, long time ago, now. 

I think I had heard the name Kendrick Lamar before  but I hadn't ever heard his music so I had to go to Youtube University to listen to it and it's good that it had subtitles because it goes so fast I wouldn't have caught a lot of the words.   I had to look at another Youtube that explains Drake vs Kendrick to white People to understand some of what it was about.  And I heard other names I really should check out but there are lots of names I should check out that I never get around to checking out.    Obviously this entire area of music is something I'm unqualified to understand because I haven't been listening and so much of it is based in insider information.

First, obviously I'm not Kendrick Lamar's target audience,  the use of the "N" word lands on an old white-male egalitarian's ears differently than I'm sure he intended it.  I generally don't think it's a good idea to use the language of the enemy but, after many years of hearing it used by LGBTQ+  People,  I finally could get used to using the word "queer."  Though I still don't like it.   But that's only that word, the political content I could discern I generally agree with though I think the irony and sarcasm and satire (I think he is one of the rare artists in the English language who seems to understand satire) blunts it.  Like most art of the type it seems to be a lot heavier on documenting wrongs and criticism but is light on suggested responses to wrongs.  But it's art and not a political lecture.  

As for his catfight with Drake, it's more interesting than Betty Davis vs. Joan Crawford - it seems to be about issues instead of just show-biz -  but I don't care about either of those brawls.   

As far as listening to it regularly, probably not.  I think he's got musical ability and talent and even some inspiration - a lot of that more as a song track to the theatrical video that his music is presented in - I wonder what it would be like to have heard his music without seeing the videos first.   I don't think it's primarily about the music,  hip-hop and rap seem to me to be more a species of recitative than real songs, recitative has always been primarily a vehicle of texts and meaning not melody.  I think it would be more substantial to deal with his text which is the substance of it.

I can say that anyone who can piss off the people Kendrick Lamar pissed off by appearing at that corporate-pagan Mammon Circus Fascisimus is OK with me, in that, at least.  I read online that the NFL regrets asking him to perform which is probably to his credit.

I wish him well, I hope he contributes to positive change.  

Watching Some Mid-Western FAFO White Farmers

who supported Trump and are now finding out that they're screwed because of their guy and his billionaire owner the druggie white-supremacist from South Africa  I wondered if there will ever be a Daniel Patrick Moynihan who does a sweeping supposed academic study of America's white racists.   They should because it's not only us non-racists who the racists are costing so much, they cost themselves at least as much, the difference is they never seem to learn anything from the hardest of experience. 

America has never had a "Black problem" it has always, ALWAYS had a racist problem.  There would have been nothing problematic about the presence of Black People, Native Americans, etc.  without the racism of the racists - certainly the victims of Racism understand that that is the source of their added burden of problems but academia, once lily-white and hegemonically male but still carrying the cultural and proceedural vestiges of that, has never really focused on the cost to us all of this, our indigenous fascist movement. 

Racists are our predominant fascist power as macho-males (male supremacists) are our predominant criminal class and that fact is invisible to academia, the mid-brow untelligentsia in our society, the media and, certainly, the law.  

As I mentioned here the other day there are entire states in the United States which have always, every year of their presence in the United States been ruled by white supremacy, that is racists.  Alabama, Mississippi, I would argue the original states of the slave power, perhaps excepting a few years in Virginia and North Carolina.

But I would guess I'm right that there has never been a single state which has entirely escaped having been governed under a racist regime at some time, including Massachusetts, New York, the New England States, including my own.

 Yet I am unaware of any great movement among historians to study that fact as a basic fact of our Constitutional order, a major force in our law, a major force in our institutions and society.   I AM UNAWARE OF ANY EXTENSIVE STUDY INTO THE ENORMOUS COST, IN DOLLARS AND CENTS AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, not just for the victims of racism but for poor whites, middle-class whites, even the less affluent affluent whites, including the very racists themselves.   I have mentioned that this fact first came to my attention when I was thinking a lot about the Bush II-Cheney invasion of Iraq which was costing us trillions of dollars and the part that the racism of Bush II and Cheney and the neo-cons who expected - against every indication in history and the present - that the Iraqis were going to welcome the great white father as their liberators.   If you need a reminder of that, here's one from a useful website:

Assurance #1: The Iraq War won’t cost a lot of money

•     RUMSFELD:  The Office of Management and Budget estimated it [the cost of war] would be something under $50 billion dollars.

STEPHANOPOULOS:  Outside estimates say up to $300 billion.

RUMSFELD:  Baloney.

 
•     Testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, March 27, 2003:

WOLFOWITZ:  There’s a lot of money to pay for this.  It doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money.  And it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people... We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.

 
    The war has exceeded $500 billion in costs as of 2008 – and probably in excess of a trillion dollars when all costs, such as caring for wounded soldiers over time, are included.

In estimating the cost of the war, Bush officials attempted to assuage people’s concerns about the financial burden by focusing on the short-term, direct military costs (the cost of the invasion) – and by not accounting for a long-term occupation of Iraq, the possibility of an insurgency and ongoing violence, as well as significant reconstruction costs.

The Bush administration further claimed that the reconstruction costs would be mostly offset by Iraqi oil revenues, which has not been the case.

Furthermore, the lack of support from the international community for the war has placed the primary financial burden on the U.S.

AND THAT WAS JUST THE MONETARY COST OF THE INVASION.  Look at the racist, condescending, couldn't-be-more-wrong assurances that they would just love the great-white-father coming to liberate them. 

Assurance #6: We will be welcomed as liberators

•     CHENEY:  The Middle East expert, Professor Fouad Ajami, predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy...

    RUSSERT:  Do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

    VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY:  I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.

WOLFOWITZ:  These are Arabs, 23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators.

 
    Although some Iraqis welcomed U.S. troops, the reception was mixed at best.  The notion of a Western army occupying an Arab land summoned up humiliating memories of colonialism, as well as fears regarding underlying U.S. intentions.  Before long a growing insurgency took hold, which has led to more than 4 years of violence.

I maintain that it was the racism of those in the Bush II regime which led to them holding what was essentially a 19th century colonialist mentality towards the Iraqis.   But it should never be forgotten that they sold their war to an initially skeptical American public on the power of a racist ignorance of the differences between Iraqis, Iranians, Al Qaeda, etc.  Even Americans who are racist enough to not care about the lives of Brown People in the Middle East might understand the cost in money and, maybe, somewhat, in American lives that the racism of the Cheneys and Wolfowitzes have cost them.   Indeed, Trump made reference to that cost as part of his con-job to get power again, so it's something that apparent that even the massively racist Trump has some understanding of that.

But back to home. 

The racism of farmers who put Trump back in office, the racism of working class white racists AND THE LAWYER, ACADEMIC-JOURNALIST, WHITE COLLAR RACISTS who put Trump back in office, putting the drugged up South African racist Musk in the presidency from where he is in the process of stealing everything he can get his hands on, are the most expensive and wasteful minority group in the country AND NO ONE IS SERIOUSLY STUDYING THEM AND THEIR IMPACT FROM THAT POINT OF VIEW.  

One of the few things that is satisfying about listening to the whining and crying of famers who voted for Trump finding out that in and among Trump and Musk stealing the subsidies that Democrats supported providing for them is that some of them are twigging on to the fact that THEY, THEIR FARMS, THEIR INCOMES WERE THE MAJOR BENEFICIARIES OF FOOD ASSISTANCE TO THE POOR  - no doubt most of them imagining those poor People as media stereotyped Black welfare recipients - and that if those People can't buy food, that means they lose income, too.   Mid-Western and farm state Republicans in Congress, most of them as racist as can be, would never have voted for food assistance unless it benefited their constituents.  Too bad their constituents didn't understand that well enough to overcome their racism.  Now their representatives figure their bread is buttered on the Trump side.

There is no group in the United States that is suffering from a surfeit of information and intelligent understanding of the reality they are living in - media, especially entertainment and hate-talk as ersatz "news" making sure of that - so these FAFO farmers aren't unique but they're finding out that as the beneficiaries of the federal programs that Democrats have championed and supported far more than Republicans - even farm belt Republicans - just what they voted for.   

It is unfortunate that another group which is paying an enormous price for the racist-Trump voting farmers are the Democratic voting farmers, white as well as People of Color among them, who are as screwed as the ones who voted to get screwed.   See what I mean about the enormous cost that racists have been, especially to the targets of that racism?

Racists are the most costly, most destructive minority group in the United States - there's a reason that the states with the most racist histories are among the states which get the most subsidies from the Federal government.  

And I haven't gone into the enormous cost in crime and sedition and treason that America's racists have been at the center of.   What's interesting about that is the extent to which the corporate elites in the media, elsewhere and in white supremacy governed states have been banning even the study of this history, its teaching even research into it.  

The study of the history of EVERY SUBJUGATED MINORITY GROUP IN AMERICA is the study of our struggle against those who oppress us AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER WHICH HAS PERMITTED THAT OPPRESSION TO GO ON UNDER THE RULE OF LAW.    It's clear that the fact of the injustice of that has not much moved the agenda of equality much, such progress as was won with enormous struggle and sacrifice, INCLUDING SACRIFICE IN VERY REAL BLOOD, has been swept aside by Supreme Court fiat and media encouragement of a reaction against that progress.  But if it was presented to those with a tendency towards racism, sexism, etc. to understand that racism, sexism, etc. comes with a very real and decisive cost to them WITH A BENEFIT TO THE WEALTHY WHO ARE THEIR REAL ENEMIES IN LIFE, that might convince them that it's not worth it.

I Bought Me A President by Cathy Fink & Tom Paxton

 

Late Night Nightmares Unrelieved By Sunrise

WHILE LYING AWAKE YET AGAIN, thinking about how really bad Supreme Court "justices" have made things by invoking entirely imaginary Kiefer Sutherland 24 style scenarios in their quest to give a Donald Trump dictatorial powers,  against which our idiotic Constitution provides no powers of restraint  - largely a creation of the millionaire-billionaire funded intellectual whore houses the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society* - it occurred to me what we are seeing is that that effort, the "unitary executive" as it has been embroidered and modified and essentially redefined under the typical fascist-stink-tank process, bottled as vintage "Founders" snake water by the Court IS FACILITATING EXACTLY WHAT THEY CLAIMED A UNITARY EXECUTIVE WAS NEEDED TO PREVENT.   

What it comes down to is the Court and the Republican-fascist party allowing Trump to sell everything to an Elon Musk including the very national security which was the pretense the judicial framers of American fascism claimed was their motivation in making a president immune from even criminal prosecution.  Allowing Trump - whose patron is Putin - destroying the American-European alliance and giving Putin Ukraine, a major step in Putin reconstituting a Stalinist-Soviet state.  The goddamned members of the Roberts Court are doing things that the most insane 1930s-50s era American Stalinist wouldn't have dared to hope was even in the realm of possibilities.  And far worse, opening up America's vital national security secrets to whoever an Elon Musk or Donald Trump will give or sell them.   John Roberts and his colleagues have actually done that.

That is how totally, complete a lie it has all been, all along.  Certainly since Little Chuck Grassley was listening to his elders railing against the New Deal, certainly since the younger ones were being weaned off of the teat of Ronald Reagan.  We are watching Elon and his incel-boy shop-lifter army destroy America's safety EVEN IN THE VERY AREA OF NUCLEAR WEAPONRY AND SECURITY AND CERTAINLY PUTTING THE MOST CLASSIFIED INFORMATION AT RISK IF NOT ON THE MARKET and nothing is there to prevent that happening.  

Now that they have had a chance to copy things, that information is in their hands and the hands of those they give access to it, forever.  The orders of courts for them to keep it under wraps only proves how dangerously out of touch with reality the law and its administrators are.   The laws quaintness is as big a danger to us with today's technology as can be imagined. 

I have mentioned that those in-their-time heroes of American law and Constitutional order such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi can't seem to understand that we can't go back even to when they were in power.  THAT TIME, THAT WORLD HAVING ENDED AT NOON ON JANUARY 20, 2025.  Everything they held to be true and sacred is now dead and it won't rise from the dead in three years if, by some miracle Democrats take the Congress with a super-majority in the Senate.   The attempt to return to that status quo which died at that second is doomed to failure.  

Until all of that decades long conspiracy to destroy that Constitutional order and the even longer program of declaring the effort of former members of Congress of good will - of both parties - to clean it up in the wake of Watergate "unconstitutional" is definitively abolished by changing the very language of the Constitution which has been used to do all of that,  American democracy cannot even be restored to the deeply flawed "liberal democracy" it once was as recently as the last time a Democratic President had a Democratic Congress.  It cannot progress to becoming a genuine egalitarian democracy with the Constitution we have.  

Chief among the things in the Constitution that needs to be blown up and reformed is the dangerous parts of it that led to the "unitary executive" theory - even in its original and less dangerous form.   It was out of that language that the fascists of the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society and their allies on the goddamned Supreme Court pushed the country.  Altering the language of the Vesting Clause in Article 2 is as essential as making sure the First Amendment abolishes the "right to lie" and requiring the press to serve the interests of an informed electorate of good will.  And all of those changes absolutely need to be made because Supreme Court "justices," belonging to the intrinsically lying profession of lawyering will lie their ways around that language again just as they did to start with. 

I do think that, ultimately, a real democracy, an egalitarian democracy will have to drastically reform the entire legal profession to require truth telling among lawyers.   Consider the smile that just came to your face when you read that absurd idea, the requirement that lawyers tell the truth and you might understand how true my accusation is.   The professional courtesy that even the most honest and honorable lawyers - you'll find them generally in the least well compensated branch of the profession - to their colleagues they know are liars is so ingrained in the entire profession and, so, the judiciary that it is an intrinsic danger to good or even legitimate government.    I think a good part of the worst of our Constitution is a product of just such lawyer-lying at the Constitutional Convention and in the First Congress, though even among them things didn't get nearly as bad as they have in the intervening centuries. 

I don't think legitimate government is possible under anything like the presidential system the U.S. Constitution set up.  Even though the history of the first decades of the country proves the "founders" and that generation had a drastically different conception of both the presidency and the Supreme Court than we do now, as that conception has developed things have gotten steadily worse.  It is an experiment that finally failed with the inauguration of Trump II, I'd say it went into its death throes with the issuing of Bush v Gore. 

* Both of which were a direct consequence from the inspiration of that genteel Virginia, Harvard Law trained drafter of the blueprint of white-supremacist-corporatist fascism Lewis Powell's 1971 Memo.   I think that document, by a future member of the Supreme Court, plays a similar role in the private-sector promotion of Republican-fascism that the Sullivan Decision did in the progressive destruction of American democracy.  And from there the 1976 Buckey v Valeo decision did in ENSURING EVER INCREASING CORRUPTION OF CORPORATE MONEY TO PAY FOR MEDIA LYING.    I've been working on this area because understanding the role that Powell played in creating the stink-tank and law school campaign against democracy is as important as what the goddamned Supreme Court did, that is just the tip of that toxic shitberg. 

On The Way Back To The 19th Century

 you can listen to this AMA report the week that Little Bobby Kennedy has been put in charge of wrecking the best public health system in our history.   I will point out that this is 9 days old so things may be far worse or different today   Sort of like you'd have to wait for weeks for such news in the past. 

American Conservative UEI On Full Display In The Idiot Hegseth and The Idiot Vance

IS THERE ANYTHING CLEARER than the catastrophe and price of American bigotry in the past two days of the cis-gender white straight male, lying shoot-from-the-ignorant-lip performances of V.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth as compared to the articulate, honest, competence Kamala Harris and  Lloyd Austen to prove that what Republicans and the USfascist media prefer entirely incompetent and dangerously stupid straight-white-males to the most competent Women and People of Color.  

And the goddamned corporate media, including the top of it like the New York Times and the "legacy media" are OK with that, too. 

Republican-fascist uniformity, inequity and exclusion means  "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" is the real foundation of Republican-fascist America.    We are living at the start of what Orwell warned us was coming.  He just got the overt start of it a little wrong.   America's democracy has always hinged on the choices of truth as opposed to lies, equality as opposed to privilege and, most of all, equality as opposed to racism.  And American has consistently chosen the worst of those under our secular-"civic religion." 

Jay Semko - Saw An Angel

 

Every once in a while I like to listen to Jay Semko's music.   

Buy Canadian. 

Who Credentialed The Criminals

Emil Bove, Acting Attorney General who set off the St. Valentines Eve massacre and blatantly acting as a criminal conspirator in Eric Adam's quid-pro-quo is a product of that Jesuit Ivy League class training school for criminal lawyers, Georgetown.     

I have to say that if I were Pope I'd directly intercede to either totally clean out or close down the Catholic educational establishment, from elite-prep to graduate school level because they are as corrupt as the worst parts of the Vatican bank before Francis started really cleaning that up.   Though even that reform effort is far from over.   Georgetown, its faculties and its administration are a massive scandal as are the elite preps as can be seen in the number of the worst criminals coming out of those.

I Wish I Had The Talent To Write Sketch Comedy

I'D WRITE THE scene of little Susan Collins in a pinafore and puff sleeves honing her dumb little girl act, the one she's played to complete success in the decades in which she has been a member of Congress and before that as she held a few minor offices.  I don't know if she was doing it back when she briefly worked in a Republican administration in Massachusetts but she's done it and flourished by playing "I'm just too naive and innocent to learn a single little thing" from all of the warnings of credible people, experts testifying on the consequences of adopting or rejecting legislation, those reporting on the records of appointees,  those warning of the real record of the likes of Brett Kavanaugh as opposed to their transparent testilying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee (on which little dumb Susan is entirely and demonstrably unqualified to sit See Also the UIE post yesterday).   

She, of course, isn't alone, the entire Republican caucus of the United States Senate is doing just what little dumb Susan does, but they do it with blatant and overt amorality and a complete lack of even the inadequate legalistic, "enlightenment" era substitute for morals, ethics.   Little dumb Susan does it too, and for exactly the same reason but by doing her stupid little girl act she is called a "moderate."   And that's enough for a stupid margin of Maine voters to return her to the Congress where she does that over and over again.   And the Maine media plays its part in that every time, too.

Simps Is Still Going On And On That I Once Dissed That Anthem of Banality

I'LL PROBABLY NEVER again cite him on any topic but here's what Elton John had to say about the smart Mop Head's greatest hit:

Imagine six apartments 

It isn't hard to do 

One is full of fur coats 

Another's full of shoes

Looking for that vaguely remembered snark online I read that Lennon's inspiration of it were some of Yoko's useless, content free "poems."   I'm not going to go bother looking for those.  It's funny that the guy Simps worships as a genius found his inspiration in the gal he hates for breaking up the fab four.   Me, if I was given the choice between hearing "Imagine" for the jillionth time and listening to a recording of Yoko having the dry heaves, I'd choose Yoko's "art."  

Update:  And then there's what Elvis Costello said about it:

Was it a millionaire who said ‘Imagine no possessions?’ 

A poor little schoolboy who said ‘We don’t need no lessons?’ 

The rabid rebel dogs ransack the shampoo shop 

The pop princess is downtown shooting up 

Commenting on that lyric he said:  

John Lennon wrote some wonderful songs, but ‘Imagine’, which has been so sanctified, was one of his worst. He didn’t think it all the way through.

 That's giving Lennon a benefit of the doubt he and that song don't deserve,  I doubt he thought about it at all.  It's the kind of thing he'd toss off while brushing his teeth.   I'd thought that I think Lovey Rita Meter Maid is a much better song in every way except it's really by the cute Mop Head.  I think he was a better song writer but he was no George Harrison and neither of them were in the same league with Robby Robertson or Bob Dylan.

What's especially funny about this for me has to do with a long brawl I had with Simps over some recordings Costello made with the mega-ultra-a-hole and mediocre jazz musician Chet Baker.  I won't give details but might give links if anyone wants to read it. 

Update 2:   Stupy,  that's Simps, doesn't think I know who Richard Thompson is.   Stupy seems to think that radio signals stop at the outer suburbs of NYC, the extent of his meager geographic knowledge (he doesn't seem to understand the borough structure of NYC, despite having parked his flaccid ass on it for more than a half a century).  As if anyone could have avoided Fairport Convention if they'd wanted to.  

Hey, Simps, are you mellowing out to Chet crooning Funny Valentine today?   I mean, that's about how unpredictable you are. 

UIE - Uniformity Inequity And Exclusion

WATCHING THE BLONDE BIMBO presidential spokes-skank and the other "DEI" spouting clowns, idiots and crooks of the Trump regime, it came to me that we can be certain, absolutely certain of one thing.  EVERY WHITE REPUBLICAN WHO HOLDS A POSITION IN THE GOVERNMENT IS TAKING A JOB FOR WHICH A MORE QUALIFIED PERSON OF COLOR IS KEPT FROM HAVING.  

There is not one of them who is remotely qualified for the position they hold,  I'd include those elected to office who are the beneficiaries of the previously unnamed policy that has been in effect in hiring the entire history of the United States, from the entire period before the government was formed and for every single year since then.  The very small percentage of those who don't fit that pattern are exceptions, not the rule. 

White Republicans and many others who hold positions in the government are the ones who should be suspected of holding jobs others are entirely better qualified for because white-supremacy, male supremacy have always been the affirmative action that never had a name because it was just considered the way things should be.

It Might Help To Call It What It Is

SUSAN COLLINS is continuing her role in pretending to have more to her than her role as a Republican-fascist who, it should always be remembered, WILL ONLY DO THE RIGHT THING WHEN IT WON'T KEEP THE WORST THING FROM HAPPENING.    Harry Reid got her right in that.

But the way she does it, on her absurdly many appearances during the most lie-filled hours of the week,  the Sunday morning talk shows, on other talk shows, here in the media in Maine, needs to be named.

Susan Collins MO is playing dumb, over and over again, pretending she's just a stupid little girl who doesn't understand it when the terrible people she votes to confirm, when she pretends, oh, my!, she's so surprised, even shocked! when the terrible people and policies and laws she supports TURN OUT TO BE EXACTLY WHAT EVERYONE KNEW THEY WOULD TURN OUT TO BE. 

Susan Collins has been playing stupid her entire public life,  I don't know if it's something she learned as a little girl to get her way with daddy (Ivanka Trump's act is similar though a bit different in that regard) or to get out of punishments by feigning innocence but it's certainly what the skank does in her political career.   A small majority of Maine voters have been suckers for it - encouraged by Maine's uniformly Republican held and controlled media, including Maine Public media.   

Maybe if we start calling Collin's dumb little girl act what it is it might be recognizable to at least Mainers and they might retire her.   I doubt we can shame her into doing what's right because she clearly has no moral center, no integrity, no sense of shame at all.

Hate Mail - On The Presidential System

THE FRIGGIN' FOUNDERS AND FRAMERS from the start included a dangerous number who hated democracy, or, really, equality and never wanted it to break out in the United States.    Some, like the real instead of the Broadway star Hamilton, had more than just monarchist tendencies.  The Federalists were pretty much anti-democratic and, so anti-egalitarian, which as far as I'm concerned, means they can all go to hell.  And it's not as if the slaveholders among the Jeffersonians or Jacksonians are all that much better.  You don't start to get to real models of genuine democratic thinking until you get to the abolitionists and suffragists and they were mostly not in power much or for long.

I'm not enough of a student of the record of the Constitution to be able to go into much detail as to what if any struggle there was between those overtly hostile to democracy and those who may have had a slight, then currently fashionable view of it - Jefferson was not one of the Framers though he was in contact with them - and how that could have resulted in the dangerous choice to invent the presidential system as opposed to a parliamentary system but the results are clearly dangerous to democracy as has proved in the tendencies of one or the other system to produce dictatorships.   I think Adams' three branches of competing powers has proven to be pretty much a flop, the Supreme Court turning that into a lame duck in 1803 and making it generally, steadily worse.

One of the safety features of most parliamentary systems is something the presidential system lacks, completely, the forced return of the government to the judgement of the voters through a no-confidence vote of the legislature.  Ours has nothing that will do that during even the dangerously long terms of the president, four years being way more than the worst of them needs to destroy the entire edifice of deputed democracy, as we have learned the past three weeks.  The Supreme Court and the idiot framers seem to have ensured that that safety feature will not protect us under the most high-powered of executives in the world.   Impeachment with conviction and, only then,  removal by the anti-democratically rigged Senate depended on that most ephemeral and largely imaginary entity in human psychology, the sense of honor among the elites that would comprise the U.S. Senate,.

Large in the most dangerous things we face in Trump II are the newly invented presidential powers given to Trump by the Roberts Court, as anti-egalitarian a Court majority as that body has ever had in even its antebellum history, and a large part in their excuse in that is the theoretical necessity of an American president being able to wield dictatorial powers during some theorized crisis.  That isn't in itself an unreasonable idea. There may someday be such a crisis - the most plausible of those brought on by that deadly gift of 20th century science, nuclear weaponry - and it may be that the regular mechanisms of law making and legislative oversight of the executive will have to be bypassed during such a crisis.  I'm sure such a crisis is imagined and addressed in the laws under parliamentary democracies, I would bet most of them far more realistically imagined and addressed than by our corrupt Supreme Court which figures the fixed-term of the presidency into things.

What is remarkable is how that exceptional, provisionally imagined crisis by the U.S. Supreme Court to cover actions of presidents, real and in process as well as entirely theoretical and world-theatening, has been expanded into the blanket impunity that the Roberts Court created.**  Mixed with the absolute reality that the Constitutional mechanism or removing the most criminal presidents in our history, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Trump is a complete and utter fiction, none of the less than a handful of the most criminal presidents ever been impeached, no more removed by conviction in the Senate, insures that what the Courts have created in the American Presidency is a dictatorship EXERCISED WITH DICTATORIAL POWERS AT THE MERE PERSONAL PREDILECTION AND WHIM OF WHOEVER HAPPENS TO BE PRESIDENT AT ANY GIVEN TIME.  The Roberts Court majority knew for an absolute certainty that the sitting president, Joe Biden whose presidency is probably the most law abiding one we've had in living memory, would never exercise the powers that they crafted for the next Republican-fascist president, even one as proven a criminal as Donald Trump or any of the previous Republican presidents going back to Nixon who are the record of developing presidential criminality and for whom much of the impunity, granted to the presidency by the presidentially appointed, unelected and, as well, never removed by impeachment Supreme Court; has been created on behalf of.

In a parliamentary system in which the prime minister is elected as a member of parliament and whose retention is based more directly on the support of the electorate DURING THEIR SCHEDULED TERM OF OFFICE* the fear of the members of their party or coalition losing their seats is some measure of guarantee against the Trumpian kind and level of corruption.  It isn't a hard and fast guarantee against that though even a Boris Johnson, the Brits' closest equivalent of Trump, was vulnerable to it in the end.  That the Tory party in Britain is monumentally corrupt and supported is a product of the same regime of corrupt media, there's a reason that American media corporations are always importing Brits to play that same role here.  

The fixed-term American presidency which, in fact, has no mechanism for removal and, now, by those foremost guarantors of electoral corruption, Republican presidential despotism and anti-democratic inequality, the Supreme Court has proven that we'd have almost certainly been better off with a parliarmentary system all along.  I may try to see if the motives in inventing the presidential system are discernable in the record of the drafting and writing and peddling of the Constitution but that's of little importance as compared to the reality of it in the history of the country under that Constitution and its definition under the corrupt Supreme Court.  

It strikes me that so much of the construction of the Roberts rules of presidential despotism is under the same regime of imaginary crisis as the scenarios that lead to the support of the use of torture by governments in the "ticking timebomb" fantasis, though, as I've mentioned, that paranoid fantasy has been expanded way beyond that to cover things that are no crisis in even the imaginations of even the most irrational of lunatic Constitutional scholars.  A lot of it is asserted to be necessary as a mere matter of convenience and expidition.   ALWAYS BE SUSPICION WHEN THOSE LAZY-ASSED "justices" START TALKING ABOUT CONVENIENCE AND EXPEDITION.   Roberts is constantly whining about the work load,  a load that hasn't kept the members of his court too busy to accept the bribes and grift that are offered to them by billionaires with cases before the court.  I have no respect for that profession, lazy, pampered assholes held up as secular gods. 

I have pointed out here recently that once the fascists have cut a road through the thicket of the Constitutional system that that road will remain open and able to be expanded into a super highway, generally by Supreme Court fiat UNLESS THE THING IS DEFINITIVELY CLOSED DOWN BY ALTERING THE LANGUAGE THAT IT WAS CREATED OUT OF.  I think the entire presidential system is the most dangerous aspect of that, it will be a constant danger to not only egalitarian democracy but even the less gangsterish form of liberal democracy with elections.  And the racket of "Constitutional" and legal scholarship is full of paid whores who are always finding ways to turn the words of that documents into such roads to oligarchy and autocracy.  I have no faith that even a reformed presidential system with the Roberts court impunity explicitly taken out of it will ever be safe from this happening again and likely faster than before.  It's not as if the American presidency is a pantheon of saints and angels or even of wise or benevolent leaders.  The few, the very few presidencies which break that pattern are too few and far between to give a rational person any confidence that it can be. 

* As was recently pointed out by a Canadian member of parliament in response to some idiotic thing that one of Trump's cabinet members said, the members of the Canadian cabinet are all elected by their constituents, not chosen by the fiat of the executive and are all vulnerable in the next election based on their performance in office and as a member of the cabinet, as is the PM themself.   Canada and Britain have had some really stupid members of cabinets and even incompetent PMs but none of them have been as stupid or incompetent as Trump and his appointees, and seldom anything like nearly as corrupt.   

** It should always be remembered that in the same term they created presidential impunity, they also legalized overt and total corruption through bribery as long as it was bribery on a payment plan, the bribe being paid only after what was bought was delivered.  No doubt that proves to be a great benefit to the billionaires and millionaires buying the corruption, payment only for what is delivered.   Never let it be said that the Roberts Court doesn't deliver for their patrons.

A Response - Libertarian Nazism As Embodied In The Paypal-South African Boys Club

clearly is a real thing.   Nazism and libertarianism (for the wealthiest white men, as libertarianism mostly always has existed in reality in European and American life) isn't the contradiction that political science or social science would have it to be because they make the mistake of thinking rational coherence or consistency is at work in such things.   That has always been a weakness of the habits of discourse flowing from the "enlightenment" and making believe you can treat such subjects with scientific methodology.   One of the most basic of features of all political oppression is the foundation of it in unequal treatment based in unequal power, the more unequal that treatment, privileges for the rich (and therefore powerful) allowing them to do things that the poor, the middle-class and even many of the rich but not as rich would never be allowed to do - and thus selective libertarianism - is intrinsic to the very thing that it is.  

The most irrational and rationally absurd contradictions abhorred by academic discourse can comfortably exist in real life even as it could not in the purely imaginary coherence of academic abstraction.    Black white supremacy (as embodied in Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell), Jewish Nazism (as embodied in Stephen Miller and David Sacks), Gay queer bashers (Lindsay Graham and any gay man or Lesbian who is a member of the Republican-fascist party),* as compared to that the reality of libertarian-fascism makes all the sense in the world.  All of those merely logical incoherencies are a product of the privilege of wealth and its ability to shield the rich boys and gals from the very laws and powers they promote and which  would destroy them if they were poor.

As an aside, the duping of poor whites into supporting their own oppression is, I think, related to this phenomenon, though often without conscious calculation being a part of it.

And it's not a very big shield that the wealthy have to use to shield them against the law, they barely need one at all.  It is one of the stupidest things in the rules of how the legal system works that it regularly ignores or denies such privilege and permissiveness for the rich (and so powerful) AS THE VERY METHODOLOGY OF THE LAW, LAWYERING, JUDGING, "justicing" CONSISTS LARGELY OF PRACTICING THAT PRIVILEGE AND PERMISSION.   That the rich are permitted to to into court represented by more and more skilled lawyers (who always work for the deepest pockets)to go up against legal opponents who have everything from one  less skilled and wealthy lawyer with fewer resources to no legal representation of all, setting up a system which is unequal from the start is never really addressed by the legal and judicial systems.  And that's not counting the bias of lawyers who become judges, most of whom are both in favor of the rich and so powerful and who are everything from OK with the inherent inequality of legal and judicial procedures to so habituated into it that they operate as if those were unknown to them.   If you think that's untrue,  what is there about the Thomas and Alito scandals revealed this past year AND THE COMPLETE IMPUNITY FROM CONSEQUENCES FOR THOSE CRIMINALS INVOLVED which does not prove every point made in this paragraph?  

The inbaked corruption of the legal system is so much a part of it it that the life-long mega-criminal and con-man rich white boy of very little brain, Donald Trump has flourished in it through a lifetime of litigation and law breaking to arrive at the pinnacle of legal impunity (largely invented for him by Supreme Court fiat), even though he was finally convicted of felonies and adjudicated a sex criminal.   Donald Trump is the absolute proof of the inherent corruption through inequality as the law of the land.  Removing that slogan over the doors of the goddamned Supreme Court building the Roberts Court sits,  among the biggest lies ever told on this continent,  is a moral imperative but one which will never be acted on. 

I can remember the incident quite well, though I can't find the post which is somewhere at Echidne's blog in which I first made the point that the true foundation of democracy was equality and not some of the more common and often entirely daffy notions of "liberty" or even libertarian"freedom."  I don't remember what I was thinking over as I wrote the piece but I remember the idea came to me like a lightening bolt and after that the focus with which I saw so much more about how so much was going so wrong had a clarity that it had never had before. Among other things it enabled me to understand such supposed contradictions in classification.   With inequality any contradiction, even the most damaging and consequential are permitted and enabled and facilitated by those in power.

Equality is the true foundation of not only democracy but ANY legitimate government, ANY legitimate legal systems and ANY legitimate or even decent social conventions and practices.  That is equality of PEOPLE, not of their ideas.  Any idea which contradicts of damages equality, democracy, doing to others what you'd want them to do to you can rightly be rejected and even suppressed because the equal rights to legitimate government and a legitimate legal system and an equally decent life surpasses the right to damage those.   I would bet that most of the old-line liberals and most of the lefties of my youth would reject that and one of the bases of that rejection is in their desire to protect some aspects of privilege that they enjoy at the cost of those who are not so privileged.  They would piously blather on about liberty and freedom but it would, in the end, be in service of THEIR privileged lives. Or they'd just be unable to think so unconventionally.   The Golden Rule is really about as radical a statement of politics and economics as there is,  I can't think of anything more radical or more of a guarantee of good.   It took me a while to realize that answer had been lying there in plain sight my whole life as all of the academic, civics and theoretical bull shit was mounted as a distraction against that reality.  

* Female misogyny is so commonly expressed and observed that it is an indication of how something that is inherently irrational can become a ubiquitous habit of thought under the power of grinding inequality.   I think Sowell's internalized white supremacy is a similar phenomenon but one which is far less subtly ingrained into the culture of Black People and so is a bizarre rarity as opposed to female misogyny.   As a Gay Man, I know how consequentially damaging such socially-instilled habitual self-hatred can be (it is a major theme of pornography and other media) and how difficult it is to even notice.

I Hope This Excerpt Doesn't Get Me A Cease And Desist

THIS IS WHY MEHDI HASSAN is one of the best journalists today.   From The Guardian today:

Today, more than four decades later, DEI has become the new N-word; the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism. DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – is thrown around by high-profile conservatives, from the president of the United States downwards, for the express purpose of undermining Black people in public life.

Don’t believe me? In a recent interview on Fox News, the White House counselor and former Trump lawyer Alina Habba declared that the administration’s 27-year-old press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, “is overqualified, brilliant and was well-versed and ready … she didn’t need a thick binder ... unlike our last press secretary who was put in there for … DEI reasons”.

For the record, the “last press secretary”, Karine Jean-Pierre, is the Black daughter of Haitian immigrants. Is she less qualified than her successor? Well, let’s compare résumés, shall we?

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, are Ivy League grads.

Jean-Pierre is.

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, worked in two different administrations before securing their top White House positions.

Jean-Pierre did.

Neither Habba herself, nor Leavitt, has served on three different election-winning presidential campaigns across three different decades.

Jean-Pierre has.

So when Habba says Jean-Pierre was appointed White House press secretary for “DEI reasons”, what else could she be alluding to other than that she is a Black woman?

When the Republican congressman Tim Burchett called Kamala Harris – the then sitting vice-president, former senator and former attorney general of the country’s most populous state; a woman who would have entered the Oval Office with a longer record in elected office than Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – a “DEI hire” within 24 hours of her becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, what else could he have been referring to other than that she is a Black woman?

When a viral tweet (26m views and counting) from a popular far-right account (that is also amplified by Elon Musk) referred to Brandon Scott – the mayor of Baltimore who was elected with 70% of the vote and previously served eight years on the city council, including a stint as city council president – as the city’s “DEI mayor”, what else could it have been trying to point to other than that he is a Black man?

DEI is the new N-word. In fact, the Black podcaster Van Lathan argues that DEI is now “worse than the N-word” and has become “the worst slur in American history”. The term “DEI hire”, he explains, “is not just being used to undermine the qualifications, capability and readiness of Black people … DEI is placing the blame of all of society’s ills at the feet of these people.”

Do yourself a favor and read the entire piece.  Sort of makes me going over what the fan of the Brit Tasmanian genocide and the discontinued ad-flyer trolls say fade into total insignificance.

The Republican-fascist Putsch Against Democracy Is The Culmination Of A Long Term Project

which has been going on from well before the major milestone in that, the Republican-fascist majority on the Rehnquist Court's Bush V Gore from which two Republican appointees to the Court joined the two Democratic appointees in dissent.

Before that there were, by comparison, minor milestones set up during the previous model for the Trump presidency, that of another product of Hollywood and entertainment and the corporate media, Ronald Reagan, the previous record holder in executive branch criminality in which an empty headed product of show biz was put in the presidency to be controlled by others.   I will give Reagan this, that until his senility was full blown, probably late in his first term, he had what Trump never has had, a vestigial connection to reality.  That American democracy has been destroyed by the stupidest, AND I MEAN STUPIDEST, president in our history proves what a truly defective idea the presidential system of government is.  At least in countries with a prime-ministerial system - with a few exceptions such as Boris Johnson, the most American style of Brit-fascists - their criminal executives are at least smart. 

My conclusion, gained from forty-five years of watching this kind of operation is that it was certainly a scenario worked out as to how the corporate fascists, those in the DC area stink-tanks and guess-pools, those on the most august of Ivy level law school faculties.  It is among the most telling aspects of this how much academic respectability has been given to even the most overt of fascist scheming among the most well endowed and respected of academic whore houses.   

Along with the shame that belongs rightly to secular elite academia, I have to include the surprising number of right-wing Catholics involved in this.  Including all of the Catholics on the Supreme Court except Sotomayor.  And foremost in that and what it sows is the blatant Antichrist aspects of Catho-fascism, as is well maintained within, especially,  the American Catholic church.  A good part of that can be laid directly in the laps of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.   Not willing to go into that in the depth I want to, just now, I would say that if the recent and mandatory letter of resignation by that apparatchik of American-Catho-fascism with a broad smile, Timothy Cardinal Dolan gave on his 75th birthday is accepted by Pope Francis, it might indicate that the era of toleration of that in, at least, the Vatican may be over.  The glacial pace of action in the Vatican except when it comes to things like kicking out supporters of Womens' ordination is a direct analog to the law's delays as an aid to evil doing.  I think Francis removing him is a long shot even though I would guess he wants to replace Trump's good buddy in St. Patrick's, the speed with which Dolan may be retired will be an indication of the strength of the reaction of the Vatican against Trumpian fascism.  Some of the recent appointments of Francis are a step in that direction, especially his appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy to DC, but far more and far more drastic action is needed.   Everyone should be supporting Bishop Buddee. 

I don't think there's any likelihood of a similar sign in the form of forced retirements of even the most wacky of neo-fascists, some of them clearly insane Catho-fascists at Harvard or Yale or Princeton Law is going to happen.   And a number of those, especially at Harvard Law are, truly and clearly nuts in addition to being criminally insane.   American academia, from top to bottom is in a eutrophic stage of decadence.

The seeming speed with which democracy is being wrecked in the past several weeks is an illusion, this is a project which has been planned for decades with the funding of overtly fascist millionaires and billionaires and they haven't been keeping it all that much under wraps.  One of the things they have used most effectively is the lazy, slow, courtly, delay of the law, the courtesies of the old-boy network among the various elites, that of the law among the most corrupt.  I have mentioned several times over the past nineteen years that the lawyers and judges deputed to be "liberal" who supported the appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court was a major eye-opening event to me.   I wish that any of those surviving traitors to democracy who are still alive would be harassed with the words they put into the record of his confirmation hearings which have proved to be grotesquely and entirely predictably false as opposed to the record of those who opposed his nomination at the time.  I will bet that not one of those lawyerly-liarly liberals has ever had to answer for that and I wouldn't be surprised if not one of them would express regrets about it today.  

I will admit that there are American conservatives, ex-Republicans who have rather belatedly stepped up, now that those of us who foresaw this coming have proven to be right.   That it took the insurrection and the ongoing criminality ENTIRELY ENABLED AND PERMITTED BY THE LAWYERS AND JUDGES AND, ESPECIALLY, "jUSTICES" to finally open their eyes makes me wonder how they thought of the many and often rather major milestones to the Trumpzi putsch as those happened.  Liz Cheney seems to have needed the insurrection to finally, finally open her eyes to the actual nature of her party and what it has been on track to do since the Reagan years, certainly since the Gingrichization of her party.   I wonder if there had not been an insurrection if she would be sitting in the Republican caucus of the House right now and voting in lock-step as her once colleagues, many of them deputed to be more "moderate" than she was.  Maybe I'm wrong about her.  I don't think I could go so far as to ignore the role her father has played in the destruction of American democracy.  The Bush II regime was, from the start of it, a major blow to democracy, including his Supreme Court picks.

I don't have to wonder about Susan Collins who I have been telling Mainers was a complete and utter fraud since before she gained public office.  Her entire stock and trade is doing what the late Harry Reid noted, that you could count on her to do the right thing but only when it wouldn't matter.   Her career as a public figure was in supporting the worst of Republican-fascism and criminality WHILE PLAYING DUMB, EXPRESSING HER "SURPRISE" HER "CONCERN" WHILE ENABLING IT ALL ALONG.   Anyone asking how Mainers could be so stupid as to return her to office over and over again as she does her threadbare dummy act might use the corruption of the wall-to-wall Republican owned electronic media in my state, including "Maine Public."   I doubt there is a sitting member of the Republican-caucus of the Congress today who will have a Cheney style conversion but if I suspected such a thing were going to happen,  Susan Collins is one who you can count on not to have such a conversion.  She's been all-in on it all along.  And if she did make a pose of that you would know that all is lost because she would only do so if it would have absolutely no effect in delaying the complete death of democracy.   She, as Olympia Snowe before her, are and have always been total frauds.  

These are just some random thoughts I'll have more to say soon, I hope.  I can say that my injuries mentioned here the other day are more serious than I'd thought, probably will need surgery if I'm to get back much use of my right arm.   I have, though, found a position from which I can type with pretty close to the facility I could before my fall.

The Cowardly Millionaire Players Of Pro Football

SO DID ANY OF THE MILLIONAIRES PROTEST the NFL caving into Republican-fascist racism?   Looking this morning all I can see is one person got nailed for having a Palestinian flag and the Republican-racists got in a racist lather over Lift Every Voice And Sing.  Lift Every Voice is a far, far better song than the anthem, both words and music.  I'll bet the big mouthed moron caucus - Bobert, MTG, most of the Republican caucus, really-  of the Republican Party doesn't know all the words.  I mean even to the first verse which is the only one anyone much knows.   Trump doesn't, as he proved even back when most People hadn't seen that he was senile.  He had seventy years of hearing the thing sung and he didn't know the words yet,  he's the stupidest man to have ever been president, by far.  I mean even stupider than Warren Harding or Franklin Pierce or Ronald Reagan. 

Republicans are and have been in the control of the racists since 1964 though that trend goes back to at least 1948 when Truman integrated the military.   That's the same year the Frank Capra movie State Of The Union contained the line, Well, you know us Southerners, we vote Democratic down home but we've got an awfully good Republican record in Congress.

In the meantime the white-supermacist with the pro-genocidalist name wants to continue the argument over their ersatz obsession over Transwomen - odd, they don't seem to be nearly as worked up over Transmen, which tells us something about the depths of their misogyny but exactly what I don't know.   

Republican-fascists, and ANYONE who is still in the party in 2025 is a Republican-fascist, pretending to care about Women is a transparent pose considering they've nationalized the very bodies of Women and are entirely OK with women dying in the most gruesome ways as a result of Republican-fascist abortion bans and restrictions in every Republican-fascist controlled state.  The liars who invent sex crimes as a result of Transwomen using public toilets  are perfectly OK with torturing Women RAPED BY CIS-GENDERED-STRAIGHT MEN by making them carry the rapists fetus to term and making them give birth when they don't want to.   That's not the policy of Democrats and liberals who are perfectly OK with such Women impregnated as a result of rape carrying the fetus to term IF THAT'S THEIR CHOICE.   Republican-fascists are OK with enforced pregnancy even if the Woman is a little girl impregnated by rape as can be seen in a number of cases since Roe was overturned  in which their lives are endangered by carrying the fetus to term.  As in he pre-Roe world, there is no number of dead women that they think is too high a price to pay, especially since it's those Women who are paying, not them.

Neo-Nazi guy, you slimeballs don't give a rats ass about Transwomen in sports or them using a public toilet,  you want another hate issue to sway the bigoted and ignorant into sending money and voting for those who will use their ignorance and hatred to shaft them as much as the ones they hate.  Republican-fascist voters are either scheming con-men or they're stupid dupes, though some of the dupes are stupid scheming con-men, too.   Republicans cook those up in soc-sci-marketing campaigns to figure out which ones to focus on to win any given election cycle by whipping up those prone to that marketing.   Women are nothing but objects to be used, just like everyone else is for you ALL CONSERVATISM IS FIRMLY BASED IN MAKING EVERY HUMAN RELATIONSHIP TRANSACTIONAL.   That is the difference between us.  Though I have no problem expecting most of you value the most favored - read that rich and so powerful - more than anyone, rich-white men with money, straight over gay though if the gay neo-Nazi is a billionaire, the rich will override everything about him.   But in the end the issue for you is what you figure YOU can get out of it, in your case probably some Person of Color or Woman has a job they're fully qualified for but that you figure as a straight-white male you think rightly belongs to you - college based cis-gendered-white guys with a sense of entitlement are such a bunch of a-holes.

As to sports, they shouldn't have any presence in educational institutions, from grammar school up through post-doc.  Especially not contact sports or other sports that lead to life long debility. Phys-ed should be about the health of everyone in the school, not just those with a physical prowess for playing little boy's games.   America's unlightenment is tied securely to the resources spent on sports that should be spent on education.   If it were up to me, I'd dump all the sports and institute generally health and exercise programs in their place.   The stupidity of Americans in the voting booth is intimately died with their ignorance and that's a function of time wasted on entertainment.  Sports is the most ubiquitously funded aspect of that.

Something Came Up That Reminded Me Of This Post From 2011

 
Saturday, April 16, 2011
 

The Randians At Play With Their Model Trains [Anthony McCarthy]

I'd better admit that I've been taking quite a good deal of pleasure reading the bad reviews of the movie made out of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's novel. And some of them have been among the worst reviews I've read recently. I should also admit that I didn't read Atlas, having struggled with her prose and her bizarrely demented thinking fully developed in her earlier The Fountainhead. I'd been aware of some of her other writing, skimming some of the shorter stuff, maybe looking at some of the rest of it but nothing there changed the original impression that she was a crackpot* and one with a psychotic mean streak. Wait, change that, it wasn't a mean streak, it was a deluge of pathological hate, anger and resentment.

That she developed one of the stranger and more dangerous political-"philosophical" cults going is what's primarily interesting about Ayn Rand and her similarly cracked followers. Having given people who are emotionally arrested at the state between infantile generosity and when they have mastered their selfishness enough to relearn sharing, was a sure fire formula for that kind of movement. The worst of it has been those who gained political power, Alan Greenspan, Paul Ryan, and her true believers in the media have deformed our politics from our idealistic democratic beliefs to the predominant faith of our establishment. Since the Republican Party has handed economic policy to Ryan, we have every right to say that Ayn Rand is the foundation on which they intend to build. Rand was Lyndon LaRouche with influence.

For anyone who hasn't heard, one of the bases of Randian faith is that only the private sector is able to produce anything good, that anything that is done by the government is bad. That is one of the things about the reviews of Atlas Shrugged that has given me the most pleasure. For anyone who doubts that Rand was totally nuts and not especially intelligent, she chose a make believe, would be railroad baron as her hero to demonstrate the evil of good intentions, the folly of democracy and the virtue of selfishness.

Anyone who has ever looked at transportation as a part of human technology and history will be struck by one thing, there has never been a form of transportation that hasn't absolutely depended on government support. Shipping required protection from pirates, beacons to mark dangerous obstructions, direct subsidies to mercantile efforts, the construction and maintenance  of ports. Roads are built with government subsidies, often through the labor of people held in servitude by the government, often on the basis of government appropriation of private property, etc. The history of the railroads have been a history of even stronger involvement by governments, often depending on the corrupt subsidies from bought off legislatures, executives and courts. In the United States, the irrationality of much of the rail infrastructure is directly due to that history of corruption by private capital of the government. Air travel would die without massive support from the government.

If anyone wanted to choose a worse example to spin a Randian fantasy around, it would be hard to think of one. Yet Ayn Rand, who some of her devotees believe is the most brilliant human being to have ever lived, built her proof on the one industry that most definitively refutes her credo.

In reading around about it I have been reminded that Rand credited a number of inspirations for her writing, including Hugo and Dostoyevsky. I have also read that she credited a number of classical philosophers as antecedents, though I'm also aware that philosophers who have specialized in some of them doubt she ever understood them. I have to say that reading the plot of her book and the movie, I didn't think of anything but the little remembered British film The Titfield Thunderbolt, which was made four years before Atlas was published. Though, if she did depend on that rather charmingly silly movie, it would also be ironic because it is all about the virtues of cooperative action to save a tiny rail line from the predations of the bus industry.

That Rand seemed to have missed that it was the titans of the auto industry, the interstate highway system built by the federal government at the behest of the military-industrial complex and other competing industries that made her book ridiculously anachronistic even as she was writing it, only adds to the hilarity. But when you're the greatest genius in the history of the universe, an example of the most Uber of Supermen, you don't need to notice that vulgar little thing called reality. Alan Greenspan didn't have much use for it either.

* Anyone who might dispute that Rand was psychotic should look up her adoration for William Hickman, a man whose greatest claim to anyone's attention was his brutal rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl, whose dismembered body he sent in pieces to the authorities. Of course she would see him as a great example of the Nietzschean superman. As is always the case with the people impressed by that other nutcase, perversity impresses. If anyone who has looked at that could still think there was anything positive about that cesspool of psychosis they should be watched, carefully. This is an aspect of the thinking that is regularly promoted by our media and one of our political parties as worth considering. Withholding judgement on the basis of alleged philosophical foundations only makes us complicit.

Field Invasion? Neo-Nazi Name Says What?

HAD ANOTHER SLIP ON THE ICE and fractured a bone and and re-tore my rotator cuff that I tore about thirteen years ago, funny how I couldn't exactly remember that event until my shoulder reminded me of it, so much for "brain only" nonsense.  Odd how I don't seem to remember to put on my crampons, even after that.

In the deep dive into unread comments I find this from the neo-Nazi who trolls me.

Vandiemenlander commented on "Keeping Track Of Who Credentialed The Criminals"
2 days ago
Isn't it funny a misogynist like Trump was the president to stand up for woman athletes not having their fields and courts intruded upon by men with odd sexual fetishes?

You guys must like the GOP being in charge because if you keep acting like Trump's position is the fringe, minority one.

OK, I'll argue it in your terms of numbers because arguing on abstract principle when it's a real matter of real life actually distorts things to the detriment of equality and justice. 

It was a few weeks back when the Republican ex-governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker present head of the NCAA was asked how many female trans-athletes there were in college athletics and he said fewer than ten.  Republican-fascist politics and media run off of the hate and fear of their ignorant suckers, the theme I've been featuring lately.  Whipping the ignorant and gullible into voting against their interests through the fascist media, led by that sub sewer source, FOX Lies on entirely imaginary crises such as "DEI" "caravans" etc.   It's generally something dreamed up in what I am certain is a soc-sci-media-pro operation to find out how to lie about whatever minority group to the greatest media and electoral effect and it works for them over and over again until their real goals cause a total collapse as they did during Trump I, during Bush II, Bush I and before that in reaction to Watergate.   See my many posts on the disaster "free speech-press" has been for egalitarian democracy and moral decency.

Anyone who reads me knows that I don't have a particularly high opinion of organized sports - they violate several of the most important Commandments of Christ, the Golden Rule first and foremost - and are generally anti-intellectual and are inherently mean spirited.   like a number of the arts and other pass-times, they are generally not terribly important, certainly not in terms of the public good.  I certainly am opposed to sports as a profit-making racket, of which college sports is one of the more corrupt ones to the ruination of American education.  

As a public and political issue,  I don't think that the very, very few trans-people whose major presence in public life is their wanting to participate in Womens' sports comprise a major issue for LGBTQ+ People in our many millions anymore than I would mistake the millionaire pro athletes of Color as representative of the most important interests of the generally subjugated and discriminated against members of those groups in their many millions.   Or the larger but still small numbers of Women and minority groups who have, comparatively, "made it" in our anti-egalitarian country and who make common cause with the oppressors of Women and minority groups out of their personal, financial interest.  I was never especially interested in the issue of such high climbers reaching the tops of corporations because the many, many thousands and millions who wouldn't even get close to a promotion or a living wage is what's really important.  Guess what, they don't, once they achieve board-member or CEO status do much if anything for Women or minority members in general.   The rich are like that.   Something that you'd think poor-white men would have realized by now if they weren't distracted by the distractions of racism and misogyny that they're fed by the corporate media.

The NCAA, being a generally conservative group of financially interested opportunists feeding off of the bodies of young athletes in what is supposed to be an educational system have caved to Trumpzi-Republican-fascist pressure in regard to the fewer than ten college atheletes that Charlie Baker was questioned about.  If they thought it was in their interest they'd go back to 1910s era racial discrimination as their policy, though the pro-sports industry they service would probably think that would be unprofitable for them.  I AM NOT, BY THE WAY, HOLDING MY BREATH THAT NFL PLAYERS OF COLOR AND THEIR WHITE ALLIES WILL BE PROTESTING THE NFL FOLDING TO TRUMP ON ENDING RACISM ON THE FIELD IN FRONT OF THE TV CAMERAS during America's pagan high holy day.  If those millionaires surprise me, I'll be the first to say I was wrong. 

I, of course, support Trans-rights as I do the rights of any other beleaguered minority group but I am a realist, a realist who knows not every worthy fight is worth the cost of fighting it.   Compared to the issue of Transwomen, especially Transwomen of Color being victims of one of the highest murder rates in the country,  fewer than ten Transwomen who want to play college sports, an entirely voluntary participation in what is at best a pass-time, is not worth expending political resources on.  Imagine it's a checkers tournament instead of a field-sport and you'll see what I mean, and I like playing checkers.  It's like those stupid and costly annual brawls over erecting manger scenes on public property which were of minor interest to a few non-Christians AND THE LEGAL INDUSTRY THAT PROFITED OFF OF IT BEING AN ISSUE but which wasn't worth a comma in the text of a law advancing equality for those of minority religious beliefs. 

As for Trump, he has exactly two uses for women.  Either they have lots of money like the putrid Linda McMahon or the even more putrid Miriam Adelson and, the complete transactional operator he is, he wants some of it, or he wants sex from them.  That's it, including, by his own Freudian revelation, his own daughter.   His attitude towards Women is known by his own words and actions,  in the infamous Access Hollywood bragging about his sex crimes against Women to the sexual assault he is fully adjudicated as having committed against a Woman he repeatedly slanders, a women he mistook on the stand as his second wife under oath. 

I am beginning to warm to the study of your repeated neo-Nazi, stupid-Hitler worshiping ravings by a college-credentialed,  I would bet, college employed nut-case.  I am fascinated by how, under our athletics led university and college system, such detachment from reality flourishes right within the employees of it.   Perhaps when my shoulder heals I'll be able to do the research and writing.