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.