If There Is One Thing That Is Clear From The Period of Bush v Gore Till Today

IT IS THAT YOU CAN'T FUCKING TRUST THE GODDAMNED COURTS TO PROTECT AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.    

Hell, they won't even protect the lives of the American People with anything like any reliability.  

This has been a response.

Nightmares In The Daytime - Thoughts On Trump's Insane Election Ratfucking Speech

LISTENING TO CLIPS from Trump's election stealing  "speech" from last night,  my first thought was the mad Caligula going to war against Poseidon and having his troops collect his plunder in the form of seashells, after which he demanded the Roman Senate praise him for his victory.   As  I recall an arch or some other monument was constructed.* 

Our Senate is not much better than the Roman Senate in the most corrupt parts of the descent of Rome into the imperial system after its plenty corrupt to get on with republic failed.   It should never be forgotten, that even with the history of the thing fully known to them, the framers of the U.S. Constitution used the Roman republic as a model for what they were imposing on the new country.   They clearly were trying, to an extent, to repeat what had failed more than 18 centuries before expecting that it would prove incorruptible, this time.   That is with all of their slave-owner, crooked lawyer-financier and inequality enabling features added.   The Constitution of the United States is held up as fundamentalists hold up the Bible, only it is far more dangerous to us because it is given actual power which the Bible has never held on this continent.  We are never to admit that the Constitution is the source of most of the corruption that we suffer under, or that and the Supreme Court "interpretation" of it which has only added more dangerous features to what they wrote down. 

Hearing the calls for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove our own corrupt, mad and far more dangerously powerful Roberts Court crowned emperor only proves that our system, our Constitution, now corrupted into the beginning of Republican-fascism is ludicrously unable to protect us.   

That amendment, framed when it was plausibly argued** that something like honor and caution would govern the actions of a Vice President and the members of a president's cabinet,  is a dead letter.  The provision in it for Congress to appoint others to remove a dangerous president from office have never been taken up and, without some better scheme for doing that,  we are left with the sense of responsibility and honor and morals that a J.D. Vance, a Todd Blanche, a Pete Hegseth, a Marco Rubio, a Robert Kennedy, a Brooke Rollins, Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Doug Burgum, Sean Duffy, Linda McMahon, Chris Wright, Doug Collins, Scott Turner,  Keith Sonderling,  and Markwayne Mullins have.   If you could find enough morals, sense of responsibility, honesty, wisdom or even enough of the least of those attributes, intelligence among the entire group just named to make one decent public official,  I doubt entirely.   None of them could count on even a J.D. Vance to keep them on, he and his owner, Thiel would want their own gang of thieves in place and they might want smarter ones. 

Such is who our fate is put in the hands of,  by the absurdity of the Constitution and the Republican-fascist majority in the U.S. Senate who the thing relies on to shield us from the corruption and stupidity of a Trump. 

Nothing that happens in November, no reform legislation, not even the desperately needed reform of the totally corrupt Supreme Court will be enough to save us in the long run without some serious and drastic reform of the U.S. Constitution - including taking the Marbury power from the Court once and for all.   It was the Supreme Court that got us into this with their lie and billionaire and millionaire favoring rulings.   It was lawyers among those in the presidency and Congress who couldn't imagine doing what needed to be done after the BIPARTISAN emergency clean elections legislation passed after the democracy endangering crimes of Watergate were exposed - remove the power to nullify such legislation from the Supreme Court.   I have long held that even among democrats the lawyers among them would be the weakest link in securing legitimate government through egalitarian democracy and protecting it from those who were its most dangerous enemies,  the rich, the racist, the profiteers and the for-show-patriots.   And they will ride such nonsense as removal of a Trump through the Constitutional fictions of impeachment and the 25th Amendment into an imperial corruption that will make the Roman one look penny-ante. 

I think the most insightful sentence uttered about the law under the U.S. Constitution was said by one of the most corrupt and corrupting of the robber barons,  J.P. Morgan when he is said to have said,  "I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do, which is pretty much an accurate description of what a very large percentage of lawyers in the US are trained to do and which any rump of honest practitioners in the law have been unable or, more likely, unwilling to transcend. 

Trump is, beyond measure, the stupidest person to have ever held the American presidency,  and considering the likes of Franklin Pierce,  Andrew Johnson, Calvin Coolidge,  George W. Bush, and others are his competition for that, that is saying a lot.   But he is a corrupt idiot who was tutored by the infamously corrupt and extremely powerful lawyer-liar-crook Roy Cohn.   He apparently learned everything he needed about the law and lawyer tactics that he would need to rob, steal, cheat, swindle, wear down to climb to the top rank of criminals in United States history from that one corrupt lawyer.  I would be surprised if he hadn't, actually learned less from his putrid father, the KKK-Nazi loving Fred Trump.    And it should never be forgotten that Cohn prospered for decades,  half a century as a corrupt, crooked and loathsome lawyer, not in some eutrophic swamp like Louisiana or Alabama but in the capital of American sophistication and media scrutiny,  New York City.    The one and only time that the members of the bar really did anything to hold him to account was when he was finally on his deathbed dying of AIDS even as he was pretending he was straight and getting celebrity TV journalists to cover for him,  one of the most famous of those having pretended to be his girlfriend, briefly.   And the judges and "justices" were in on that and so many other examples of corruption, both in the career of Cohn and in the CV of Donald Trump. 

Putting a Band Aid on the gutted American democracy is what I expect will happen, it will not work, the Supreme Court will make sure of that.   Especially if the Congress passes effective laws.   The Constitution is the cause of all of it,  the faulty ideas it consists of, the intentional anti-equality corruptions baked into it, the added corruptions that its structure did nothing to overturn or prevent.  Without that, with the practice and scheming of corrupt lawyers and others - look at the authors of Project 2025 - will only get another chance to try again.  

As an aside, election rigging is also baked into the Constitution in order to prevent real representative democracy.   The original 3/5ths provision which, after emancipation turned into the even more corrupt 5/5ths under Jim Crow (and which the John Crow Supreme Court has revived) was stealing the power to vote from Black People while giving those who enslaved them and maintained post-bellum apartheid against them the voting power they were given through counting them in the census.   Trump's legislation which his speech pushed is a Republican election rigging law.  As have been the Roberts Court's rulings that allows states to deny Black People,  Latinos, Native Americans and, as the Court explicitly green-lighted DEMOCRATS the representation that their numbers give them a right to.   

I will leave that point which could be elaborated on by saying that the structure of the Senate has de-facto election rigging in it by giving low-population states far, far more electoral power than those in even the largest states.   Vote rigging in reality is baked into the Constitution from the start.  Those in the largest states have been played for chumps from the start of the thing and never so much so as today. 

One of the stupidest things in our Constitution is that the 1st Amendment is so flawed that even with the witness to the Holocaust, slavery, America's genocide of the original American People, etc.  WE ARE TO NEVER LEARN FROM AND PREVENT SUCH ATROCITIES.  The ideologies those are based in are to ALWAYS HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE TO SUCCEED AND MURDER MILLIONS IF NOT MORE, FOREVER.    We are to never, ever learn even the hardest lessons of history, not even during the lifetimes of those who experienced and witnessed those terrible lessons.  It has given rise to the insane post-WWII ideology of "free speech absolutism" which went from such champions of Molly Ivins and myriads of other leftist and liberal democratic journalists, lawyers, academics, etc.  There is nothing so telling as to the insane folly of that ideology that it is now the favorite ideology of the Trumpists, the Murdochian fascist-porn industry titans, and fascists and Nazis and, lest anyone not realize they are the most powerful of all of these, Americas indigenous fascists, the white supremacists.   ONLY ONCE THEY HAVE POWER THEY WILL USE EVERY ORGAN OF POWER THEY HOLD TO SUPPRESS, WHAT, THE FREEDOM OF THEIR OPPONENTS TO OPPOSE THEM.   Look at what the "civil libertarian lawyer" led Brit Labour government has done in that regard, as an example.  

Until we make lying not only wrong again, but a meaningful liability to those who lie for fascism,  America's democracy is as dead as the Roman Republic was.  And I mean as it was in 1787, not just in 40 AD.  

* UPDATE:  I was going on memory, it was a massive lighthouse not an arch,  which erosion on the coastline destroyed.  I think any Democratic candidate who promises to destroy Trump's monuments to himself will probably gain votes for that promise.   It is insane that a criminally corrupt and insane president can do what Trump has been allowed to do in that regard but it only proves how insanely corrupt our Constitution, as it really is, allows things to get.  WITH THE SUPREME COURT AND LOWER COURTS ALLOWING IT. 

** It is entirely relevant that those who wrote and adopted the 25th Amendment were the generation who experienced and fought WWII against fascism and Nazism.   Their children (my age cohort), grandchildren and great grand children have proven to have forgotten or never learned what their experience taught them.  We can't rely on that happening again, not short of a democratic recovery from as bad or worse here than happened in Europe, Asia and elsewhere then.  We can learn from that history or we can fall for libertarian insouciance such as "free speech-press absolutism" is made of. 

I Need A Day Off

From the news, not from writing.  I'm going to shut down my computer and not go on it again till Friday morning.   And I'm not going to listen to the radio either.   Not even if I hear from a relative that they've proclaimed the second coming of Mitch. 

Till then. . . 

In case someone wondered what I mean by going through that small book as a quick self-directed course here's what I do.

Type it out, making comments and taking notes along the way,

- put the book on a clip board with clips or clothes pins, or in a holder  (mine's a cookbook holder my sister-in-law bought but my brother decided to get rid of ) to hold it up flat and prop that up where I can see it as I read and type.

- Then, starting at the start of the text,  I read a paragraph twice, then type it out, then read through what I've typed out to correct and check it.  For those writers with a more complex writing style or a book that does, you might find it faster to read it more than twice before typing it out.  David Bentley Hart's writing is an example of that kind of thing, his paragraphs are very long so I don't try to do more than about a page a day with him. 

- then type any questions or thoughts on that paragraph.

Then move to the next one.  

I go by what they claim monks in a scriptorum were able to do and never try to do more than two pages in a day.   Again, more complex text might need to be taken at a slower rate.    I started out writing it out but my hand's can't take that anymore and even with my practice of only writing things out in block capitals, I can read it but no one else is ever going to want to. 

And also never try to have more than two books going at a time, the temptation is to think you can do more than you can.   It's better to go through fewer books better than more books where you're just skimming.    You don't have to finish by the end of the semester, you're not paying anyone or getting paid.  You don't even have to do tests though writing out ideas like in a theme paper might be useful. 

If you have suggestions of how to do it better,  please, tell me.  I'd love to have more efficient ways to do it. 

Schools are increasingly credentialing rackets, not places of education.   Your education is, ultimately, in your own hands. Really, it always has been.  For older books in the public domain, the internet has been a positive boon, especially since many town libraries have more or less given up.  And this way you can take any course you want, whether or not its offered, whether or not it's approved.   

Tom Paxton - Molly Bloom

 

I haven't listed to this song in about a half a century, I'd guess,  but it has been going through my head all week so I figured I'd share the ear worm.

At least it's a funny song with pretty clever words.   Good use of kazoos too. 

Now, where's my copy of Ulysses?  

I Can't Do Better Than Mehdi Hassan Did In Refuting Today's Version Of Holocaust Denial

 

I wish I could ask this question to Michael Sean Winters and, really all those denying what the world has seen because the murderers bragged about their killing online. 

Neo-Nazi Says What?

IN RESPONSE TO MY POSTS ABOUT THE ICESTAPO MURDER of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, brings up a case of a shooting NOT BY A POLICE AGENCY to "what about" the murder by his fellow white supremacist, neo-fascists and neo-Nazi Republican-fascist goons saying that I say its OK because the alleged shooter (I know nothing about the case so I am taking the ne-naz's word for that or arguments sake) because I, what?  DIDN'T SAY A WORD ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT'S JUST ONE OF A JILLION SHOOTINGS THAT HAPPEN IN THE UNITED STATES BECAUSE OF HIS SIDE'S ARMING THE MURDERERS,  PRIVATE AND ICESTAPO.  

You really are that stupid, aren't you, ne-naz.  

Auto-Correct Strikes Again or "good news for the poor . . . that is also a form of bad news for the rich"

Of course I know that the prophecy made over the infant Jesus at the Temple was made by Simeon, not "Simon" as apparently whatever intelligence might be claimed for auto-correct doesn't know. 

I have yet to find out how to turn of auto-correct in the program I type texts into.  That's laziness on my part, not a lack of intelligence.  At least to the extent that laziness isn't a product of stupidity.  

- - - - 

Since I have the time I'll type out the next paragraph from Luke Timothy Johnson's book from the one I typed out this morning.   If I'd been intelligent that early in the morning I'd have remembered it was even more focused on my them.

As a prophet, Jesus announces "good news for the poor" (6:20) that is also a form of bad news for the rich (6:24).  The categories of rich and poor stand, on one side, for all those who are powerful within society, who "sit on thrones" (Lk 1:52) social and religious privilege, and on the other side, all those who are weak and powerless, who are marginalized within society. 

Jesus Was Absolutely In Line With The Goals Of Socialism And Not Those Of The Framers Of The Constitution - Hate Mail

THERE IS NO DOUBTING that the economics of Jesus are extremely radical and anti-capitalist.  That is there is no honestly doubting it.  For a start he goes the Mosaic ban on usury one step better and tells People that if they have money they are to give it away to those they don't expect to pay it back.   Since I've only got a little time to deal with this, I'll concentrate on Luke this morning.   Here's what he says in Luke 6:34-35.

34 If you lend money only to someone you think will pay you back, will God be pleased with you for that? Even sinners lend to sinners because they think they will get it all back.

35  But love your enemies and be good to them. Lend without expecting to be paid back.  Then you will get a great reward, and you will be the true children of God in heaven. He is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel. 36 Have pity on others, just as your Father has pity on you.

Capitalism would be impossible, as would, by the way, banking and insurance and other industries based on the lending of money with interest if the U.S. law were "based in the bible"  only it's when that claim would NOT be in line with the Gospel of Jesus that those who love to tell that lie are in favor of their version of scripture being claimed that way.   And as I said, Jesus' are an intensification of the Law of Moses. 

In Luke Timothy Johnson's surprisingly useful book  The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction  (which I'm going through as a self-designed short course) he condenses a lot of the evidence to support my title in some very short paragraphs.  

Jesus appears as a prophet-Messiah at the start of his ministry.  Luke moves a story about Jesus visiting his home town from its original place in Mark 6:1-6) and makes it a formal inaugural moment in Jesus' ministry (Lk 4:16-29).  Himself full of the Holy Spirit (3:22, 4:1, 14) Jesus reads in his hometown synagogue the words of Isaiah (61:1-2, 58:6), and declares them to be fulfilled in him (4:21).  The Spirit of the Lord is upon him, and he is the anointed one, who has been sent out to bring good news to the poor, liberty to captives, sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed (Lk 4:14-19).  The rejection of his townspeople foreshadow the opposition this prophetic messiah will experience 4:28-30).  He will be a sign of contradiction, as Simeon declared of him when he was an infant, "for the fall and rise of many in Israel." (2:34). 

I will begin by noting that the Common English Version translation of the sentence of Simeon translates what most versions put a different way as a "warning."   I think that's a useful way to put it if you understand that any significant warning will meet with opposition argument and contradiction.  I think we professed Christians would do well to take his words as warnings, he was a prophet and more. 

The program of the Republican Party in the United States could not be more in opposition to the words of Jesus,  "good news for the poor," all the Republicans have is hatred of the poor and destitute, lying about them and advocating they live and die in abject misery.  Capitalism's attitude towards them, ESPECIALLY IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRIES, was best put by Charles Dickens in his most known but also most superficially read book:

“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”
“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

I will forego the temptation to point to the Malthusian reference to that, the fact that it is exactly what the New Poor Law made the law of Britain and the fact that Charles Darwin's natural selection is an intensification of Malthus which ALWAYS leads to death through eugenics.   Though it's one of my major themes here. 

The policy of American conservatives,  Republicans, capitalism is the policy of Scrooge before his unlikely and miraculous conversion.   And that's only their policy towards Poor Whites, their policy toward People of Color is that of the KKK, as the ICESTAPO murders this week alone prove.  Those were in line with the New Taney Court's Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo decision in which the "color blind"  John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett et al gave the police the power to target People, even those who they had no warrent for as the one in Biddeford, Maine yesterday ON THE BASIS OF THEIR COLOR.  

As an aside, Susan Collins, the patented "moderate Republican" said that she didn't make a mistake in voting to confirm its author, the sex criminal and, clearly, racist Brett Kavanaugh, which should be an issue in the coming election.   She supports the legal decision that is the basis of the police murder in her constituency yesterday.   And she's a "moderate Republican." 

I could go through the entire New Testament and over and over again compare the words of Jesus to the policies, whether explicit or on a de facto basis of Republicans, conservatives and capitalism.   I will note that any and all forms of secular socialism fall short of the radical economics of Jesus but I don't have much time this morning,  I've got to get some work done before the global warming heat sets in.   Yet another thing brought to us as a "good" of Republicans and capitalists and a lot of the communists, these days, are full fledged capitalists.   Though they're somewhat less inclined to be slaves to the extraction industries than those conservatives under "classical economics" and capitalism.  Capitalism is pretty much a guarantee of not only corrupt government but stupid and irrationally selfish government, as well. 

I would welcome any Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, practitioners of Vodun or any of the other religions to lay out their own scripture or prophecy or tradition that supports the same points.   I think any legitimate religion will have the same content.  I will say that may Muslims have far more extensively made the scriptural ban on usury part of their civil law than those in the West have from the start of early modernism when Calvin, especially, put that aside in favor of capitalism. 

In secular governance in a pluralistic egalitarian democracy,  we need a generally religious socialism if not something more radical that needs a new name. 

Here's' the latest thing I've seen about the ICESTAPO murder in Maine today, from the Portland Press Herald,  by Isabell Oss and Abby Driscoll

Cecelia Humiston woke up Monday morning to commotion outside her Chapel Street apartment in Biddeford.

The 22-year-old walked out and saw what appeared to be a person on the ground on Pool Street, then heard yelling from other neighbors and cries from a family in distress — two women and a young child.

“She couldn’t have been older than three,” said Humiston, who has a 2-year-old son. “She was still in her Bluey pajamas.”

Just minutes after a man was shot and killed, reportedly by federal immigration officials, Humiston saw who she believes was the victim’s daughter. She said the older of the two women yelled to law enforcement, “You took her dad, you took her dad!”

The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and Presente! Maine identified the victim as a 26-year-old Columbian man. His name has not been released, but the organizations said he had been issued a Social Security number and was authorized to work in the U.S.

Humiston said she did not know the family, but her father told her he’d seen them around town several times over the last few years.

From her window, Humiston could see law enforcement asking the family to stay on the scene and if they had spoken to investigators yet. A member of the family told an officer she “didn’t care,” and wanted to leave, Humiston said.

Humiston described the law enforcement officials as “rude,” and said they barricaded the family’s car from leaving. Another yelled at the little girl, who she said was trying to smell flowers.

Several neighbors said they have seen ICE activity in the city since February. Some recall agents patrolling bus stops and stopping people on the street, but Humiston was shocked to learn about Monday’s incident.

“This is Biddeford, things like this never happen here,” she said.

Naw, I don't feel in the least bit ashamed of saying it - Rain Delay Hate Mail

I HAVE AN UNSHAKABLE FAITH that Lindsey Graham is in hell, what most of you would know Catholics call purgatory.   Where Trump will go.  Which one will spend more time there, that I don't know. 

There's an old joke about Unitarian Universalists,  that the Universalists believe God was too good to damn anyone to hell for eternity and the Unitarians firmly believe that THEY are too good for God to damn THEM to eternity.   I'm with the universalists.  

I'm a Catholic universalist,  I think there's a hell where all the evil we have done and been gets burned out of us but that it's not eternal.   I wouldn't want to go there but I'm sure someone does. 

Charlie Kirk is there getting his racism and slander against TransPeople burned out of him, his promotion of gun murder, too.   And for the same reasons that Lindsey is there. 

Aren't you glad you demanded an answer?  

I Don't Know How Much Coverage It's Getting

but there has been another ICESTAPO murder, this one in Biddeford, Maine.  That's not far from where I life.   There haven't been many details in the media, and those will, I'm sure, come from witnesses and not the Trump regime.   

I haven't read anything from our governor, Janet Mills.   I hope she's as good on this as she was on standing up to Trump up till now.  Not that she'll have much more success with that than governors in other places where ICE and the other federal fascist police entities have murdered People.

Did these assholes get all their training from watching cop shows on TV and video games?   I'll bet our local cops probably got more training than to do stuff like that. 

This is the Trump regime at war with the American People. 

Before Going Out To Weed

 I'll repost what I said at RMJ's

I think it's pretty funny that a lot of the conspiracy theorists find it unreasonable that a 71-year-old man who is known to have eaten pretty much every meal from a restaurant (when a TV was stolen from his kitchen he didn't know it for weeks because he never went in there) and who is known to have drunk heavily - believe me, he was an alcoholic and not a recent one - could have died as a result of hardening of the arteries.

I was just talking to one of my younger relatives a couple of weeks back about how when I was a kid it was far from unusual for men in their 30s and 40s to die of heart attacks. Off hand, thinking of it right now, I could name you at least four or five of those who died in my town at the time. It's not because diets have generally gotten better, drugs for treating the effects of a meat centered diet mixed with other health endangering habits have gotten better.

Still, since the Republicans live by spreading rumors and lies, I've got no problem with what they do being turned against them, except it does nothing to defeat the deadly error that there is such a thing as a "right to lie."

Todays Article Slamming Democrats

BY MICHAEL SEAN WINTERS embodies what I really like about his journalism and what I really dislike about it.   I will pass by the typical and rather superficial comments about Graham Platner,  I have yet to read someone who isn't a long time observer of Maine politics who really gets that.  He is somewhat more at home when talking about New York. 

Like most American journalists, for him Democrats, except for the farthest right of them (see below), can only do wrong.  

Here for example is a paragraph I think is both rather unaware and unfair as it is, in part,  insightful.

The problem with the democratic socialists is not their economics. It is their indifference to the way liberal democracy works.  If they called themselves "social Democrats" they would not be such an easy target. Or, better, if they called themselves "FDR Democrats" they would put their opponents on the back foot. And there is not a single item on their agenda that requires one label over the others.  One suspects that they like the fact that "democratic socialist" sounds more radical.  In a democracy, however, one has to persuade, and this group of progressives prefers to hector. They speak as if their ideas are self-evident.

I would like to have Winters give us a paragraph or two just what is "the way liberal democracy works."  Because as the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, etc. show, it's either not working very well or it isn't working at all.   The turmoil in the United States that gave us things like the phenomenon of the Obama voter becoming the Trump voter and, I will go on to say, so many of those very same people turning from MAGA to FAFO regrets over their support for Trump is exactly that LIBERAL DEMOCRACY NOT WORKING AS ADVERTISED, IN ANY WAY. 

Liberal democracy with its maximum emphasis on "freedom" especially under the name of "liberty" as became a slogan in both the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century has proven to be entirely compatible with inequality, ECONOMIC INEQUALITY most of all, but also the rankest of racial, gender, ethnic, class inequality in terms of political participation and legal rights.   AND ALL OF THOSE AREAS OF INEQUALITY UNDER LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ARE INTERTWINED.   In the Post WWII years, when, through Democrats enhancing the power of organized labor and such massive economic and social leveling under things like the GI Bill and increased support of higher education - the tuition at Land Grant Universities in those years should certainly count as welfare as much as payment to poor families - the white working and middle class flourished as never before.   That was even as Black Americans and other People of Color were far, far less included in that until the passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the mid-1960s.   

Once that happened and with the economic consequences of things like spending for the War in Vietnam and increasing transfer of wealth from the working class TO THE RICH and poor and middle class whites felt the pinch, they were either talked into or fell back on those long, long ingrained habits under liberal democracy to kick down and kiss up.  

Michael Sean Winters' liberal democratic habits of thought are one thing that leads his desire for the consequences of egalitarian liberty with the very "freedoms" such as the freedom of the media to lie us into fascism, the freedom of those with money to buy government, the freedom of them to set up guess pools and programming on such as PBS in the past and in online "influencers" like the late Charlie Kirk to propagandize using such notions as "freedom" and, most potently destructive of equality, "free speech." to lie us into Trumpism.  

His notion that Democratic Socialists, who I have certainly been critical of in several ways, would be any more acceptable in 2026 by calling themselves "Social Democrats" or even "FDR Democrats" is naive in the extreme.    If calling themselves either of the two would in any way benefit their chances of getting elected or putting their economic equality agenda into law then that would have happened back when Democrats ran on the memory of FDR and called their agenda "social justice."   So corrupted has the memory of history become, under the liberal democratic definition of "free-press, media, speech" that those wouldn't work any better than "Democratic Socialism."  

He is, though, correct in the fact that so many lefties, especially those with college credentials, seem to be blissfully unaware of,  that in order to govern, make laws and put them into effect,  you do need to win a majority of the votes, though, as I noted yesterday, under our "liberal democracy" with its rigging to ensure that the right and ignorant and influenced by billionaire money actually win, the Electoral College and, especially under Supreme Court usurpation, can short circuit that.    Liberal democracy, American style, is even more corrupt than it is in many of the newer liberal democracies.  Ours is intentionally and explicitly rigged to ensure inequality will always be a major force in American politics.

Almost the entire news media, almost as much of academia and the conventional wisdom of the plutocracy will lie to you about that, never so much as in the month of July 4th and never so much as in a year that ends in a 76 or a 26.  

The most self-evident clause in the Declaration of Independence was rendered moot almost as soon as the leaders of the Revolution, slave owners and their allies, every one,  got actual power.  That was already clear when they got around to the parts about enumeration of population in the slave states and how they would be assessed for taxation at the commencement of the revolution. 

Before giving his article a bit of praise I have to address this obscene passage:

Nowhere is the progressives' morally obtuse self-certainty more obvious, and more troubling, than in the ease with which they accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Everyone is free to criticize any decision of the Israeli, or any other, government. . . 

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO MORAL OR RATIONAL ARGUMENT THAT WHAT ISRAEL HAS DONE IN GAZA IS NOT A GENOCIDE.  If you want to give that decision to the 'experts' there are numerous ISRAELI scholars of genocide who have said that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is a genocide.   The Nazis did their best to cover up their genocide as they were committing it.  As I recently linked to a piece by a Holocaust scholar noted, there is a rare instance of a soldier writing to his wife in Vienna about what he and his unit were doing in Eastern Europe,  and it is one of the rare instances of something like that.  The genocide by Israel in Gaza has been videotaped and commented on by the genocidalists as they were gleefully committing it TO THE WORLD ON THE INTERNET.  If Winters wants to argue about the definition of "genocide" to defend what the IDF an the widely supported Israeli government is doing as some lesser act, then he is in need of some serious moral reflection.   Maybe he should seriously contemplate a picture of a child shot in the head by the IDF like the baby who was shot while they were breast feeding.  

. . . Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered a master class in how you criticize an ally in his speech in Tel Aviv last week. When a person only criticizes Israel, and ignores Hamas' responsibility not just for the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, but for repeatedly placing Gaza's civilian population in harm's way and refusing to turn over hostages which would have brought the war to a speedy conclusion, why is that? Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Palestinian rally the day after the Oct. 7 attack. There is a word for looking at a complex problem and only blaming the Jews involved: antisemitism.

Dear Jesus, don't tell me that MSW is going to endorse Emanuel for president.   

There have been myriads of those who condemned the actions of Hamas on October 7th who are fully able to see that the scores and scores of thousands of civilians killed and outright murdered and millions removed from Gaza in what MEMBERS OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT AND ZIONISTS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF ISRAEL ADMIT IS AN ATTEMPT TO DESTROY GAZA AND DEPOPULATE IT, LEBANSRAUM 2026, IN A WORD IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE .  

What is Israel but a program of putting Jews "in harms way?"   One of the great criticisms of the Zionist project was that it would concentrate Jews in a way that killing them would make it far easier.   And it was seen from before the establishment of the state that it would exist in a perpetual state of war because of how it was built on land stolen from Palestinians, Muslims, Christians and others.   Dorothy Thompson went from an ardent supporter of Zionism - unlike Hannah Arendt, she supported the overtly exclusionary (and racist) Zionist Biltmore Conference - only for her to realize when she saw what was happening for herself to see the Israel project as a deeply dangerous trap for both Jews and Palestinians.   I think Winters would do himself a favor by looking closely at the evolution of Dorothy Thompson's position on the establishment of a "Jewish state" that has turned into an explicitly apartheid state which has steadily expanded its land by terrorizing, attacking and killing Palestinians and those in surrounding states, especially Lebanon.   Thompson was consistent in her opposition to that kind of thing, whether in Europe by Hitler or, eventually, in the middle east by Israel.  

I would love to hear what he would have to say about this recent quote:

 "What is Jewish supremacy? Eighty years after the Holocaust, it's Mein Kampf in reverse. The superior race is us." 

And this one:

"The Israeli government is encouraging Jewish pogromists to dispossess Arabs of their land through abuse, including shooting at them,"

That was said by former Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya'alon .

I could go on with what is wrong with what Winters said,  here is something that demonstrates why he is pretty good in his real area of expertise, recent and past Catholic history and culture.

. . . The record of democratic socialism in postwar Europe is something Americans would do well to emulate. At its heart, it stands for the proposition that the common good needs to play a larger role in setting national priorities, that the hyper-individualism, and most especially the deregulation of capital, that characterized the Reagan-Thatcher revolution was a mistake. John Judis has penned an excellent analysis of the development of democratic socialism in recent years vis-à-vis the Democratic Party.

This is not merely my opinion. That noted leftie pol Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2006 book co-written with Marcello Pera, Without Roots, famously said: "In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness."

Maybe he could get the recent Catholic converts like J.D. Vance to refute the second most adored recent Pope of the trad-caths to good effect.   I have pointed out that, having to deal with both the far more radical than socialist economics of the Mosaic Law or its intensification under the Gospel of Jesus and the earliest church, even the recent reactionary Popes,  Benedict and JPII have sounded like economic radicals in their writings and speeches.   

I would, though, caution that European democratic socialism has rested on a reform of the liberal democratic order* and, so, it has not prevented the devolution of its retained inegalitarian features into neo-fascism and even neo-Nazism.   Which gets us to something we do really agree on,  I agree with MSW that the word "socialist" makes it a political liability if not a non-starter.   The Nazis along with the Marxists, the putrid Fabians and a myriad of other pseudo-socialism have made the word poison in far too many cases.   For the good that came from post-war European democratic socialism, it was certainly not an end of history any more than liberal democracy - you can safely read that "rampant capitalism" - has been. 

NOTE:  I have come to distrust any political or legal or, really, intellectual framing that pretends it can extend the methods of science as used in the more exact physical sciences into the realms of society, economics, and, most dangerous of all, perhaps, civil law.   Liberal democracy is, inherently, that kind of a pretense of extending scientific method way beyond where it can legitimately, honestly or safely be applied.  That danger intensifies with that most dangerous of all such attempts becoming part of the mix, the theory of natural selection.   For the Catholic journalist Michael Sean Winters, he might want to consider the consequences for the Gospel of Jesus under the intellectual framing of "natural selection" which Darwin, himself, said was identical to Spencer's "survival of the fittest." 

The Law, the Gospel, the Epistles, and their equivalent in other religious traditions are  the only secure foundation of egalitarian democracy and you can't find that with the scientific method.  "Liberal democracy" shuns that truth. 

The Clearly "AI" "Proof of Life" "Photo" Of Mitch McConnell Proves One Thing

and that is that an intelligent and skilled user of Photoshop type computer software could do a much better job at faking it.   

I won't go into the list of telling details in the first picture they put up because those probably are already known to you.

Then there is the report that they took the original one down and put up a revised "photo" then, according to some reports, they took even that down. 

I looked at the images in some of the reporting on this and was certain it was a fake.  

Really,  have Republican hacks, flacks, tech assistants gotten so lazy by already relying on "AI" that they can't be bothered to fake "photos" better than that?  

It is entirely absurd that the governor of Kentucky cannot demand to see and talk to McConnell in person, with someone else who knows him - they'd probably try to find a body double, they're so desperate to keep the Republican-fascist majority in the Senate - so I wouldn't necessarily trust anything less than that for "proof of life."    Surely if Mitch is as "well" as the "photo" shows him being he would welcome a courtesy visit from the governor of his state.

What we've learned from this is that "AI" is stupid and that it has already made those who lie for fascism for a living really, really lazy.  

Graham has died after what family members described as a "brief and sudden illness."

BRIEF AND SUDDEN ILLNESS like alcohol poisoning?    It's been known for years that Lindsey was a heavy drinker.   I've noticed this year that in hearings, in interviews,  in Q&As that he's been rather obviously under the influence, generally heavily so - I have been intimately involved with alcoholics, I can tell one when I see one.  

He's been a thoroughly evil man his entire life, living a lie as an in-the-closet and active gay man who was a stalwart of the party that has made hatred and oppression of LGBTQ+ People a plank in it's party platform, nowhere more so than in his little corner of the traditional bastion of bigotry,  South Carolina.   His record in the Congress has been one of sheer evil in almost every case, his record as a talking head of Republican-fascism as well.   I can think of literally nothing good to say about him in all of the decades I've been reading about him and hearing him.  Like with the several times when the late Mitch (Moscow's bitch) McConnell said something mildly positive, it only showed him to be as big a hypocrite as he was a constant force for the bad.  

The only thing I'm sorry about is that he didn't live till after the election in November because I think it's likely that he would have lost it.   I always want the truly evil to experience maximum consequences in this life though if that's not going to happen, yeah, death overtaking them is a second best and under our crooked system probably the best that we can look forward to for the worst. 

I do not hold with "De mortuis nil nisi bonum"  I say of the dead speak nothing but THE TRUTH.    And when there's literally nothing good to say about them,  the hell with lying about them.   I hope that purgatory burns out of him all the evil he's done and been, I'm expecting in his case it'll take a lot of that. 

Holding Public Office Is Not A Right It Is An Obligation To The People

THE UNITED STATES FOUNDED ON THERE BEING NO KING has become a total lie because we have a monarch,  before the New Taney Court issued its string of rulings making Republicans kings - when it's a Democrat in the office, they certain hold that "that's different" - things were bad enough.  Now there is no denying that they have made the presidency into a "unitary executive" and absolute monarchy.  In this 250th year after the slavers, aristocratic lawyers and others signed the Declaration of Independence issued their lofty and, sadly empty, words,  we have a mad king who is unusually stupid, unusually crooked and dishonest who has far, far more power to do evil than a King George III ever had.   And there is no way under out insanely retained 18th century Constitution and the political system that has evolved out of it to get rid of him.  

Look at the title of this post again, it states a truth that is entirely ignored.   No one has a "right" to hold a public office,  there is no rational basis for claiming that there is any such a right.  Under the U.S. Constitution, if it was to be claimed that the winner of an election has a "right" to hold the seat then that is certainly nullified by the atrocity of the Electoral College which has put the loser of the popular vote into the office five times in our history,  three of which imposed some of the worst presidents in our history on us including Rutherford Hayes,  George W. Bush and Donald Trump.   Of the other two, Benjamin Harrison was a pretty bad president and only John Quincy Adams is generally ranked in the top half in those historian surveys they love to take at C-Span.  

But the point of this is to show that even if you want to make what should have always been, explicitly, understood as not a "right" but as an obligation freely taken to The People is now treated in a more extreme fashon than a "divine right of kings"  to the detriment of the country and the world.   

The next congress, if it is controlled by Democrats should make it a law that all presidential candidates take a physical examination and psychological evaluation made by a panel of doctors not of their choice AND NOT ANSWERABLE TO A PRESIDENT and the conclusions of those doctors be made part of the public record.   The laws, the regulations and the courts allow those hiring People for minimum wage and low paying jobs to demand those kinds of tests of People who apply or accept an offer of a job often with the slightest of public safety implications.   Yet we are stupid enough under our president deifying law and culture to let a Trump hire hack doctors and those with clear political and personal agendas to lie about their physical and mental states over the course of going on two decades.    There is nothing rational in that, it is as much sheer madness as any of Trump's most extreme and obsessive nocturnal emissions that prove his dementia.    The ways of pretending to deal with that in the past, the idiotic myth of impeaching even the worst presidents in the process of the most public criminatlity and dangerous wrecklessness has never happened and with Bush II and Trump it's clear that will never happen.

Yet we don't require the qualifications for office that a fast food franchise can ask of someone looking for a job to flip burgers.  

The equally stupid "25th Amendment" means of dealing with the matter of removing a demented or damaged president from office is going to prove as much of an illusion as impeachment as a means of removing a Trump from office.   It gives exactly those with the greatest motive of keeping a Trump in the presidency,  HIS CABINET veto power over any proposal to do that.   

Nothing that depends on the "honor" of the powerful and generally rich is worth the photons with which you read the worthless ink on the parchment it is written on. 

I BREAK IN TO NOTE;  As I type this the news that the radio tells me the evil Lindsey Graham has died, suddenly at the age of 71, I'll have more to say about that.   And don't forget the rumors are that Mitch McConnell has died and the Republicans are covering it up,  both such evil hags as Virginia Foxx and liars like Scott Jennings claiming to have talked to him - It would seem that McConnell's Chinese gangster family wife and former Trump cabinet member Elaine Chao may have taken it on the lam as soon as she knew he was either dead or about to die.    

What a wonderful Republic the Constitution has given us in fact as it lies in mere words. 

A Democratic Congress should immediately put a Constitutional Amendment with an age limit for President and Vice President out for ratification.    I think if Joe Biden had not gotten caught up in the reflexive Zionist mindset of blindly and reflexively supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza and he had not been enough of a sentimental fool as to appoint Merrick Garland as Attorney General, he may have gone down as one of the greatest presidents we ever had.   Especially if age and exhaustion had not caught up with him - I blame his staffers for that, they really let him down.   But I am unwilling to ever take another chance on someone who will reach or surpass the age of Eighty in who I will vote for for president.   I think 75 should be an absolute cut off after which any presidential candidate will be ineligible and any sitting president should have to retire.   I think 70 may be a better age for that but I doubt such an amendment would pass congress, though it might be acceptable in many statehouses.  

Speaking of state legislatures.  I would say Congress should put one out an age limit for the Senate and House, too but there is no way you're going to get the many geezers who the voters should have put out to pasture long ago to let that through that initial phase of adoption.    If that is to be done it will have to be done through the state legislative route.  Which has the advantage that there will certainly be many members of those who would like the chance to run for a seat that some dithering person of my age cohort has a lock on.   

As I noted, the many PMs that the Brits have recently gone through,  seven or so in the past 10 years, several of them not through election, shows that their system gives them a way to get rid of a Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson or Liz Trott.  Unlike the stupid American system which gives those with the greatest incentive to keep a corrupt or incompetent member of their party in the presidency,  the British system makes it far easier for voters to make that party pay for a bad PM and their cabinet will be full of those who would like a chance to become PM or to move up in power in the one that will succeed the present one.  It makes it in their interest to dump the worst though they will often keep a really bad one in office for the wrong reasons.  Our system only has wrong reasons for keeping the worst presidents in office even as their crimes are flagrant, public and deadly. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way - Longbow's Justice

 Longbow's Justice 

Tanis encounters an animal rights activist and a mystery centered on husky dogs found abandoned in a kennel. 

Saying the "L" Word Out Loud And Putting It Into Practice Is The Only Basis Of Legitimate Economics

MAX AT UNFTR has an excellent obliteration of the "New Democrats" the successor to the "Democratic Leadership Council" and why they have been a disaster for those below affluence - the large majority - and, so Democrats going back to the early Clinton years.   And he puts it in terms of the ten most right-wing Democrats in congress and as candidates who are launching a platform of platitudes and dangerous promises that,  I believe along with Max, is a plan to gut the entire social safety net.   He begins by telling the sad truth that there are no socialists in Congress or anywhere else in the government, not Bernie Sanders, not AOC,  he gives the genuine definition of socialism,  the workers owning the means of production,  not the most common use of the term as distorted by Marxism, Fabianism and other pseudo-socialisms. 

I have made what I think is necessary clear,  the revival of Christian Socialism, only what I really want is a broad,  religiously based socialist movement that includes Christianity but also religious Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.    I don't think any secular socialism is ever going to be achieved, one based on the pseudo-social-sciences, including economics, will never gain broad support of have the moral commitment to stick to the basic requirements of equality,  justice, economic justice and,  I'll say it out loud, LOVE.   And I don't mean the one and only thing you are allowed to use word that for in politics,  "love of country."   Which always turns into a mawkish and phony and hateful kind of pseudo-emotion.  What economics and politics and the law should be based in is nothing less than  Love of People and other Living Beings.   And secularists who read this are already throwing up in their mouths or jeering.   

We've tried everything else, it ain't working. 

But we do know BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT that Blanche and the rest of them wouldn't be impeding an investigation IF THEY KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING TO BE FOUND.

THERE ARE SO MANY TRUMP SCANDALS that I haven't had the time to give even the worst ongoing ones the attention they would require.   I have not specialized in the Epstein scandals.   I am seemingly innately resistant to anything that looks or sounds like a tabloid scandal so many of the most sensational accusations, such as those made by a young man who claimed that he was subject to and witness to sadistic sexual use of young children, pre-pubescent children, who would sometimes be killed during sadistic sex or, in some cases, murdered.   He said that when one girl was shot in his presence he was told not to worry, that girls were easier to find than boys so they wouldn't kill him.   It seems unusually difficult to find that particular account on the internet, at least when I went looking for it today.   I wonder why "the algorithm" might make that the case.

But I think my scruples against looking at things like that may be a moral failing on my part. 

I generally don't listen to reports even from credible journalists on the topic but this video by the now liberated journalist Katie Phang led me to a reluctant but, I hold, necessary conclusion about the Trump Department of "Justice" suppression of information and even investigations of the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner crime ring.  

Even the filthy dirty lawyer-liar Todd Blanche must know that suppressing the renewed New Mexico governments investigation of the Epstein property mentioned in such accusations of child-rape-murder, the Zorro Ranch, with its private air-strip and more than ten thousand acres on which to bury bodies, will have one guarantee effect, THE SO CALLED DEPARTMENT OF "JUSTICE" SUPPRESSING INVESTIGATIONS INTO THOSE ALLEGED MURDERS AND RAPES WILL BE SUPPORTING THE MOST EXTREME OF THOSE ACCUSATIONS.

They certainly know that because they,  the Trump crime family,  the Republican-fascist party, right-wing media HAVE ENCOURAGED AND BENEFITED FROM THE MOST EXTEREME Q-ANON STYLE ACCUSATIONS, EVEN THOSE WHICH ARE PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE THERE WAS NO BASEMENT TO THE PIZZA JOINT THAT THOSE CENTERED ON.   They know that that is a guaranteed result of their blocking an investigation. 

It is an absolutely rational conclusion that those two facts mean that they fear what evidence will be found if a thorough investigation of the Zorro Ranch is made and that evidence become public.   

Todd Blanche and his corrupt department are rationally believed to be covering up child-rape-murder BY THOSE THEY WOULD WANT TO PROTECT,  TRUMP AND CLARENCE THOMAS ARE AMONG THOSE NAMED BY THE YOUNG MAN MAKING THE ACCUSATION,  THEY ARE CERTAINLY TWO WHO BLANCHE ET AL WOULD WANT TO PROTECT.    And there are certainly a whole class of billionaires and millionaires that they would want to protect too.

Given those truths, I think we all have permission to believe the worst about this even on a total lack of evidence OTHER THAN THE STATEMENTS OF THOSE WHO ARE CREDIBLY BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN VICTIMS.   That testimony and even online interviews and videos OF ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS MAKING STATEMENTS ABOUT THEIR CLAIMED EXPERIENCE, are evidence, though there is other junk being put out which may or may not be, without any careful examination of that, we have no way to know. 

But we do know beyond reasonable doubt that Blanche and the rest of them wouldn't be impeding an investigation IF THEY KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING TO BE FOUND.  We have every right to believe that they know something will be found if that investigation is made. 

Correction: It's COUNT Binface, not Captain Binface

I USED THE  title for the video I posted without correcting it. 

I wouldn't like to offend a Recyclon inter-galactic space warrior, not even one whose election I indicated I would approve.   Far from the joke candidate he's always presented as being,  Count Binface has got several excellent planks in his platform:

- Abolishing the House of Lords.

- Giving free broadband to everyone.

- Stopping the sale of arms to repressive regimes.

- Making Piers Morgan zero emissions by 2030.

Maybe best of all is:

- Proroguing Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Though I'd say that was just a first start at reigning in the current aristocratic fascist.   Here's what I said seven years ago:

I'm a total and complete opponent of capital punishment but every single time I hear Jacob Rees-Mogg talk I feel like volunteering to be the one who chops off his head. 

He's on a list of Brit fascists I've said should be permanently excluded from entering the United States.   Nigel Farage, Binface's opponent in the by-election is on that list I made then.