Republican-fascist judges on the 8th circuit, one appointed by Bush II, the other by Trump BOTH LOSERS OF THE ELECTIONS THAT MADE THEM PRESIDENT, ONE PUT IN BY REPUBLICAN FASCISTS ON THE SUPREME COURT, have ruled,in Minnesota that valid ballots delayed by the Trump-Dejoy tampering with the vote, cannot be counted if the crippled U.S. Postal Service has not delivered them. Not only are they obviously meddling in an election to prevent valid votes from being counted, they are doing so in opposition to the long-standing practice against courts fucking with elections this close to election day. These Republican-fascists on the 8th district have even acted as advocates for the Minnesota legislature which was not a party to the action, acting as advocates and judges in the same case on behalf of plaintiffs who had no standing to represent the legislature:

Thursday’s decision involved yet another dispute over state election law—a dispute that should never have landed in any federal court in the first place. A Minnesota statute requires voters to return mail ballots by Election Day. In May, a voting rights group sued the state to block this rule; it alleged that the deadline is unconstitutional in light of the pandemic, which has placed extraordinary pressure on the state’s vote-by-mail system. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon chose not to fight the lawsuit. Instead, he entered into a consent decree (essentially a settlement) with the plaintiffs, approved by a state court, that halted enforcement of the Election Day deadline. The Minnesota Legislature has expressly authorized the secretary of state to “adopt alternative election procedures” whenever a law “cannot be implemented as a result” of a court order. Pursuant to that law, Simon extended the ballot deadline by one week and informed every voter that their ballot would be counted so long as it is mailed by Election Day and received by Nov. 10.

And because I think judges and "justices" shouldn't be allowed to not have their outrageous, criminal actions pinned to them, here's the paragraph that names these scumbags:

By a 2–1 vote, a panel of judges for the 8th Circuit reversed Brasel. The majority consisted of Bobby Shepherd, a George W. Bush nominee, and L. Steven Grasz, a notoriously unqualified Trump nominee. Jane Kelly, Barack Obama’s lone nominee to the court, dissented. Shepherd and Grasz blew past the standing problem, holding that the plaintiffs would suffer “a concrete and particularized injury” if late-arriving ballots were counted because they would create an “inaccurate vote tally.” Shepherd and Grasz then ruled that the secretary of state likely exceeded his powers under state law and infringed on the Legislature’s constitutional rights by changing the deadline. They directed the state to segregate ballots that arrive after Nov. 3, and strongly implied that they will soon declare these “invalid” and order them “removed from vote totals.”

Just in case anyone thinks I'm being too hard on that corrupt branch of government.

I hope elections officials in Minnesota and other places where these fascists in black robes try to rig the election of Republican fascists counts those votes and announces how they were cast so that if the fascists manage to reimpose Trump and a Republican-fascist congress on us, the level of their illegitimacy can be measured.

For those of us old enough to remember back when the Republicans who were fascists, and back then there was something of a distinction, there are deep ironies in it turning out that it's Republicans who have sold us out to the Russians, the other various anti-democratic gangsters. And the right-wing media, the ideological and corporate descendants of Red Channels and the media that were all anti-commie back during that period Hollywood presents with such romantic unreality in the post-war period.

But there is no greater irony than the role that Republicans on courts have played in ratfucking things for the effort to sell us to Putin and the others, in that they have broken every single stand of (yeah, right) "principle" that American conservatism is allegedly based in. The alleged opposition to courts playing a political role, of "judicial activism" of the concentration of power in not only the federal government but in the hands of the president, all of the old lines that they used to pull in the 1960s and which I'm sure they still repeat like a Chatty Cathie doll even as their actions prove they only favor that when it's a Democrat who is doing it or if it's a liberal majority (like we've ever had one of those) on the Supreme Court doing it.

There are Constitutional amendments that need to be put into place along with supporting law, those have become all too obvious as the courts have both been gamed and, with obvious knowledge of the judges and "justices" have not only enabled the crimes of the Trump regime, they have been an active part in those crimes. The chief "justice" on the court has twigged onto the fact that the Supreme Court had pretty much blown the game and he's joined in a few politically motivated concurrence with decisions that have not gone the way with the Republican-fascist majority - Roberts wants to preserve the court as it is with all of its outrageous privileges and its usurped powers, I suspect most of all he wants the Court to remain the one branch of the federal government that has resisted anti-corruption measures such as reporting the financial interests of the members of that stinking cesspool of corruption. I wonder what would happen if the Congress passed and a president Biden signed a law that required a sitting "justice" and a prospective "justice" to reveal things such as that. You want to bet the putrid court would not find some lame "constitutional" argument that they could not be subject to those clearly less than needed starts at anti-corruption? 

 

Some of the commentators I've read are calling what these two criminals have done the "Amy Coney Barrett effect" theorizing that the fascists on lower courts are going to be testing to see just how far the fascists on the Supreme Court will allow them to go in the most anti-democratic actions. 

 

There has to be an amendment to the damned Constitution that removes any judge or "justice" for violating the  right of qualified voters being able to cast a vote and having it counted.  The whole judicial branch of the government has gotten out of hand, it's one of the greatest dangers to equality and democracy, made so by the evil contained in the Constitution, against which we will have to fight as long as such language remains in it.   The place to identify what will present current and future fascists in black robes to do that is in their rulings and dissents as well as the legal writings of those in the law schools who present them with the excuses they then use.  That language used against equality and democracy will be there for them to use until it is removed and changed to make it more specific.  

If we are extremely unlucky, the arming of fascist under the "Second Ammendment" by the Roberts and other fascist courts will soon prove how dangerous it is to allow those things to remain in that document.  THAT WE EVEN HAVE TO CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY OF TRUMP FASCISTS WITH AUTOMATIC WEAPONS KILLING PEOPLE RESISTING HIS RE-IMPOSITION ON US IS AN OUTRAGE THAT FLOWS DIRECTLY FROM THE SUPREME COURT AND THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST PARTY THAT THEY MADE THOSE RULINGS ON BEHALF OF.  

Even if Trump and the Republicans are soundly rejected, this is another bullet we may have dodged, what seems like a long time ago, now,  I was warning of the consequences of not quite dodging it the next time.  We're dead.  

Here, I'll post it again:

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

WHAT IF WE DODGE THE BULLET?

What if they lose? What if the congress investigates the crimes of the Bush regime and those are stopped? What if things go back to normal? After what we've seen the past forty years, if things can go back to normal it won't be a blessed relief, it will be a disaster. Our recent history proves that we have fatal problems in the foundation of the American government.

Our elections have to be fixed, not just returned to c. 1964. We have to secure the vote, from before it is cast to counting to reporting the results to their fulfillment. No elections official, secretary of state, or judge can ever be allowed to prevent another legal ballot being cast or counted or made to count. The sleazy behavior we've seen from every level from elections clerk to Supreme Court and the Executive wouldn't be tolerated in a real democracy. A democracy needs it to be an impeachable crime for a Supreme Court Justice to say that a Citizen of the United States does not have a right to vote. That is a fundamental contradiction of the role of the court in a democracy. Anyone who believes that has no place on our court or in our government.

The media, and today that means the electronic media, have to have their self-interested biases exposed and it's pollution scrubbed out of our politics. They have to be forced to perform the public service they promised, including standards of fairness. Broadcast stations must provide real news, including local news, which has to be unbiased and fair. And as a comment here yesterday said, without diverse ownership of the media, they won't serve the entire public.

The cable "news" channels have betrayed the public's trust even more flagrantly than broadcast, spreading lies effective enough to start the most idiotic and dangerous war of our history. We will pay the cost of their lies for decades, in blood as well as money.

They also aided the Bush putsch of 2000 and the earlier scheme to remove a genuinely elected President on trumped up charges and lies. Pretending that a rogue cable industry isn't a danger to freedom has to stop. Anyone who defends them on their crimes against democracy is a dupe or a profiteer. Put them under the same public service requirements as broadcast media. Media passes itself off as the voice of the people, then let them show it by putting the public before their investors and owners.

Recent history proves that self-government can't depend on leaving it to chance. Laissez faire democracy dies and the death is never a natural one. It lets the powerful and wealthy swamp the People's voice almost all of the time. In the same comments mentioned above, it was pointed out that the Supreme Court rulings making corporations artificial people made that all the more true.

Our government is always presented as having three branches, those are where almost all of the pitiful efforts at reform are concentrated. And that hasn't worked, we have the most dishonest government of our lifetimes. Putting patches on the process to make it a level field is unrealistic to the level of willful blindness. Powerful interests have power. They will always win when they have equal access to the process and own the media. The handful of examples where individuals or small groups win over the big guy make for sentimental TV movies, using them as proof that the system works is calculated dishonesty.

If the People are neglected then it all goes wrong. They won't even show up to vote. That step isn't a naive social studies lesson that you stop thinking about after the test in fourth grade. You don't go on to the higher study of civics and leave it behind. There is nothing higher in a democracy that the People, there is no act of government more important than their Vote. Abraham Lincoln, one of the real founders of the country we live in today, gave the formula for it. You know it by heart. He didn't mention the congress, the executive or the high church of the judiciary. He said that the enormous sacrifice of the American People in the Civil War was so that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from the earth.

Any aftermath of the Bush II disaster that doesn't include changes to these laws will be just the beginning of the next time. Not securing the Vote, the will of the People; and forcing their own chosen responsibilities on the media, the only guarantee of an informed and realistic Vote, is a welcome mat for the next would-be dictator. Any liberal, leftist, Democrat, independent, even "moderate" Republican who lets two years go by without enacting real electoral and media reform had better beware. It's just a matter of waiting before the same coalition of corporate interests, bigots, oligarchs and haters tries again. They might be as slow and stealthy as they were this time, buying up media, using it to spread lies that "more speech" can't drown out, but they'll make a come back.

 Slight relapse, pushed it too far Thursday.   I'll pace myself. 

I've got to figure out how to embed stuff from Twitter, Clue: I'm not doing it if I have to join

How psychopathic does the Trump cult have to get before people figure out that what's feeding it is a really dangerous problem?

Listen to this young woman who was one of the Trump cultists left in the cold in Nebraska once Trump and his advance team were done using her and the rest of his victims, once the cameras were turned off.

 

She's clearly been imbibing the poisonous "more speech" that Trump and his backers promote, I mean, the psychotic dolly is accusing Tom Hanks of pedophile abuse in Athens, TOM HANKS!  

 

These are the kind of Republican-fascist nutballs the Supreme Court has armed with virtual automatics and let billionaires fill with poisonous lies of the kind that get them shooting.

Hate Mail - The "More Speech" Crowd Shouldn't Get To Bet With Our Lives That Their Hunch Is Right

I happen to think Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU, professional enabler of lies and liars,  is an idiot of the kind that goes through Harvard and Harvard Law and who comes out thinking that the Nazis should have total freedom to do what we know from history they can do, lie themselves into power and murder millions of people, which is the substance of their ideology, and also to oppress, enslave, abolish the rights of and enslave virtually all of humanity in their pathological eternal Darwinist struggle for THEIR supremacy. That she does that while being the child of a Holocaust survivor proves the power of stupid ideas learned on the secular-play-left and reinforced in Ivy level universities is enormous.  I've read contemporaneous opponents of the Nazis, they were just as smart and made just as good arguments against them, maybe better in some cases, arguments than we could, that if "more speech" worked would have kept them from power.  Her shtick is disproved by history.  

If it worked here the abolitionists would have won the abolition of slavery and inequality without there being a civil war and the question of equality would have been settled, there would have been no Jim Crow, no neo-Jim Crow arising in this country right now, the most "more speeched" period in history, rising on the power of the "more speech" which is in the form of lies tailored to be an easy sell.  Why we've got a con man in the presidency.

Maybe it's her bet that it wouldn't happen here is based on her own personal belief, which I do not share, that Jews are relatively safe from it happening to them, here.   If she doesn't have that belief her putting the rights of lies and hate speech over the lives of mere mortals is explainable only as an acquired psychosis or moral depravity.   But that belief is a delusion.  There is nothing special about the United States or Americans that means that won't happen.  I know that delusion is shared by even members of minority groups for whom it most certainly has happened here,  Native Americans, Black Americans, Latinos, LGBT People.  Though there are certainly many members of those groups who have been the object of perfectly legal oppression and homicidal terror - in some cases carried out by the American government under the American Constitution, local, state and federal, and with the support of courts.  Slavery, Jim Crow, and the neo-Jim-Crow that the Supreme Court is reimposing on racial minorities- the Supreme Court always being the life-jacket of racist privilege.  And the First Amendment interpreted in the way that Nadine Strossen seems to always favor it being interpreted has, in fact, been the most useful tool of the neo-fascists on the Supreme Court in furthering us down the road of it happening here in the traditional old American way of doing it here, probably as far down that road as we have ever gotten since the Civil War. 

I think she's an idiot with a lot of personal cred invested in that idiotic faith in "more speech".  Well, there's never been more of that "more speech" and, guess what, in the age of mass media some loser lefty-liberties freak can "more speech" till their tongue gives out and the spare change "speech" of the billionaires can make it a total waste of time on their part.   If "more speech" worked we would have had no danger of having Republican fascists such as control the government and run the Court now, after more than a half a century of having these assholes say "more speech" that has obviously not worked.   

I have a rule, anyone who thinks the KKK, the other indigenous forms of what is in fact, the same thing as Nazism here must be given a "fair chance" with an "even playing field" of doing what they have done before out of some Ivy style idiotic conception of "principle" then they are too stupid, too dangerously stupid to give any attention or money to.  I suspect that the billionaires will be perfectly happy to give them money, in exchange for what billionaires give money for.  And they'll be perfectly OK with taking it.  They can make it a matter of "principle".  They teach you how to do that in the Ivy equivalent world, how to lie your way out of moral realism on "principle". 

And I could go on and on and on about the fact that for Women, it has never stopped happening.  I have mentioned before that the FBI once published figures that said an average of four women a day in the United States is killed because they're women, that women live under a gender apartheid that makes it dangerous for them to go places that are relatively safe for men to go, that they are always in danger of discrimination and exploitation.   The Nadine Strossens of the professional play-left don't seem to learn much from that either. I would bet that the ACLU "free speech" advocacy has historically had the funding of the porn industry, I'll bet that was a big part of the money-making that funded its expansion in the Ira Glasser period, I'd love to have the time to try to track down who it was who funded that. 

You have to be a real sucker to buy that big a con job.

Tucker Carlson, Enormous Douchebag, Claims The Dog Ate His Homework

 

It's not likely that this 1980s era piece of made-for-cable scenario bull shit will get little Tucker Carlson, TV dinner prince that he is, fired from "journalism". Journos have no real professional practices, anymore. Not that they ever much did, what they used to have is a fear of being sued for libel and or slander, once that was removed the crap floated to the top and that is why FOX has been running Trump's vestigial mind for the past four years.

The bull shit was made up to pretend that the Biden campaign or some unspecified other entity right out from under the care of Fedex or UPS or whoever, stole the damning documents about Hunter Biden (who, by the way, isn't running for president). Little Tucker's bull shit story includes the claim that these ultra secret agents who were so good that a. they knew about the package and what was in it and b. Fedex or UPS or whoever and all of their super surveillance and tracking of the package couldn't get a picture of them doing it LEFT THE FRIGGIN' BOX BEHIND WITH WHATEVER EVIDENCE THEY MIGHT HAVE LEFT ON IT BY MISTAKE AND WITH TRACKING INFORMATION THAT WOULD HELP INVESTIGATORS INVESTIGATE THE THEFT. I'm not super-duper secret agent but I'm not so stupid that I'd leave the box behind, any kid who stole a chocolate knows you don't leave the wrapper to show you took one.

That is on top of what Brian Tyler Cohen points out that REALLY, IN 2020, THEY WERE SENDING DEAD TREE COPIES THROUGH PRIVATE CARRIER INSTEAD OF SENDING THEM ELECTRONICALLY! -- documents, the receipt of which is so time-sensitive that they couldn't wait for Tucker and his producer to go back to NYC in the closing days of this election. Probably "documents" that it will be claimed were obtained in electronic form to start with.

There's a reason that Brian Tyler Cohen's career seems to be going places, he's good at doing short commentary and he's pretty good at doing interviews too.

The Difference Between A Narrow Statement Of THE LAW And A Way Of Putting It Into Practice In Life?

RMJ has an excellent post up that is worth reading.

 

The Hebrew prophets got it right, and to sum it up in one sentence (no, not the "Golden Rule," that's honestly a bit too narrow), I always turn to Micah: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God." For those of a non-religious bent, or a non-Judeo-Christian persuasion, elide the last three words if you like. It still works. And what does it have to do with lamenting (and implicitly arguing for changing) "the collapse of civic virtue among voters"? Especially if you think your ideas of "civic virtue" would make a fine starting point for upbraiding everyone else on theirs. Humility is hard. It's also vitally necessary.

As I commented there, I thought maybe adding something to Micah about being honest with yourself about your own motives should be included, then I realized as I read further that self-doubting and self-questioning was an intrinsic part of humility. Obviously it's something I need to work on more. 

 

He continues on in ways that make it not only relevant to political life and, more importantly, social life but showing that the difference between following that path outlined by Micah and that of the likes of Trump is the difference between decency and Trumpian gangsterism. Though those are my terms for it.

 

I love the distinction RMJ makes between the concise statement of The Law, the "golden rule" and the non-legalistic perhaps more covenantal practice in Micah's words. At least that's how I'm thinking about it right now.  

I Hope This Is The Last Time I'll Ever Feel Moved To Write About James Comey

Michael Schmidt's revelation that James Comey's wife tried to talk him out of his move that likely put Donald Trump into the presidency, his announcement 10 days before the 2016 election about Hillary Clinton e-mails that he'd never read and that hadn't been gone through by the FBI - when they did they gave a far less impactful announcement that they found nothing in them - reminds me of how much I loathe that sanctimonious and hypocritical asshole and nothing more than that.  

 I don't doubt for a second that there were obvious reasons he did that to Hillary Clinton, first that she was a Democratic candidate who it looked would win the election,  FIRST RULE OF LIFE, NEVER TRUST A REPUBLICAN WHO WAS A REPUBLICAN AFTER BUSH II, second and no less of a reason for someone like Comey, she would be the first Woman to be president.  

For someone like Comey for whom principles, scruples, even what might almost attain the status of morality is always largely a matter of form over substance, temporary pose instead of lasting import.   He is a good example of a kind of conventionalized religiosity of the kind that is often found among so many among the servants of affluence - I'd go into his record at the scumbag investment firm Bridgewater and how that didn't trouble his sensitive sense of morality but I'm hoping he fades into total obscurity after the Trump crimes have been fully investigated in exactly the way that Comey never would have done if he had not been fired by Trump.  Not unless he figured he'd get caught enabling Trump in the end.  I don't think there's really that much difference between him and a Rod Rosenstein.  

Comey's place in history should be as the man who sanctimoniously and dishonestly delivered the country and the world to at least four years of Trumpian fascism and the devastating damage that has come with that.   He did that to keep the country from being governed by the women who actually won the election on behalf of his Republican Party.  He's the Sandra Day O'Connor of the Trump era even as that asshole was of the Bush II-Cheny era.  I hope she's cognizant enough to understand that that's how history will see her.  I hope we make it obvious to him that that's how history will remember him, though he'll like to imagine himself as a martyr of principle and scrupulosity and even imagine himself as a model of moral propriety when he's nothing of the sort.  No, I don't even care if he feels the shame and humiliation, understands that everything Trump and his goons did in office was a result of his unprecedented, even unallowed act of law enforcement interference with an election ten days later.  I hope it's how we see it and act to prevent a future Comey ever holding the office.  No more Republicans appointed to those offices by a Democratic president, that should be the rule from now on.

 

Post-Fevered Thoughts

IT wasn't Covid-19 but it was quite a bad virus that I got. Thank God that it wasn't something that required hospitalization. I can't imagine what it's like in those places that didn't take New York's and Washington State's early crises with Covid as a warning to take adequate precautions to avoid the deadly consequences of having their hospitals overflowing with Covid cases. Imagine having a heart attack or a bad accident there, right now.

I know in the de-religionized, secularized, sciency regime that rules right now it's forbidden to take the experiences we have as warnings or teaching opportunities, we're just supposed to shrug and say "shit happens". But that's a pretty stupid way to look at things because how we learn or choose not to learn from experience AND ACCORDINGLY CHANGE OUR BEHAVIOR, OUR LAWS, AND OUR PRACTICES very often makes a huge difference in the outcome. Recent days there have been a number of stories about studies of what might have been if we didn't have a bunch of pathological gangsters in charge of the federal and many state governments, by the end of the year there may be a quarter of a million Americans who would have been alive to see in 2021 if even the simplest measures, masks, social distancing, banning spreader events and occasions had been in place and encouraged by the media instead of the utterly insane situation when the mass media, FOX, Sinclair, hate-talk radio, pathologically fascist podcasts, etc. had been suppressed.

 

More practically, why bother making such bad mistakes and so many of them if you're going to be too stubbornly stupid to learn from them?  How stupid do you have to be to fail to learn from observed experience?   But such are most of the best and brightest among us. Look at how few of the Coney Barret Super Spreader Event Republican fascists have learned a damned thing.  

One of the biggest learning opportunities of my lifetime, the very age of "liberty" of a childish and naive form of "freedom" has been to see the not only malignant but oppressive results of things such as free-speech, free-press absolutism. Last week I spent a few posts going over one of the emblematic, the flagship examples of "liberal" advocacy of such absolutist readings of the First Amendment and how it has helped to bring us to Trumpian fascism. I said how their advocacy for the "rights" of Nazis and the American Nazis of white supremacy and other such violent, anti-democratic, racist oppression to do what they have done in most of the countries of the world, including the United States, to gain power and put into practice exactly what they advocated.

It was probably a small thing to the mostly white lawyers, mostly never impacted  by the very real American apartheid of Jim Crow and the other forms of it in other parts of the country, when they made their arguments and wrote their amicus briefs and went home secure in the expectation that nothing they were helping to get a "fair chance" at happening would ever touch them or their loved ones. But we are seeing that it not only can happen here, it has, in fact, happened here over and over again and for most of our history under the friggin' First Amendment, which has been not only like the laws that illegalize billionaires sleeping under bridges as well as the destitute, with rulings like Buckley v Valeo, that advocacy has set up the most uneven playing field possible by making billionaires the possessors of ever so much more speech than the unheard destitute. 

That's the thing about speech that the advocates of free speech absolutism choose to ignore as they bleat "more speech" in the face of the tsunami of lies that has drowned American equality, America's only real form of democracy, speech to have an effect has to be heard. 

 

Equal rights to say something is as meaningless to our social and political lives as the Republican-fascists including those who such advocates write those amicus briefs for and who argue in front of are making the votes of potentially millions of Americans in the Roberts Court run up to repeating the ratfucking of the vote by the Supreme Court. It may be a long shot for them, but they'll do it if they figure they can get away with it.

These are a few of the things I've been thinking about in the past several days of wondering. It looks like my ballot, which was hand delivered to the ballot box at our town hall will be counted because I'll still be alive on Election Day. I think I'm back. 

 

I hope one of the things we get a chance to learn from is how seriously stupid it has been for the left to trust the Supreme Court, the court so ridiculously romanticized through so many Nina Totenberg segments on NPR, so many sappy Hollywood and TV movies, through the absurd mimicry of false sanctity gained through the false practice of having judges dress up like priests when they are probably now as they have been through most of the period of the American judiciary, one of the worst parts of government.   In the ominous choice of Coney Barrett to have the most reactionary and pathological of the sitting "justices"  the degenerate Clarence Thomas be the one to swear her in, I saw what should have been the death of that pantomime.   Things are going to get a lot worse very fast.  

Yeah, I'm pretty well over Nina, I was pretty well over her twenty years ago. 

I'm running a high fever.   A cough but no serious breathing problems yet.  I hope to post something later today. 

On the bright side, I got my garlic planted.  Hope someone enjoys it.