I Will Admit That Until The Last Couple Of Days

it didn't occur to me to research the ways in which modern democracies, as distinguished from the very late medieval one* we managed to once have eked out of the U.S. Constitutional system, have sought to distance the investigation and prosecution of crimes from the kind of political manipulation that is built into the U.S. system.   

I will acknowledge that to one extent of another,  the U.S. system has been utterly reliant on the sense of morality (huh!) and honor (ha!) felt by the politicians and lawyers (and judges[ha!ha!]) who manned the government and the so-called Department of Justice and the judiciary at any given time or at least on their fear of effective consequences for delivering injustice but as we have seen increasingly since Nixon had what was once the most overtly criminal Attorney General,  John Mitchell who was never anything as obvious a law breaker as what Republicans have appointed since then and what you can be sure the "honorable" Roberts Court (give me a frickin' break!) would allow to be done now as it is unillegalizing all manner of crimes for the Trump crime spree of all times.  

I did look up to see at least a description of how Britain separates its  Crown Prosecution Service from the direct manipulation of the Prime Minister this morning and wondered if I should look at other democracies to see how they have done it as a clue as to what might work better than our obviously catastrophically failed system.   That failure long predates Trump,  it having been obviously in serious trouble under Bush I and II, something which certainly dates back to when Reagan had the crooked Ed Meese as his AG.   Meese was never prosecuted - the reluctance of prosecutors to prosecute the white, the male, the straight the rich and the power-linked is an intrinsic problem of all prosecution offices, I suspect - but he was certainly enough of a sleazebag that even back in Reagan's once record-breaking law-breaker administration, he had to resign.  I will say any Department of "Justice" that could harbor and nurture the likes of Bill Barr operates under rules that are seriously defective and, remember, he was once the duly Senate approved Attorney General of the United States.    And don't get me started on the to-be-held-as-honorable Robert Mueller,  Barr's good buddy all during his entirely sleazy, certainly often dubiously legal career.   "Honor" in such circles is entirely of the ersatz kind. 

I haven't looked far enough into the antifederalists to see if any of them addressed the glaring problem of having a president appoint the head of prosecution who, like all of the president's cabinet has a vested interest in not noticing law breaking by the president and their fellow cabinet members,  I would suspect that the blatant criminality of our system will never go back to something that kinda worked under the honors system,  Republican-fascists of the kind who man the DoJ and the Supreme Court have the same relationship with "honor" as Trump,  it's all a matter of appearance or at least a con job and transaction on those bases.   

Anyone with any ideas on how other countries have at least made an improvement over our totally failed system is welcomed to let me know at least where to look for that.   I'd have to see how it works in reality instead of on the stated intentionality of the thing,  ours is so obviously an open invitation to corruption that I'm kind of shocked that a lawyer like John Adams had such a role in creating it.   Maybe he figured everyone would be as honorable as he liked to think he was and Washington was alleged to be.**  Or maybe, him being a lawyer, after all, his sense of honor was entirely consonant with the filth that that profession regularly perfumes and whitewashes.  

* I think any Constiutional system that included overt slavery should be considered late medieval and ours had and still has those slave-power enabling features baked into it. 

** No figure who held people in slavery or sanctioned slavery has any right to be considered honorable, not even in history.   Washington held People in slavery his entire lifetime, he tried to gull Ona Judge back into slavery after she escaped while they were in Philadelphia.  She was not safe from that until he and Martha who was her enslaver were dead.     I believe I'm correct that if she had gone back to her,  she would have ended her days under the particularly cruel and brutal enslaver Robert E. Lee,  as the inheritance of Martha's great granddaughter.   In the end, the Washington's were no better than he was and he was notably more cruel, making it his practice of breaking up every enslaved family under his ownership.   I don't hold with telling history on the terms that slave holders and other criminals would have it told in.   It is an indictment of our culture and system that Lee died as an officially honorable man, peddled as such in a library full of lying books and a filmography of even more lying movies and TV shows.  

I waited for Godot once

that was enough.  Guy never shows up. 

Maybe I should post some of Becket's many radio plays,  RTE has a whole bunch of them up.  I've thought of it,  it's just I'm not really that wowed by Beckett.   Not since I was a teenager, that is.  I really liked Kenneth Gaburo's movie of Play when I first saw it.  It's an odd kind of nostalgia watching it again. 

I don't really believe in wallowing in hopelessness and nihilism.   And it turns out to be uninteresting. 

The American Right Has Mainstreamed The Looniest Levels

of North Korean style deification of the looniest kind.   And I do mean the Republican Party,  the leader of it,  who I am forced to call the President.   With the "med-bed" AI posting, "ah-ced-uv. . . . how we say that. . . . ah-ced. . . " press conference with Little Bobby and the snake oil merchant of Oz  (thank you very much Oprah) hovering in the background Trump  the flood of total lunacy that is in charge of the government now with not only the support of but the promotion of,  encouragement and enabling of not only the degenerate Congressional leadership team of Mike Johnson and John Thune but of John Roberts and the other five overt fascists on the Supreme Court.   They are as in on it as the most oily of lunatic emperor and king flattering assholes of the past and the present.   The worst of our presidents of the past - and they are legion - never had such unanimous support form his party and the media as the objectively worst one by a mile does right now.    Rachel Maddow gave a pretty good listing of the items last night. 

The United States went from the proven competence of Biden, proven in that he really did put in place a team that pulled the United States out of the catastrophe that Trump I left us in to the totally insane Trump II who is so bad that even huge numbers of the conservatives who supported the catastrophic Bush II years quit the Republican Party over Trump I all in four years of media sandbagging of Biden and Kamala Harris.   It was said not only here but around the world that the Biden economy pulling out of the Trump and Covid catastrophes was the envy of all.   That is everyone but the critical mass of the American media and the lying Republican fascists who stood in front of the camera to take credit for the building projects they had voted against and rejected. 

Our most powerful institutions by which I mean the media,  Hollywood (thank you, very much,  George Clooney and the comedians)  the billionaires and millionaires, the goddamned Supreme Court and the Republican Party are entirely OK with having someone in the presidency and his team of unequaled idiots  crooks, grifters, liars, racists and bigots leading us into catastrophe worse than Trump I.

American conservatives including those who left the Republican Party before Trump I started have never to my knowledge done much soul searching and repentance of what they have brought us to, step by step, from the then record-breaking criminality of Nixon, to the then holder of the most indicted and convicted administration under Reagan,  George H.W. Bush who had to pardon his way out of a criminal indictment (with the aid of William Barr) the Supreme Court crowned Bush II with his incompetence that led to 9-11 and the somewhat justified but totally hopeless war in Afghanistan which it took Biden to end, the massively illegal and totally disastrous invasion of Iraq sold on lies and the disastrous consequences of which are still playing out all over the middle-east, Asia and Africa - and don't forget Bush II leading us into a severe economic crisis, recession and almost a Hoover level depression,  disasters which I have every reason to believe that Al Gore wouldn't have brought us to.  AND IT WAS THEIR FELLOW CONSERVATIVES WHO BROUGHT US TRUMP I AND II. 

Conservatives are, by and large, primarily if not entirely motivated by their own desire for wealth and power.  I think that the majority of them have proven through history and certainly in the past fifty-seven years to care more about that than they do anything else - including the very viability of the United States as a democratic republic,  the lives of countless millions of People everywhere, including in the United States, and the very viability of the environment on which their lives, as well as all of life, depends. 

In the pragmatic reaching across the aisle, as it were, by the left in order to salvage at least some of that list I just made,  I don't think it's asking too much to ask the rational conservatives to at least admit the part their own ideology has played in bringing us to disaster.   I say that as in internal critic of my own side. 

There is much wrong with the various ideologies of the left and at least the more common thing called "liberalism" which shouldn't be mistaken for the traditional Scripture-based American form of liberalism (not that that is perfect, either) and I have certainly been an active critic of my side and those who I would acknowledge some common cause with.   I have been most critical of the university and college-credentialed secular left, even as I acknowledge that they are not infrequently on the same side of issues as I am.   Word serach "Left Forum" in my archive to see I'm not lying about that.   If there is anyone on the right who is confessing what is wrong with their side in that way,   I'm missing it.   I don't trust conservatives who aren't openly and honestly critical of their own side. 

In the meantime, as Jake Tapper has on George Clooney (from the audience seats where he's pretending to be Murrow retelling those oh-so-often-retold-tales )  has doubled down on his role in bringing us to Trump II,  CNN and the rest of the media are normalizing the insane clown dictator of the United States,  the kind of insanity that you see in North Korea, the worst of Maoist China, the dictators of the Philippines,  Idi Amin Dada,  Ludwig II of Bavaria. etc.   Clooney calls his sandbagging of the most competent president we've had since LBJ a "civic duty."   Well, I've been skeptical of this thing "civics" since I took it in high school and found out it was mostly a sack of hagiographic lies  

The old theory that the "free press" (including the most powerful of that, "entertainment")  freed of any obligation to tell the truth by the idiocy of James Madison and the First Congress is a bulwark of democracy has been definitively disproved by the actions of the American media in the past sixty one years.   The American media,  in its most ubiquitous form, has been all in on leading us here, whether it is the cowardly and always right-leaning "bothsiderism" of NPR,  the always tilted Republican C-Span (Brian Lamb's legacy lives on),  the billionaire bought Washington Post and LA Times,  the Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden sandbagging New York Times, . . . (search also on this blog for "In These Times,"  "The Progressive," and "The Nation" and the actually better "Mother Jones" to see what I've said about those organs of the would-be left) and then there are the cabloids and the networks and hate-talk radio.  

The "free press" freed to lie by the civil libertarian lunatic lying invention of the "right to lie" is the enemy of equality, it is the enemy of democracy,  it is even the enemy of republican government as is proved by the actual record of the free press into lying us into all of those disastrous presidencies listed above and either preventing or terminating better ones.   I have very clear memories of the 1968 election which was the first one in which the networks and media almost uniformly made it obvious that they favored Nixon despite his whiny lies that the media were out to get him once his criminality could no longer be denied by them.   I have as clear memories of 1980 in which Jimmy Carter (badly advised by his team of Georgians) was sandbagged in favor of Reagan.  And the media - those shocked by the revelations of Nixon's crimes either retired, died or habituated to corruption - set on its Republican-favoring trajectory except for those times when their corrupt economic policies had the inevitable effect of producing a recession even risking a depression when they might briefly be forced to admit that their guys were about to wreck the economy.   And in that it's entirely THEIR OWN ECONOMIC SELF-INTEREST that they care about NOT THAT OF THE LEAST AMONG US OR EVEN THE MIDDLE-CLASS.  

We have been led to the American decadence and degeneracy by the media, from the Murdoch lie machine to the self-defeating electoral perfidy of In These Times and, sometimes, The Nation.   The Madisonian-early-Jeffersonian theory of the press freed from an obligation to tell the truth and so serve good governance is  disproved in real life,  it is dead in reality though the media can certainly keep the belief in that alive like their fellow free-press-speech beneficiaries can peddle Little Bobby's health theories and "med beds."   Only media obligated to tell the truth is safe for good governance and any legitimate government.   I don't favor the government being the mechanism of punishing the media for lying and defaming,  I would trust the civil law for that as it used to work somewhat before the Sullivan Decision,  though I think there should be some kind of judicial process by which mass electronic media can be delicensed and banned because it is too dangerous to trust and it will always tend to produce those even more dangerous governments that will silence those who tell the truth.   YOU KNOW, THE WAY THAT THE MEDIA PRODUCED DONALD TRUMP IS DOING, RIGHT NOW PERHAPS TO BE GIVEN THAT POWER BY THE ROBERTS COURT.    Government regulation is always a risk but we have found out that the media, freed to lie and defame, is an even more guaranteed danger to good government and a decent life.  It's all so much more complicated than it seemed to the amateurs of the late 18th century who drafted the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.   We have had more than two centuries to learn from the experience of what they produced in reality instead of in their imaginations.   I don't give the slightest damn about the welfare of the media,  I care almost entirely about good and legitimate governance. 

I read over and over again that "the framers" relied heavily on the history of the Roman Republic to come up with what they did.   Well, that was a rather bad model because the Roman Republic - structured for the benefit of the Roman aristocratic oligarchy led to constant civil wars and, eventually, to the post-Republican imperial decadence.   Of course, to the aristocratic slave owners and financiers, they may not have noticed it was always a bad deal for the plebs and slaves who lived under the Roman Republic.   Those 18th century amateurs didn't have any real experience of republican governance to base their theories in,  we have that history and that experience under the U.S. Constitution and are in a far better place to come up with something better.   I am skeptical that anything under the influence of the American media to choose it will produce anything better and know it may, as Charles Pierce fears, may produce something worse.   But we've got worse now under the Constitution we've got.   We have little to nothing to lose anymore.  

This is my answer. 

Minor Hate Mail Before I Have To Go To Work

YOU ARE WRONG,  as I mentioned almost from the start of this I have never considered myself "a writer" except in that I write stuff.  My one and only writing teacher told me that anyone who writes words is a writer but I've never claimed to be one.   I doubt that most of the paid scribblers of the past wouldn't have been better at it than I am if they didn't have recourse to someone editing what they scribbled.   And I did, explicitly, reject the idea that I was playing "journalist" and especially the only legitimate form of that,  the reporting of accurate fact,  "opinion journalism" being no better than what I do even at its best.  "Opinion journalism" is one of those phrases invented so that the media industry could publish lies and claim to be living up to some kind of professional ethics.  As was said by the ghost of Oliver, the director in that great Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows about "theatrical ethics,"  "There's no such thing."  Not that there couldn't be, it's just that under "freedom of the press" and the idiotic legal fiction of a "right to lie" there is no such a thing now. 

Given that, I'll note that I do have my moments, looking over at the headline listed in my little used alternative blog,  you'll see I rhymed "senescence" with "tumescence" to good effect,  which I have to say I still like.  And there has been the odd limerick or so.   Maybe I should go back to doing that,  my rule was that unless I could do it in less than five minutes I wouldn't post it.   I'd give myself seven or eight, these days.   

How Corrupt Is The Roberts Court? Record-Breaking Corrupt - Hate Mail

WHEN I WROTE this, early last Friday morning:

Until the Constitution is changed to reign in the corrupt Supreme Court, there will be no safety for egalitarian democratic republican government and there will be no such a thing as enduring change for the better.    It is the engine of corruption that can demolish even the emergency salvage operation mounted by the Congress after the Civil War and in the adoption of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and that rarest of all things under our Constitution,  Court led progress such as in Roe v Wade.  

I should have included one of the most blatant of Supreme Court outrages, the overturning of the bi-partisan legislation drafted and adopted after the crimes and corruption of Richard Nixon and his administration and, especially, HIS REELECTION CAMPAIGN came to light in the Watergate hearings and investigations,  the Supreme Court overturning of those campaign finance law reforms in Buckley v Valeo.   That ruling, a so-called "free speech" ruling in which the Supreme Court said that campaign money bribes such as were overtly paid to Nixon by millionaires, billionaires and so notably corporations, CAMPAIGN MONEY SPENT TO KEEP WHAT WAS UP TO THEN THE MOST CRIMINAL AND CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY IN OFFICE,  was "speech."  If there was ever a more creative act done by an activist court in the history of that band of inventive fabricators than that I would like to know what it was.   I have noted before that in doing so the "justices" not only put such corrupt-campaign-money-"speech" over clean and honest governance,  they also created millions and billions of times more "speech" for the filthy rich and dirty corporations than they allowed for the common People of the United States.   That corruption has only spread and been made worse by subsequent courts the Roberts Court opening up our elections to an extreme level of such corruption through rulings such as Citizens United in which it was warned that not only domestic billionaires BUT ALSO THOSE IN OTHER COUNTRIES - SOME OF WHOM RULE AS DICTATORS WOULD PRACTICE EXACTLY THAT SAME CORRUPTION TO OUR GOVERNMENT.   When Putin, the dictators of Saudi Arabia, China, etc. meddled and meddle in our elections on behalf of the Republican-fascist party - notably the party of the Supreme Court majority since before the turn of the century,  THEY KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE DOING.   And in doing that they even out-do the Court in 1976 who issued the original corruption favoring ruling in Buckley v Valeo because they've made what was horrible far worse having seen the results of Buckley Valeo in producing corrupt government.  

The pretense of such Supreme Court "justiceing" that pretends that the Constitution is indifferent to such things as clean elections, honest elections, clean and uncorrupt government reached something of an ultimate level shortly before they turned Trump into a despot immune from criminal penalties when in the Snyder v. U.S. ruling they legalized bribes paid to politicians and others in government as long as the bribes are paid after the favor is given.   I'm not the only one who noticed that they were also legalizing the corrupt gifts and graft that have become openly routine for themselves.

Alliance for Justice Vice President of Strategy Keith Thirion issued the following statement:

“The conservative justices ruling that it should be easier for public officials to receive gifts is perhaps the least surprising outcome of the term. While claiming to be concerned with bribery, the Court has just greenlit it by allowing payments after the fact in the form of rewards called ‘gratuities.’ Given the lavish gifts we know at least Justices Thomas and Alito have received, it’s no surprise that they’re quick to defend officials’ right to receive them.”

And since then we have seen that Roberts gets such money through his wife's head-hunting job and Coney Barrett got through her two-million dollar book advance for a book which could only recoup that cost through those millionaire-billionaire mass buys of her book.  This is, beyond any question, the most overtly dirty and corrupt Supreme Court in the history of the court.   And it was plenty dirty before as even that most august member of it,  the one who John Adams said his appointment of was his "greatest gift" to the American People,  the massive holder of slaves, routinely ran roughshod over justice, reason and the lives of Black People in John Marshall's record of uniformly favoring not only slave holders but also pirates who brought kidnapped Black People into the country against the law.   And, as I did note in that list I made early Friday morning, he was joined in that by the supposedly anti-slavery "justice" Joseph Story who wrote what was, before Dred Scott, the worst pro-slavery decision in history to that point, the Prigg decision that allowed free Black People being abducted and enslaved in free states.   Given time,  I have no reason to believe that the six Republican-fascists on the Roberts Court or their Republican-fascist successors won't revive those kinds of things,  they have certainly done things as outrageous as that. 

When I Read That The Oldest Surviving Pipe

 organ had been  partly restored to playable condition,  I had to find a recording of it.   

It's disappointingly short but it was the longest continuous recording I've found yet.    It is something of a revelation as to how smoothly an organ with sliders instead of keys could be played and the sound of it,  I believe in Pythagorean tuning, is convincingly medieval.    This video shows the sliders being played

After 800 years of silence, a pipe organ that researchers say is the oldest in the Christian world roared back to life Sept. 9, its ancient sound echoing through a monastery in Jerusalem's Old City.

Composed of original pipes from the 11th century, the instrument emitted a full, hearty sound as musician David Catalunya played a liturgical chant called "Benedicamus Domino Flos Filius." The swell of music inside St. Saviour's Monastery mingled with church bells tolling in the distance.

Before unveiling the instrument Sept. 8, Catalunya told a news conference that attendees were witnessing a grand development in the history of music.

"This organ was buried with the hope that one day it would play again," he said. "And the day has arrived, nearly eight centuries later."

From now on, the organ will be housed at the Terra Sancta Museum in Jerusalem's Old City — just miles from the Bethlehem church where it originally sounded.

Researchers believe the Crusaders brought the organ to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, in the 11th century during their period of rule over Jerusalem. After a century of use, the Crusaders buried it to protect it from invading Muslim armies.

There it stayed until 1906, when workers building a Franciscan hospice for pilgrims in Bethlehem discovered it in an ancient cemetery.

Once full excavations were conducted, archaeologists had uncovered 222 bronze pipes, a set of bells and other objects hidden by the Crusaders.

I'm looking forward to hearing more of it in the future and imagine it will be copied in modern versions.   I would be curious to know more about the playing technique as people have practical experience on it.  I'm not aware of anyone else playing organs with sliders but, then, I haven't exactly kept up with current medieval performance practice.   It's largely a matter of informed guessing mixed with artistic sensibility,  it's not possible to really restore the mindset that those who created that music and heard it back then with any reliability but what we hear can be a genuine musical experience. 

I Should Be Noting That This Sunday In The Catholic Church

is dedicated to Refugees, the Poor and the Marginalized with special mention of the liturgy from 

Amos 6

Thus says the LORD the God of hosts:

Woe to the complacent in Zion!

Lying upon beds of ivory,

stretched comfortably on their couches,

they eat lambs taken from the flock,

and calves from the stall!

Improvising to the music of the harp,

like David, they devise their own accompaniment.

They drink wine from bowls

and anoint themselves with the best oils;

yet they are not made ill by the collapse of Joseph!

Therefore, now they shall be the first to go into exile,

and their wanton revelry shall be done away with.

to the story of Lazarus and the rich man who went to hell for his indifference to the destitute on his door step,  you know, those who the Roberts Republican-fascist 6 said towns and cities could outlaw and harry out of town.   The kind they're throwing off of Medicaid and all other forms of support.  

But I'm being called out so I will also note that the UnJustified podcast with Alison Gill and Andrew McCabe has Mr. McCabe on with a full account of what he actually said and did in regard to the incident that James Comey is being indicted over and in the process shows why, of just about all the FBI figures in these issues, he is the only one I really respect.  All of those in the media who are claiming that either Comey or McCabe has to be lying, and some of them are lawyers and should certainly know better, are lying about Andrew McCabe who told the truth all along and Comey at least didn't perjure himself when Ted Cruz asked his assinine question.    

I'm entirely on Alison Gill's side in regard to her opinion of Comey and the likes of John Bolton, who I regard as villains even as I acknowledge they are being singled out for unethical prosecution by Trump and his trollop of an insurance lawyer-liar but, true to form, without refuting Gill's point McCabe states why you should care about even those you hold in such low regard being illegitimately prosecuted.   We may disagree about some things but compared to everyone else who was involved with these issues,  Andrew McCabe seems to me to be a real man of honor. 

I recommend listening to the whole thing.

UnJustified Who Is Person 3?