The Republican Criminal Class

IT COULDN'T BE more obvious that the reason the most criminal president in American history pardoned the hundreds of criminals who tried to keep him in power in 2021 is to encourage those criminals in their insurrection against America's electoral democracy to benefit Republicans and their sponsors.  This is part of a long, concerted effort to normalize the idea of armed violence used by neo-fascists, even neo-Nazis politically.   It's what the ever more permissive court and, especially Supreme Court gun legislation* has resulted in, the Roberts Court's criminally insane presidential immunity and overt corruption on the layaway plan of last year were issued even as they knew that the likely Trump II regime would pardon his criminal army of thugs and they enabled him, anyway.   I'll forego detailing my suspicion that the drug-addled, demented and impotent Trump gets off on the violence and the prospect of violence, though I'm sure that figured into it for him, too. 

Democrats, both those who aren't members of the Democratic Party and those who are, have to face the fact that the Republican party is a fascist party who have no use for the rule of law and certainly have no use for honest elections and that lauded peaceful transfer of power.  That's as true of those on the Supreme Court as it is for the thugs in the Congress and the criminals in state houses and governorships and in the Trump II regime.   Much as I respect and admire Nancy Pelosi, her statement that the country needs a normal Republican Party and those others who long to go back to the normal of some past are deluded.   You can't reconstruct any past, never mind the one that once saw Republicans vote with Democrats to pass clean-election legislation after witnessing the crimes of the Nixon regime.   That past is as dead as the likes of Jacob Javits and Edward Brooke.   Every time a Supreme Court ruling pushes the boundaries away from the old ones, those have fallen fully and forever.   The only way to change that is by changing the words of the Constitution that the "justices" used to push those boundaries or to break them down and unless the legislative branch removes the Marbury style power grab they use to do that, that resetting of the boundaries is for naught. 

The courtly respect shown for "Constitutional scholars" is absurd, considering the ease with which such scholars, especially those at legal knocking shops like Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, etc., knock down the previous erudition of their guild generally for those who can pay the best or for the most ignominious of reasons.   An enormous amount of such erudition is expended in holding the line against racial equality by genteel white supremacists such as John Roberts,  enhancing electoral inequality in favor of Republicans, coming up with wealth enhancing legal theories for the wealthiest - lawyers being far more accomplished and compensated gold-diggers than those reduced to prostituting their bodies.   Only the top ranks of "journalism" being more well compensated whores to wealth.   The few, the very, very few such scholars of Constitutional lore who maintain the pose of it being better than it has ever proven to be as a potential, are rather whimsical mythicists than students of reality.

If you are hoping that the consequences of the Trump pardoning of his army of violent thugs will move the judiciary in consequential numbers for the better,  I can only say that I doubt you are right.    I think we're in for worse than we've seen and in a big way.   

If we ever do manage to recreate a democracy it had better make that level of change that I've been talking about because any attempt to go back to some imaginary better past will only make it certain that all of those corruptions will come back, probably faster and with even worse consequences than before.   This reminds me of a discussion I had with one of my college teachers about the idiotic book In Defense of Anarchism by Robert Wolff.   I'd been somewhat impressed with some of his arguments, it was the period of police violence used against civil-rights and anti-war protesters and other excesses of state and police power.   She cut through them in one sentence to the effect that having to recreate civil authority would probably include all of the worst aspects of it happening all over again.  We can't go back to any previous time in that evolution, not the 1850s, not the 1950s or the sixties or 1970 - it's impossible to recreate any past and it's stupid to want to.   We have no alternative but to change what the enemies of equality and democracy have used, including the First and Second Amendments, the liberalization of the first got us Trump, the liberalization of the second one got us his armed thugs. 

The choice is between that and the descent into fascism that we are on right now.  It's as clear a choice as that.

* It's time to call what the Court does by what it is, the usurpation of the legislative function in direct violation of the Constitution as it's written.   The Marbury v. Madison power grab has repeatedly and now more boldly than any time since Dred Scott been used by corrupt "justices" to further political ends and in the Roberts Court its blatant Republican-partisan character couldn't be more obvious.   It is well past time that Democrats in the Congress and Executive stripped them of that self-created power, it's time that Democratic voters insist that they do that at the first possible opportunity,  the dangers of the descent into Republican fascism is a direct consequence of Supreme Court power grabs, the Warren Court, stupidly and unintentionally and the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts with calculation and deliberate damage to American democracy.  

The Entire Leadership Of The World

 knows what the American media, the private, corporate, billionaire owned and controlled media keeps from the stupid part of the American public THAT THE UNITED STATES IS RULED BY ABOUT THE STUPIDEST PERSON LEADING A MAJOR WORLD POWER.   Donald Trump's claims about other countries paying the tariffs he's about to impose EVEN AS PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TELLING THE STUPID, STUPID MAN HOW AMERICAN TARIFFS WORK! is still stupidly claiming what anyone who knows what a tariff is knows, that Americans will pay those tariffs.

The irony in this is that the very thing that would make it possible for the United States government to levy fees against what other countries get from us is a slave-power imposed restriction which was put into the Constitution at its drafting and which has never been removed from it.   Our system has such stupidities in it that benefit rich men with power to control our system which other countries largely don't have in theirs.   And even Britain which has had such massively stupid jack asses as Boris Johnson in charge generally have some protection against the massive and pervasive idiocy that Trump II is going to be through the parliamentary system.  The idiocy in Britain comes pretty much from the same source as ours,  a corrupt media that corrupts a decisive percentage of British voters under a corruptly unequal apportionment of representation, such as is built into the American system, as well.    If Britian changes that under this current Labour government, as it did not during the rule of the Blair government,  I have serious doubts but they might.   There is no prospect of that happening under our 18th century Constitution and the cult of worship for it built into our law and civic culture.   

In the fifth day of Trump II, as he has shut down the CDC from informing the scientific and medical community about the about to explode bird flu pandemic, it's no time to mince words over tender feelings.   I think it's time we really consider saying it the only way that Trump and his cult would understand it,  he's mentally retarded.   And so are they. 

Via RMJ And Bluesky

 David Maraniss
‪@davidmaraniss.bsky.social‬
The Washington Post editorial this morning essentially equating Biden's questionable pardons with Trump's outrageous Jan. 6 pardons was unconscionable. The newspaper I've been part of for 48 years has utterly lost its soul.

BACK WHEN SOME FEW newspapers were owned by eccentric, idealistic owners, most of those I knew of from wealthy families, though some of the best of them small-town weeklies bought by actual newsmen or women, those few newspapers employed reporters and a few non-reporters who could work on the basis of professionalism but most newspapers an just about all electronic media were staffed by those who worked, essentially, as whores of the intellect, what Harry Truman called "presstitutes.'  Many of those who worked as reporters were somewhat shielded from the whims and financial and social interests of the pimps above them in management and, ultimately the owners so long as their reporting didn't impinge on things the owners cared about or would be financially impacted by though those who were a higher class of whores, the "opinion journalists" dealing in opinion were, for the most part, pretty much whores.   

When the internet was young the long gone blog Media Whores Online - reportedly owned and run by a former journalist - told many of the truths of what the media, the friggin' "free press" really was during the Bush II years and, the Gingrich Republicans dishonest and vindictive use of congressional investigations against the Clintons and Democrats, MWO dealt with the contrast between the media part of that from the New York Times down to the Murdoch owned gutter press and the cabloid brothels. MWO briefly spawned a number of "watch" blogs such as the excellent Sully Watch (documenting and covering the then ubiquitous racist piece of right wing crap, Andrew Sullivan) but that didn't last long, either.  

It's funny how twenty brief years of the laughably called "information age" has resulted in even the dismal performance of what's now called "legacy media" in the freest period of "free press" in the history of the world back then to have degenerated into the owner of one of the now handful of major newspapers, the Washington Post, being one of the billionaire clowns to have gotten top seating at Trump II, what is now obvious as an American Satyricon only I think Trump and his crew outdo the figures in that novel by a long shot.  None of those fictitious degenerate Romans had any actual power.  Our degenerates are very real and have very real power.

I have gone on and on for years about the damage to the United States that  resulted from the Sullivan Decision, the 1964 decision of the Warren Court that stupidly,  massively stupidly opened the floodgates of overt political lying with impunity by the American media, lying that has had its only real political impact in empowering Republicans, and the worst among those, from within four years of the decision being handed down.   It has been the foremost vehicle in bringing ever worsening men and women into office THROUGH THE WORST OF THE MEDIA WHICH WAS ALWAYS READY, WILLING AND ENABLED BY THE SUPREME COURT TO LIE THE WORST INTO OFFICE.   Nixon was the first and most obvious beneficiary from the media freed to lie the lies of him into office.  Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump - and that's only the criminals and crooks that it put into the presidency.   It also led to the elevation to power of Newt Gingrich and his faction of Republicans in the Congress.  

But it was all done through the media, the free press that magnified every flaw and petty corruption in every Democrat and invented flaws and corruptions when flawed Democrats didn't provide them any.   The ubiquitously observed mythology of the crimes of Hillary Clinton - including blaming her for the infidelity of her husband - what led directly to the elevation of Trump is now typical of the lies told by the entirety of the American media, the New York Times as directly responsible in that as the Murdoch gutter press.  The Washington Post, once owned by one of those eccentric old-family idealists mentioned above, followed it, especially once the heirs of that old family sold it off in the way typical of such corporations.  Though the Sulzberger-Ochs didn't need to sell the NYT to achieve the same effect.  Oh, they retain a few reporters who, through, I'd guess, choosing their beats, haven't totally whored out but loads of the NYT reporters are whores as those who lied about Hillary Clinton's impending indictment did right before the election that elevated Trump I.  The NYT celebrated their role in the Sullivan Decision a decade ago, its role in the corruption of American politics, leading directly to Trump should stand as the real life consequences of that.   I'm kind of surprised that someone like David Maraniss is so shocked at his experience of the ultimate corruption of the free press, freed to lie in service of billionaires, millionaires and the politicians, lawyers, judges and "justices" who service them in a parallel line of prostitution.  

I do have to mention that Maraniss's accurate phrasing of the WaPo having "lost its soul" should be noticed because all of this is a product of the official secularism of the law and modern academia, such as produces lawyers and law scholars and journalists (they were better or at least when they were the product of apprenticeship instead of college credentialing).   Not that religion is a guarantee of avoiding such corruption but at least it is supposed to start within moral restritions such as business isn't.   One of the most insightful remarks about journalism I've heard recently was the very experienced Keith Olbermann saying the problem with TV journalism was that it was TV, not journalism.  TV being a business, part of corporate culture, corporate culture which is held to be immune from moral considerations, like science is.   That is, it is in fact.  The ersatz substitution of "professional ethics" for even such obvious moral truths that you should tell the truth and not lie went out the window for the "free press" with the Sullivan ruling.   And that was a product of the sloppy, lawyerly drafting of the First Amendment.  Lawyering has always been the whore house that journalism is, always at service to the richest and deepest pockets.   Only, before that ruling lying could cost newspapers and electronic media enough money to make lying costly.   You'd have to sue the billionaire owners for a lot more than judges and "justices" would feel easy about fining them for even the most consequential of lying.   Democracy is dead until things like that are done.   The WaPo is a machine to keep the worst in power as the NYT is as are the networks and the social disease of social media.  Free press free speech has brought us to the darkest period of eutrophic imperial rule.

Trump's Davos Babbling Proves We Have Capone

in terminal stage syphilis as President.  

And the entire American media, the Republican-fascist Party, the billionaire oligarchs and the idiots who bought what they were selling are OK with that.  And it's only day four of four years.   

That friggin' Constitutional crisis they've been fretting over for decades is going on before the eyes of the world. 

I'd Have Expected You'd Have Realized By Now, I'm No One's Sucker - Neo-Nazi Hate Mail

THE GUY WHO uses a white-supremacist and so indigenous American fascist pseudonym keeps railing at me that everyone knows that Elon Musk's overt Nazi salutes to Trump,  Nazi salutes that overt, self-identifying Nazis immediately heiled as validation of their ideology, wasn't what it so obviously was.   Musk's father, recently pointied out that Elon's grandparents were fans of Hitler and moved to South Africa FROM CANADA! because they approved of the adoption of apartheid in 1948.  If that's true, it's no wonder where he got it from.  

And though the corrupt American-Trump creating media and even the discredited ADL here has lied about it being a Nazi salute, many in the United States and even more in Europe aren't lying about it.   I have to say, the excuse that the ketamine guzzling pervert is on the so-called aspergers spectrum (how do you figure that out in a media-addled druggie?) is just absolutely disgusting.   I'll remind you, this is the man that the American right, the Republican-fascists, are OK with running Trump's vestigial brain. 

Right wingers are liars before they're anything else, lying to themselves perhaps but certainly lying about their intentions to everyone because they have no intention for large or small numbers of People to benefit from what they want, especially what they want for governments to do FOR THEM.   The billionaire equivalent planter-financier classes who formed the U.S. Constitution lied about their intentions and about the real character of the document they framed for their own benefit and those of their class.   Those who have and seek power now certainly lie as does the media which enables and services them as those factions of the Trump voters who were suckered by their racism and misogyny against Kamala Harris - yet again - started finding out the morning after the election.   Apparently from the way that "how do I change my vote" trended online on election day, the bullshit buyers remorse started even sooner than that. 

I've let this clearly college-credentialed, I suspect college-employed crypto-Nazi who trolls me  know that I was on to him because I recognized the neo-Nazi pseudonym for what it was,  why he expects me to forget who he is and why he'd adopt such a nom-de-dactylographie or to not recognize the character of what he says, I don't know.  Perhaps where he lives and the milieu in which he operates amnesia is more common than it is in my experience.  Perhaps that's what happens when you operate on the right, you figure everyone is a sucker because so many are.   

It's like the come-on that one of my neighbors got from a big, national real estate syndicate, offering to buy her house at half the assessed value of it.   She was insulted that they'd think she was so stupid as to no know that or to find it out, I pointed out to her that it would only take one person that stupid to make it more than worth their while to run that scam and, no doubt, the U.S. and probably state laws being drawn up for the benefit of crooks with money.  Remember my recent diatribes about how the entire legal profession, including judges and "justices" belongs to a guild that always works for those with the most money and if the politicians pass a law or make a regulation that protects their targets, it gets overturned on the basis of "implied contract" or some other lawyerly lie.

White supremacy is our indigenous fascist element, one that had enormous political and economic power since our founding, one which has ruled, continually in a large percentage of the states and has in every one of them at least part of the time.  America's indigenous fascists have generally had no problem accommodating their kissin' cousins in European and Latin American fascism and Nazism - if Japan hadn't had that treaty with the Nazis that brought he U.S. into the war in Europe, they'd have had no problem with supporting America doing business with Hitler instead of overthrowing him and his regime.  The racism they nurtured and promoted among the poor-whites - now a days they do it through entertainment media - is just a continuation of what they've used against those suckers from the start.   I remember while thinking about the debacle that the Supreme Court installed Bush II wrought in Iraq that the U.S. has paid an enormous price for the racism of the likes of Dick Cheney and the neo-cons, I dare say that America's indigenous racists are probably the biggest factor in non-productive spending all through our history,  their only competition in wasting the wealth of the United States what the equivalent of our present billionaire class has cost us in non-productive spending that is of no benefit to the common good. 

The corruptions and flaws of liberal democracy, having now largely all been normalized through the corrupt practices of lawyers, judges, justices, that 18th century, anti-egalitarian fiction, "liberal democracy,"  "classical democracy," the US style of Constitutional "democracy" is moribund.  As I said the other day once the judges and, especially "justices" have introduced the loophole taking fictions of the law into its lore, there isn't any going back without obliterating the source of those in the language of the Constitution and its amendments, most of all the so-called "Bill of Rights" and most of all in that, the holy of holey holies of American secular credulity, the First Amendment.  Though its certainly as necessary to Supreme-proof the 14th Amendment and, most of all, to force the universal clean-up of our elections and other bases of a real democracy.   

But the biggest change will need to be replacing the folly of libertarian "freedom" as popularly imagined with freedom through equality.   Equality is the real basis of any legitimate government, not libertarianism.   Most of all, getting rid of the notion that money is speech and anything that gives billionaires and others with an interest in peddling lies the ability to corrupt the gullible margin of voters in the way that has plagued us ever since 1968.  

America can choose to continue and complete Republican-fascism or it can make the changes necessary to establish that real democracy hinted at in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and Civil Rights programs.  It's as stark as that.  There is no room for billionaires and neo-Nazis, our indigenous equivalent of that in white supremacy and male supremacy in that narrowly available and, finally, true democracy.   And even once had, it won't be easy to keep.   

The other day I listened to Medhi Hassan say that he had hope because he was a person of faith even as he is pessimistic, I have to say, that clicked with me.  

 

IMPEACH TRUMP. IT WON'T WORK NOW. IT WILL WIN THE MIDTERMS LATER

 

EVERYONE Owns The Right To Outrage Against Overt Nazism AND THE MORAL DUTY TO CALL IT OUT

THE TRUMPED UP, literally, outrage over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying what is obvious, that the so-called "Anti-Defamation League" has discredited itself by defending Elon Musk's not one but two Nazi salutes includes Rupert Murdoch's NY Post accusing her of "Jewsplaining" which, it being the Post and a Murdoch site is to AOC's credit.  "Jewsplaining" being used by a Murdoch lie machine in any circumstances is a red flag that it a term invented for the most dishonest of purposes.   Especially clear in this context by that toilet paper.  

That many Jews and Jewish groups have criticized the ADL and its director over their defense of Elon Musk, the white supremacist,  sponsor of Nazi social media,   Trump's major patron, his co-president, I'd say his brain, such as it is,  defending giving a clear and unambiguous Nazi salute as part of an American Presidential inauguration is not being mentioned much at all compared to using AOC's comment as a weapon against an anti-Nazi democrat.   

That is as the director of the ADL , Jonathan Greenblatt has been profligately throwing around accusations of antisemitism  against just about anyone who is even moderately critical of the Netanyahu government and its genocidal policies in Gaza makes this exactly what AOC said it was, a definitive discrediting of him and the organization he heads.   "Antisemitism" has clearly become another such marker of dishonest accusation in order to suppress the truth. 

But there has to be a more basic question asked about this issue of Elon's Nazi salute.  Granted Jewish People in the United States and around the world have an unquestionable  right to call out Nazism,  as do members of other groups that the Nazis murdered as policy, groups hardly acknowledged to have been targeted.  Poles, other Slavic People, Roma, disabled People, Gay men, etc.   For members of all of those groups calling out and opposing ANY AND ALL MANIFESTATIONS OF NEO-NAZISM IS  ertainly not only a right but a moral responsibility.   But it isn't a responsibility that is universally or uniformly fulfilled as the ADL and, I'm sorry to say, Deborah Lipstadt* seem to prove in this case.  

But the right and responsibility to do that isn't confined to any of the groups that the Nazis targeted or that the neo-Nazis still target.   EVERYONE HAS BOTH THE RIGHT AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY TO CALL OUT NAZISM,  WHETHER OR NOT YOU OR YOUR FAMILY IS ON THEIR DEATH LIST,  whether or not your parents signed up to fight Nazism, fascism and Japanese Imperialism in WWII.   To not call it out, as our media has not, as Republican-fascists largely have not, is as discrediting of them as it is the ADL and its leadership.  

AOC has that right and moral responsibility as much as anyone who is on the neo-Nazi hit list or on the original one in Germany.   She has a perfect right to call out the ADL's hypocrisy and outrageous forfeiture of credibility.  Those who are slamming her for calling out the ADL which has forfeited its credibility for the richest man in the world,  Trump's owner, his puppeteer, his brain, have discredited themselves exactly as much as the ADL and its leadership have.    I have to wonder how they'd have behaved in Germany or Austria in 1933 at the start of Germany's great evil.    We very well be at the start of America's.   

* And Deborah Lipstadt, who served as the Biden administration’s special envoy combating global antisemitism until this week, downplayed the incident.

“I believe we have much, much bigger things to worry about regarding contemporary antisemitism than this particular issue,” Lipstadt told JTA, saying she was referring both to Musk’s salute and the ADL’s response. (Lipstadt separately told the Forward she accepted the ADL’s reading of the gesture as “awkward.”) The U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum did not respond to a request for comment on Musk’s gesture. 

I used to have a lot of respect for Lipstadt but I have to admit that I don't much respect her anymore.   Especially not over this normalization of Nazism.  This is a definitive discrediting of anyone who is unwilling to slam the richest man in the world who has bought himself an American president.  

The ADL has burned its last shred of credibility to excuse the Nazi salute that thrilled the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who aren't lying to defend Musk.

The ADL is dead to me from now on.  Fuck them all.

Hate Mail

 I don't mind you wasting your time trying to comment here but from here on out this is an American fascist (white supremacist) Republican-fascist (Trumpzi) and neo-Nazi free blog.   Your comments will not be posted.   You are banned.   Go find some secular-liberal sucker with a misplaced sense of fairness to fascists and niceness to Nazis,  I'm not a sucker. 

Went To See A Relative

who is listening to Dame Agatha e-books to distract her from the fall of American democracy.   I hadn't tried reading her since about the age of ten when I didn't like her and never tried her again.  My word, is there a cliched adjective, an adjective you couldn't have predicted two clauses and a few phrases away that she didn't use?    What a crappy writer she was.   Worse than Chandler. 

From Greatest Generation To Greatest Degeneration

FROM WHAT I'M SEEING, the mass media, the billionaire owners of which were all-in on the Trump installation, is selling Elon's Nazi salutes as something they so obviously were not, like not-Nazi-salutes.  

I was deeply skeptical of that short-lived fad of a news-anchor playing historian selling my parent's generation as the "greatest" one, being generally skeptical of the existence of "generations" as other than a mere chronological fiction even as I knew an unusual number of them actually learned something good while fighting against the WWII Axis and having lived through the Great Depression.   Whatever was greatest about them, as compared to my and succeeding "generations" was in their increased percentage who supported equality and democracy and it wasn't anything like even three-fourths of them who were all in on both.    Though even many of the WWII Republicans were opposed to the destruction of electoral democracy,  I mentioned the post-Watergate legislation that the Supreme Court and the ACLU put an end to,  you can say that for them. 

I don't have to ask what my veteran parents would say about Trump and the media-promoted overtly Republican-fascists - and the normalization of overt neo-Nazism - they opposed the far lesser manifestations of that on the fringes even as they had signed up to fight it in WWII.  I'm older than my father was when he died and I can say that I'm seriously thinking about the possibility that my generation may end up taking up arms to fight against American Nazis and white supremacists if things go as they well might.   I don't for a second believe that the process of the law is going to save us, the institutions we were told would protect us have all failed, the media which has been the primary engine of elevating the TV-reality star to the head of world fascism and the normalization of his billionaire financed now overtly neo-Nazi regime is certainly not going to save us.  

If Musk is allowed to retain his position of control over the Trump regime and proximity to power, it will come to that.   If there is one thing that should have been done in the past four years, it was him being stripped of all his assets with national security implications and him deported to South Africa along with his family.   That he wasn't is the failure of the rule of law and the Constitution in doing what both claim their purpose is, protecting the American People from our enemies.   Democracy, if it is to exist in the future, cannot exist in the 18th century framing in which the U.S. Constitution exists.   Equality and an informed pubic steeped in the virtue of equality is the only secure framing for it and that is incompatible with the existence of billionaires and millionaires rich enough to corrupt the media and democracy.    I don't think democracy can exist with the kind of social media we have, it has also been a major engine of 21st century fascism and neo-Nazism.   Keith Olbermann may be right that the ability to post anonymously online has to go.  No one should be able to post online without the ability to be held responsible for what is posted by them.  Bots must be abolished, AI is neither intelligent nor is it capable of telling the truth.

The Significance of Non-Violence And Martin Luther King jr

 

Diane Nash: Managing Fear

 

A Better Place For Resistance Than Despair - Psalm 91

1 Living in the Most High’s shelter,
    camping in the Almighty’s shade,
 2 I say to the Lord, “You are my refuge, my stronghold!
    You are my God—the one I trust!”
3 God will save you from the hunter’s trap
    and from deadly sickness.
4 God will protect you with his pinions;
    you’ll find refuge under his wings.
    His faithfulness is a protective shield.
5 Don’t be afraid of terrors at night,
    arrows that fly in daylight,
6     or sickness that prowls in the dark,
    destruction that ravages at noontime.
7 Even if one thousand people fall dead next to you,
    ten thousand right beside you—
    it won’t happen to you.
8 Just look with your eyes,
    and you will see the wicked punished.
9 Because you’ve made the Lord my refuge,
    the Most High, your place of residence—
10   no evil will happen to you;
        no disease will come close to your tent.
11 Because he will order his messengers to help you,
    to protect you wherever you go.
12 They will carry you with their own hands
    so you don’t bruise your foot on a stone.
13 You’ll march on top of lions and vipers;
    you’ll trample young lions and serpents underfoot.
14 God says, “Because you are devoted to me,
    I’ll rescue you.
    I’ll protect you because you know my name.
15 Whenever you cry out to me, I’ll answer.
    I’ll be with you in troubling times.
    I’ll save you and glorify you.
16   I’ll fill you full with old age.
    I’ll show you my salvation.”

Common English Bible

We We That Stupid In The OO's?

MY RECENT and very short trip down short-term memory lane,  looking at Eschaton again, I was struck at how the same gals and guys - minus the myriads who fled to save their adulthood - were saying pretty much the same bull shit that they were saying when I regularly wasted way too many hours there in the past.   Blaming "the Dems" for losing the election,  carrying, roughly, the Green Party, perennial play-lefty line on that,  making really stupid claims about it all,  the same kind of stuff I remember dealing with a lot back then and when I started writing a blog.  I referenced one of the early conclusions I came to that in contrast to those who would never run for office or, if they went through the motions of running, knew they'd never win an election and so would never have the possibility of actually making new law and new policy,  a real politician knew they had to win and take the office to do anything other than lose, what the Greens and the play-lefties have specialized in doing since the first play-lefty play-party was organized sometime in the 19th century. 

You would think that those who hold college credentials would be smart enough to realize that without having had to be taught that but, clearly, that isn't the case.   I think the refusal to learn that obvious truth is directly related to the whiteness, the affluence, the mostly maleness of the play-lefties whose aesthetic sensibilities are what most of their conception of politics is about.   Duncan Black is a good example of that but no where near as much as his cash cow, or, these days, cash calf.   As I mentioned Duncan used to write a number of actually worth reading posts on infrastructure which were ever more interesting and useful than his political theorizing and tantrums.   Not that his regulars ever seemed to much read those as compared to the tantrums.  

As a now longtime advocate of getting a more adult left going,  I don't see much evidence of that happening.   One that knows, first and foremost, that they have to win elections to do anything and that threatening those who have gotten elected and who know their reelection doesn't depend on the generally undependable play-left is needed more than the entire play-left from now on back.   

I don't think the play-left, affluent, indirectly affected by the Trumpian fascists winning and, then, not that much,  should be part of that because they are gifted at division and election losing.  It's their only talent other than spreading discouragement.    I wasted years trying to talk facts with them.   We're plum out of years to do that. 

Where Do You Think He Got This Idea? - They Send Me Links

 A REGULAR READER sent me a link to this comment made at the baby blue blog.

Steve Simels, blog malignancyMr.Murder 43 minutes ago

Once the SCOTUS interpreted the 1st Amendment as conferring the right to lie with impunity, we were on the irrevocable road to fascism. That was the whole point.

Late Correction

 I just noticed that I left the mistake of saying "Jackson" where I meant "Johnson" stand all day and no one corrected me.   I'm guessing the guys who troll me didn't know the difference and my regular readers who can read and know stuff are too polite to point it out.

The Mendacity Industrial Complex - An Impromtu Reaction

APART FROM him falling for the Israeli apartheid regime's genocide in Gaza, I think Joe Biden has had the most potentially positive administration since LBJ if not FDR.   And it's clear that it is about to largely if not all go for nothing as the Trump regime takes over.  Only not for nothing, for far worse than that.  I don't think in any period since the Lincoln presidency gave way to that of Andrew Johnson have we come close to the drastic contrast that we saw when Biden took office from Trump to its return to Trump, has that transfer of power been more pronounced.   Any country which could go from Trump to Biden and back to Trump is a dangerously sick country, probably in the throes of a fatal illness.

The speech President Biden made from the White House yesterday told some truths I wish he'd told decades ago, though if he'd told them then he probably would have had a short instead of one of the longest careers in government.   He laid out the role that lying in the media, the mass media, the even more enveloping and suffocating social media lies that sandbagged his phenomenally accomplished administration, everything from FOX Lies and down to the goddamned New York Times, NPR and, I will say it, Stephen Colbert style entertainment painting one of our most competent presidents as a senile, doddering incompetent, whipping up lie after lie, spreading and normalizing those - the specialty of the great grey whore of NYC and the minor one of NPR - and many other lies on top of those lies.  

But telling that truth gets you uncomfortably close to the idiocy of the Bill of Rights a forbidden topic, my violation of which led to me adopting the name of Thought Criminal as I was told that was going too far.  Telling the truth about the Warren Court, the Burger Court, Rehnquist and Roberts' Courts, the part that the hollowly hallowed ACLU has played in the empowerment and weaponization of lies, especially those targeting Democratic politicians who attempted to give us democracy, real democracy, egalitarian democracy, starting as soon as the Warren Court issued the first of those deadly rulings in 1964,  the lies in the media that both sank LBJ's administration, the chances of Hubert Humphrey in the next presidential election, the elevation of the previous champion of criminality in the presidency,  Nixon, and the entire half-century of the undoing of American democracy which has paralleled the emergence and financial flourishing of the freest press and media in human history.   The old-style ACLU style assurances that allowing the most flagrant of lies to flourish would be effectively countered by "more speech" has been given the test of time and time has failed it absolutely, conclusively, to the point of being among the most certain of disconfirmations possible in the philosophy of law and governance.  

One thing about the profession of lying, lawyering and its elite branches in judging and "justicing" is that once an avenue of opportunistic lying has been taken, especially in terms of the U.S. Constitution, that that avenue can't be merely closed off by a future ruling but it will have to be shut off at the source, in this case the First Amendment, and that is a forbidden topic of conversation.   The fact is that that is as true for the First Amendment as it is for the Second one, the one which Republican-fascists in power and on the Court has used to arm the fifth column which we certainly have reason to fear will open up on our fellow citizens whenever the oligarchs and their tools in government tell them to.   The sacred language of "Jemmy" Madison and the other amateurs, slave-holders, financiers and crooks of the First Congress set in stone will have to be changed to explicitly un-privilege lies and firmly abolish the "right to lie" that the Court has invented as certainly as it invented presidential immunity.   The problem lies in the vague, inferior late 18th century poesy of the Constitution.   Frankly, with what I've learned about the corruption of the slave-holder-financier founders, every defect in that document is rightly suspected as being lawyerly loophole setting to empower them, so much of the language of that document being used that way by later generations of lawyers, judges and "justices" none more blatantly than under John Marshall and more infamously by the Taney and gilded-age courts as well as the later Rehnquist and, perhaps worst of all, the Roberts Court

With all deference to Joe Biden who has earned my respect in the past four years, he's a little late to this realization though he's still years ahead of almost everyone in the tiny fraction comprising the honest media and the likely even smaller percentages of those in the legal and political world.   As Eisenhower only came to articulate the dangers of the beginning of our oligarchic rule in the military-industrial complex in his last speech, the trained lawyer, Joe Biden has only fully articulated the problem in his last speech.   I have a deep and respectful appreciation for the necessity of a good politician to not go too far and become an ex-politician through losing their next election.  I have less respect for those who work in the media because the stakes of them losing their paying jobs is far less consequential for the American People, other People around the world and the world in general.   I don't have anything at stake in telling you that truth, a truth I was warned against telling when I posted one of my early pieces on this topic at Echidne's old blog.   What are they going to do to me?  Fire me from an unpaid writing hobby?   

Until the language of the First Amendment is changed to make it clear that:

a. Lies are not covered by "free speech-press,"

b. There is no such a thing as a "right to lie,

c. That 'the press" [and other corporate entities] do not have rights, what the fools in the First Congress misnamed those are privileges and that that privilege comes only with an obligation to tell the truth to inform us so we can cast an informed vote for our representatives and for ballot measures,

the First Amendment will continue to be the vehicle to power of lie-empowered oligarchy as certainly as it kept in power the white supremacists in the South and elsewhere and thwarted the struggle for equality and real democracy.

Of course, all of that heavy lift will be for nothing unless the Supreme Court is reigned in, starting with term limits and ethics as President Biden finally endorsed but, more important still, have their usurped Marbury v. Madison powers definitively stripped from them.   The Voting Rights Act which the Rehnquist and Roberts, white supremacist Courts have abolished will have to be restored.  It was only with that law and the Civil Rights Act that America started to weakly live out its promises, as MLK jr. mentioned in that speech which will be desecrated by Republican-fascists, white supremacists and others, next week, that is if Trump's elevation doesn't totally drown out that yearly disgrace to his legacy.   The Supreme Court, it's 'liberal" manifestation in the Warren Court as they stupidly set this catastrophe off with their "free speech-press" ruling and the conservative then fascist dominated ones accelerated as they weaponized those "liberal" rulings, is the penultimate source of this.   That Court has to be harnessed, not to fealty to "The Constitution" but to equality and democracy.   I'd put those in place to what they're supposed to uphold, protect and defend instead of that document.   And I wouldn't give you a pint of piss for democracy without equality.   As we can see in the white-power states, in the Israeli apartheid government, in every dictatorship where there are elections in which an oppressive majority lords it over minorities, democracy without equality is, if anything, as dangerous as outright oligarchy. 

Artie Shaw - I Cover The Waterfront from 1949 and 1941

 

He kept moving on instead of repeating himself. 

I'm Still Getting Hate Mail

over my dissing of John Lennon's hypocritical atheist dirge "Imagine."   That that banal, hypocritical, useless song seems to have replaced another song I dislike,  "Amazing Grace" as the go-to song to sing for every ill conceived occasion where a show of piety, of some vague sort, is evoked shows how bad things have gotten since the once common familiarity with earlier Protestant hymnody has died out of the life experience of most Americans.   

I've gone over what's wrong with the song and John Lennon's hypocrisy (he'd have to imagine "no possessions" really hard as he clung to his hundreds of millions and what possessions he had with Yoko in The Dakota) and its defects as a melody and its banal harmony as well as insipid, stupid words - look for it in my archive - so I won't go over that again.

What is really hilarious about the push-back I'm getting is it's from the superannuated cohort of the "nothing is sacred" set such as congregate to masticate their pre-digested ideas as their Geritol kicks in.   If you want to see how sincere they are about that "nothing sacred" pose, diss the "smart" Beatle and his crappy song and you'll find out they hold such shit in the highest regard.  

But I want this to be constructive so I'd suggest a more appropriate song to remember Jimmy Carter would be Marty Haugen's fine hymn,  All Are Welcome, here sung at a Roman Catholic Women Priests' Ordination Mass

Let us build a house

where love can dwell

And all can safely live,

A place where

saints and children tell

How hearts learn to forgive.

Built of hopes and dreams and visions,

Rock of faith and vault of grace;

Here the love of Christ shall end divisions;

Let us build a house where prophets speak,

And words are strong and true,

Where all God's children dare to seek

To dream God's reign anew.

Here the cross shall stand as witness

And a symbol of God's grace;

Here as one we claim the faith of Jesus:

Let us build a house where love is found

In water, wine and wheat:

A banquet hall on holy ground,

Where peace and justice meet.

Here the love of God, through Jesus,

Is revealed in time and space;

As we share in Christ the feast that frees us:

All are welcome, all are welcome,

All are welcome in this place.