Remember All Of This Is Happening Under The U.S. Constitution And The "Rule Of Law"

 such as those really are in real life.

We are at the stage of fascist takeover where the values slogans of even the Nancy Pelosis and Joe Bidens aren't going to help.  The "institutionalism" that was peddled by the virtuous lawyers of MSNBC have been pushed into the Patomac and drowned.   It proved to be not much use in the past four years.   This is the greatest crisis in American democracy in its history, worse than in 1861 BECAUSE THEN IT WAS THE PRESIDENT AND THE CONGRESS WHO WERE ON THE SIDE OF DEMOCRACY AND THIS TIME THEY ARE ALL IN ON THE NATIVE FASCISM THAT THE CONFEDERACY CHAMPIONED.  

This time the traitors ARE THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER, THOSE DEFINING "THE RULE OF LAW."   

Lincoln could use the Federal government to fight against white supremacist government and treason, they've got control of the federal government this time.  Just as they have for the entire antebellum period, during the long Jim Crow period and ever since Republican-fascism has been resurgent in the backlash against the long struggle for equality and economic justice in the brief period in which that made some headway.  

This is the worst it's been since at least the lowest period before 1861 and I hold it's arguably worse because they're stealing everything as they destroy democracy.   And they've got the entire federal government now, especially the Roberts Court.

We MUST All Observe Black History Month Because It Contains So Much Of What Is Best About America

AND BECAUSE TRUMP'S regime is trying to suppress that history. 

So I will go back over posts from a project I did a number of years ago dealing with the history of abolitionism starting tomorrow.   I hadn't planned on that before just now, reading about the Trump regime's order banning that history so I need to go back to review and revise and add to those posts.    

The history of he struggle of People of Color and Women and LGBTQ+ and Disabled People and Poor People and everyone else who are subjugated and oppressed for equality is the best thing about us.   Only those who love the worst about America want to suppress that, most of all our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists who dominate the Republican Party and the corporate media. 

Elections Bought By Musk and Thiel Are A Direct Result Of The Supreme Court's

First Amendment rulings since 1964.   Elections are won through what the media puts out and our media puts out lies and slanted information based on who owns the media and the interests of the rich men and a few women who own the media and finance it through advertising.  The rich having ever so much more money than the poor and middle classes, their lies and slanting dominates the biggest and most politically effective media.  There's nothing complicated or mysterious about that, though the Ivy League product on the Supreme Court pretends it isn't entirely obvious and one of the most salient factor in American life and politics.

Franklin warned that experience keeps a hard school but a fool will learn in no other one.  He was right but it's hardly enough.  It is a hard fact of American politics, that the media has the power to overcome even the hardest of even lived experience.  That the Covid 19 criminal insanity and idiocy of Trump I didn't bury his political aspirations forever is a product of the American media lying for him during the catastrophe and lying for him after, during his nonfeasance , malfeasance and misfeasance which were the entire substance of his first regime.   

Even his completely catastrophic economic shit show, what the media and its owners care about more than anything MORE THAN UP TO A MILLION UNNECESSARY DEATHS OF AMERICANS NOT FIVE YEARS AGO didn't force them to tell the truth about Trump's disasters.  And worse, as Joe Biden did literally the best job in the world of recovering from Trump's disasters, they sandbagged him and undercut him and lied and lied and lied about him and his team of perhaps the most competent appointments in recent history - and I do make an exception of Merrick Garland in that - to pave the way for Trump II EVEN AS TRUMP ANNOUNCED HIS INTENTION OF BEING A CORRUPT DICTATOR WHICH HE IS PUTTING IN PLACE AS THE MASS MEDIA LIES TO SUPPORT HIM IN THAT. 

That is all a result of the Supreme Court, from the Sullivan decision of Earl Warren's time, when the remote priests of the Supreme Court got addicted to setting up would-be progressive milestones of "freedom" in permitting the New York Times and the rest of the media to lie with total impunity when it came to politicians and other public figures, to the Burger Court's Buckley v Valeo, and the even more blatant First Amendment enabling of political corruption and election corruption by overturning the clean elections laws passed by the Congress AFTER WITNESSING AND EXPERIENCING THE CRIMES OF THE NIXON YEARS,  Nixon having been a direct beneficiary of that first, the Sullivan Decision, and onward in the parade of increasingly corrupt and incompetent and bungling Republican administrations, its magnification through the Gingrichization of the Congressional Republicans, through further Supreme Court decisions, the Roberts Court's Citizens United expansion of the line of Sullivan and Buckley v Valeo, announcing that American elections were on the market for billionaires such as Musk and Thiel, and before them the likes of the Mercers and Kochs to buy themselves the Congress, the presidency and through such dark money groups as Leonard Leo runs, the Supreme Court.

I have been a life long student of politics and a news junkie and there is literally nothing clearer about American politics of my lifetime than that analysis of how things went to shit in America.  And I will bet you if I or someone brought that case with full documentation to even the three non-bought, Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court they would literally be as clueless as to its meaning as the aged member of the Brit aristocracy who didn't know how to put toothpaste on his tooth brush, his valet hospitalized having done that his entire life before him.  Such is the power of the lore of "Constitutional scholarship" to blind even those who are somewhat willing to see what's right there before them FOR DECADES. 

And all of that flows from the sloppy, nonspecific, and incomplete wording of the First Amendment of the Constitution as it was molded and modified, especially by first the rather stupid liberalization of the Warren Court and then far less attractive aspirations of further courts, partly through a stupidly and falsely virtuous building on those Warren Court aspirations to - and they really are this politically stupid - "enhance freedom."   Even the "liberal justices" went along the more obvious motives of other "justices" to enable exactly the buying of elections on behalf of a party which was increasingly addicted to the financing of millionaires and billionaires.   That motive BEFORE THE ROBERTS COURT CONGEALED IT INTO ITS CURRENT FORM was most blatantly expressed in the Court's Bush v Gore decision, in effect five Republicans on that court choosing to put George W. Bush in office, though he'd lost the election, one of them, Sandra Day O'Connor, having expressed displeasure over Gore winning the election because she wanted to retire and didn't want a Democrat to choose her successor.  

That the Constitution didn't and still doesn't expressly prohibit the goddamned Supreme Court from stealing an election on behalf of the party of its majority is a damning indictment of the document. 

But now that the Supreme Court has made those previously uncut trails to corruption and dictatorship through the already far less the pristine virgin forest of the First Amendment, the only way to shut down that road to dictatorship is to change the wording of that stupidly inadequate text.   It has to be blatantly set out that "free speech - free press" does not include that oxymoron of secular legalism a "right to lie."   It has to include language that the press is an artificial, human creation and has no rights, those only adhering to natural living creatures but that it may have permission to tell the truth and operate for the public good but not the public damage.  It has to be made plain that media and speech which attack or damage equality and democracy can be acted against civilly in ways that prevent the media from damaging equality and democracy.   That has to be done because it is the story of American history that millions of Americans have been denied the most basic of rights on the basis of lies and, especially, lies spread by the media, including "entertainment" media.  

We have a number of rights under a democratic government, as they say in Canada, speech is a right but it's not the only right.  One of the most interesting of those rights but one which the legal scholars and Supreme Court "justices" don't seem to have much interest in at all is the right all of us have to being governed by a LEGITIMATE government.   There is no truly legitimate government which has been devised by human ingenuity except egalitarian democracy, and within that realm of legitimacy must come the admission that even an egalitarian democracy is a product of human aspiration and human trying and with that comes the susceptibility to human error.   We have a right to a far, far better government than the one which our Constitution has given us, certainly People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc. have suffered terribly under the United States Constitution, the only good things in our history are the story of the struggles to right what has been wrong under that document AND THE SO-CALLED BILL OF RIGHTS throughout our history.   The very framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were some of the worst oppressors of People of Color and Women, the oppression of both groups has been the law of the land for almost all of American history, under the Constitution, under the rule of law under that Constitution, the few hiccups in that under random Court rulings have been only temporary as the history of the history of the Rehnquist and, most of all Roberts Court have proved in their headlong return to Jim Crow and motel-room abortions and the most florid period of corrupt, bought government since the previous periods punctuated by a brief period immediately after Lincoln,* immediately after the Republican crash and the FDR years and the brief period after the now dead Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were in effect.  There was, in truth, no such a thing as legitimate government without the voting of Women and People of Color, there is no such a thing as legitimate government through most of American history which we have fast returned to under the regime of First Amendment permitting lying by hate-talk media as championed by that group you are unhappy with me telling the truth about, the goddamned ACLU.  

By the very terms set out in the preamble to the Constitution - the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence having been set aside by our slave-holding, financier aristocrat-framers - the American Constitution has now failed catastrophically in the Supreme Court aided return of Trump, this time as the dictator he promised he would be.   The Republican partisanship, the servicing of the billionaires who put them on the Court matter to the corrupt Roberts six more than anything about even an effective or mildly beneficial government.  The diseased Clarence Thomas and Alito are interesting cases in pathology but it's the genteel Virginia white supremacy of Roberts that has interested me most right now.  I think in his articulate and somewhat hesitant support of the most blatant of corruption, his desire to present an attractive fascade even in the face of the crudeness of the rest of his coalition of Republican-fascists on the court might give us some insight into how those corruptions baked into the Constitution by the framers, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Ellsworth, etc. were shit presented in the form of an heroic monument.   

I've also become more interested in something I read from Louis Boudin in his discussion of the problem having a written Constitution presents.  He discussed the proud legal erudition of the early "justice" Joseph Story, one of the most learned legal scholars in the history of the Court but one who was wedded to the long history of the English law in the way that the least learned of today's corrupt Court, Alito cited in the government takeover of Women's reproductive systems.  Boudin pointed out that the very provisions of early English law that Story cited to support his American Constitutional decisions had, by the time he cited them, already been discarded in England through the courts and government addressing the defects in those earlier legal holdings.   He said that the flexibility that the unwritten British Constitution allowed was foreign to the legal system under the written Constitution and so a learned "justice" could remain totally clueless as to what was wrong with what they ruled.   In the case of Storey, it lead a putative opponent of slavery to write what was, before Dred Scott, the most infamous pro-slavery, anti-egalitarian and most blatantly unjust rulings of that already blatantly unjust Court in its history, the Prigg decision.   

The reverence we are taught and rotely give to the Constitution, the Bill of Right, the Supreme Court are misplaced and not based on an honest, accurate and informed assessment of their real existence in reality instead of hagiographic lying.   The fact is that slavery, genocide, land theft, the theft of labor, the turning of the bodies of slaves and Women into chattels of white men and the bodies of workers into the chattels of rich white men (Goresuch on companies freezing their employees to death as a term of employment proves that's still ongoing) all of that has existed under the rule of law under the U.S. Constitution.   The corruption of our politics by money and by media lying is permitted under the U.S. Constitution and the idoloized First Amendment is the vehicle under which that corruption is maintained even in the face of bi-partisan attempts to clean up our elections.   The corruption of Trump II, blatantly bought by billionaires and now running the United States government into the ground on behalf of the billionaires who bought it is a direct product of "free speech-press" as it is laid out in the First Amendment as that has been made to mean by Supreme Courts for the past sixty one years.  

You have to be a total idiot to not realize that something is wrong here and that that is what is wrong.  We are required by our civic superstitions to pretend nothing is wrong and what we can see right before our eyes is not happening.  Such is the "civic religion" to use Sandra Day O'Connor's putrid phrase, it would seem to be dependent on the lies it permitted and now promotes.

* Which would lead to a discussion of the Electoral College and other slave-power enhancements baked into our corrupt Constitution.

The New Irony As White Ersatz Competence

THE WHITE WOMAN without any qualifications other than being a MAGA blonde with no morals, Karoline Leavitt, accusing People of Color and, wait, WOMEN hired or promoted under DEI of being incompetent.   Doing that during the first two pressers in which she demonstrated SHE IS NOT ONLY THE MOST INCOMPETENT BUT THE STUPIDEST PERSON TO EVER ACT AS A PRESIDENTIAL SPOKESMAN causing disasters for both the economy and the Trump regime. 

Before DEI and before that, before affirmative action, that job would have been done by a white man.   But, then, Leavitt's soulless sister, Laura Ingraham has been doing the same thing at FOX Lies too.

In the media, in politics, stupid blonde white women are probably the foremost beneficiaries of diversity hiring over the last half a century.   

And as ironic is J.D. Vance, soulless liar and barely crypto-fascist "trad catho-fascist" aspiration convert* to Catholicism totally distorting the Gospel as he accuses Rory Stewart, a Brit Tory who at least knows Scripture of having a IQ of 110 while thinking he has one of 130.   I'd start by saying any college grad who believes that IQ is a real thing identifies himself as a superstitious idiot but doing so to lie about the Gospel as you present yourself as a Catholic convert proves you probably weren't listening while you pretended to take the classes they require before being accepted into the Church.   But, then again, there are lots of JPII and Benedict XVI holdovers in the US hierarchy who probably would agree with the fascist even as they know better.  

* I think there was a movement among Republican-fascists to convert to Catholicism for political purposes.  With some of them, such as Gingrich it was likely an Opus Dei project.   Only the priest who converted a slew of them . . . well,

On Monday, the global Catholic group Opus Dei acknowledged that in 2005 it had paid $977,000 to settle sexual misconduct allegations against a prominent priest, Rev. C. John McCloskey. McCloskey, who provided spiritual direction at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C, was "the closest thing to a celebrity the Catholic Church had in the region," The Washington Post reports, and was widely known as the priest who converted Newt Gingrich, Larry Kudrow, Sam Brownback, and other prominent conservatives to Catholicism.

With the list of such Republican-fascist converts being what it is,  I suspect it had a lot more to do with aspirations of power and grift than it was the Gospel and Epistles.   The right-wing "trad-cath" which is largely a show-biz-billionaire financed cult has a curious number of sex criminals among them.   I wouldn't bet on several of them being faithful to their marriage vows or, among the clerics, vows of chastity. 

White Male FOX Weekend Host Affirmative Action

and Trump white-supremacist-nepotism hiring has everything to do with the air disaster over Washington.  Keith Olbermann has the details. 

 

What Trump,  the stupidest white man to have ever been president, stupider than Taft, Pierce, Buchanan, etc. reflexively blames on hiring Women and People of Color turns out to be likely attributable to the incompetence of those making decisions in his regime.   From Trump's owner, the racist, misogynist Elon Musk and his grotesquely irresponsible and stupid schemes to empty out competence from public service to the FOX weekend host he and his stooges in the Senate put in charge of Transportation to the husband of one of said weekend hosts FOX colleagues, etc.  if we can already know of one thing, their fingerprints are all over it.   Musk's desire to destroy the Federal Aviation Administration which impinged on his penis rocket hobby might be the ultimate reason for why it happened as it did.

But don't count on the racist Washington Press Whores to get to the bottom of it or the billionaire owners of the media to allow them to report on it if someone drops it in their laps.  

White Male Right Wingers

ALWAYS BLAME PEOPLE OF COLOR AND WOMEN FOR EVERYTHING that goes wrong under them in power.    Just like the Nazis always blamed Jews and members of other minorities for everything that went wrong, just like Stalin and Mao and all other despots blame others without power or even presence for the consequences of what they do.

Trump and, we can depend on the white, male, right-wingers of the media will blame "DEI" for an air accident that happened a week after Trump claimed to have ended DEI in the relevant agencies ON THE WHITE HOUSE WEBSITE because that's what they do, both because they are racists and sexists and because their base is, at base motivated by their racism and sexism.  DONALD TRUMP GOT INTO THE PRESIDENCY BECAUSE OF THE RAMPANT RACISM OF THEIR BASE AND THE MEDIA BOTH IN 2016 AND 2024, RACISM AND SEXISM WORK FOR THEM.  "DEI" is to Republican-fascism what "Jews" were to their model, the Nazis. 

They can be defeated only a strong coalition of People of Color who favor equlality, Women who favor equality, LGBTQ+ who favor equality and, yes, straight, white males who favor equality.   And if there is something we know about how all of the above vote as groups, not all of any one of those groups favors equality,  the delusion that, somehow, you will be exempt from the fascists' discrimination, recrimination, criminalization and violence effects an important minority of even those groups.  And we know that the mass media, the media addled, the entertainment addled are especially susceptible to that delusion.   One thing we have to do is keep yelling as loudly as we can what is really going on in hopes of shaking some of them awake. 

Not Two Weeks In Office And Trump Is Drooling Out "Condom Bombs"

Trump's combination of Adderall and senile dementia mixed with his congenital rich, white, boy stupidity makes it more necessary every day that he be removed from office and the cowardly Republicans in the Senate have made that impossible due to their installation of a cabinet of corrupt incompetents who know their retaining their jobs depends on the senile Trump being president.  

The crisis is coming on fast and strong and depending on the courts driving back the criminal insanity of Trump isn't going to be dependable even in the short term.  Truth is, the crisis is already full blown, like the start of a massive explosion it just hasn't all happened yet.  

Republicans and the media have brought us to this.  We could be continuing the extreme competence of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris but instead they have put the country in the hands of a senile baby-man.   Billionaires have brought us to this.  They need to be eliminated through leveling, they are the most dangerous class in the world.

Listening to Little Bobby In Front Of The Senate Committee

 I CAN'T RECALL a more slimy, dishonest piece of crap testifying for such a major job and I've listened to virtually all of the Republican-fascist testiliars for Supreme Court seats,  many of those in previous Republican-fascist and Republican administration who were plenty slimy, dishonest and shitty. 

His refusal to answer Senator Warren's questions about him personally profiting from the scummy lawsuits his law firm has brought and will bring against vaccine manufacturers and others, pretending that she was asking him to not bring law suits even as she pointed out, repeatedly that that wasn't her question constitutes perjury.  

I was never all that far gone on the Kennedy mystique even as I admitted that, generally,  Edward Kennedy recovered from his slimy past and became a generally good Senator.   Caroline Kennedy gave an unprecedentedly scathing assessment of her cousin, calling him a predator and someone who has led many, his own close relations and People he has influenced through his for-profit anti-vaxxer hypocrisy, to their deaths and the deaths of their children.  

His confirmation will probably go through, Republican-fascists put Hegeth through they'll put anyone through, and it will be a milestone in the descent of this country into the most depraved of corruption.  They've never given a shit for the health of the American People only he profits of the corporations.   And now we know Little Bobby Kennedy is all in on the same sort of thing.  He is a good example of the worst of the play-lefty left, which is never far from self-interested depravity especially as practiced by millionaires, billionaires and their slimy heirs.  It's a rare one who won't turn on a dime like he does as soon as he sniffs his interest goes in another direction.   He's the kind of person who makes me hope I'm wrong about hell because he deserves to burn in it.

As The Republican With The Neo-Nazi Handle Rages

 Right, unlike your NEW ground of calling Republicans Nazis and insisting any criticism against the Dems is racist/sexist/fascist/homophobic, etc.

Really, I'd have thought you'd realize by now that I read a bit of history now and again.  Hell, a lot of that I remember reading as current news.

It's not new and it started well before Trump's owner, Elon made his two Nazi salutes during the Trump II inauguration.*  But I won't go all that far back.   Here's what the Republican friendly "The Hill" said last spring.

Former President Trump has once again stoked outrage for his flirtation with Nazi rhetoric, this time with a video posted to his Truth Social account that used the phrase “unified Reich.”

The video drew swift condemnation, including from the Biden campaign, which spent the day on the attack and noted it was just the latest instance of Trump using or promoting language often associated with Nazi Germany or World War II dictators.

Here's what the cowardly, FOX lite, Trump enabling CNN said: 

Donald Trump dabbles in Nazi allusions too often for it to be a coincidence.

The latest example is a video posted on the ex-president’s social media account that features a fake headline implying the US could become a “unified Reich” if he wins a second term in November. The video replicates what appears to be World War I-era newspapers. But the term “Reich,” which means a kind of empire, is also synonymous with the later Third Reich of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign insisted the sharing of the third-party video on Monday was the work of a staffer and not Trump, who was in court. It was eventually taken down hours later on Tuesday.  

Here's what they said on a previous occasion when Trump was talking to a "right leaning "news" organization:

 Former President Donald Trump said in a recent interview that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” using language that is often employed by White supremacists and nativists in comments that have drawn rebuke from one prominent civil rights group.

“Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country,” Trump told the right-leaning news site The National Pulse in a video interview published last week. “It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”

Trump’s comments, which gained traction online this week, drew condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leader called the remarks “racist, xenophobic and despicable.”

“Insinuating that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ echoes nativist talking points and has the potential to cause real danger and violence. We have seen this kind of toxic rhetoric inspire real-world violence before in places like Pittsburgh and El Paso. It should have no place in our politics, period,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said. 

You'll note that even the goddamned ADL hack, a previous Obama appointee couldn't ignore the Nazi language of Trump, the reference to the Pittsburgh Synagogue attack and the El Paso shooting by another neo-Nazi makes it clear he and those who quoted him recognized Trump's neo-Nazi rhetoric for what it is.   And that's just Trump, someone whose first wife said his bedtime reading was of a book of Hitler speeches some rich asshole figured should feed into his diseased mind. 

And that's just Trump,  Republicans, such as yourself, are overtly Nazi adjacent as American white supremacists have since the rise of Nazism.  It was largely Republican businessmen and anti-New Dealers who promoted "doing business with Hitler." Those ties go all the way back to the beginning even as Hitler cited American white supremacy as one of his inspirations.   The white supremacy that Republicans took to their heart in the Goldwater-Nixon "Southern Strategy" is our own and far more enduring and influential form of it and you, Herr neo-Nazi name, couldn't be a more representative specimen of it if you put on the brown shirt and arm band.  

It's the Republicans who were anti-Nazis who need an explanation, not the ones who are all in on it, now.  Even the Goldwater era survivors are largely appalled at what their party has wrought.  Those who weren't all-in on it from 1964 onward.

America's white suprmacists are, by and large, OK with Trump's and Musk's and your neo-Nazism, CNN right now is,  as I've pointed out last week, even the ADL is OK with it because things are a lot worse than they wanted to believe they were last spring and they're cowards.   The billionaire tech-bros are all in on it, though Trump's idiocy will probably get them to turn on him because he's going to soon cost them a lot more than they hoped he'd hand over to them for the bribes they're giving him and his crime family.  Vance's owner,  Peter Theil isn' going to be less of a danger than Elon, once they've pushed the senile, fat old neo-Nazi aside, though he's probably less likely to do Nazi salutes on ketamine.

*  Here's just a bit of what I was aware of as far back as the late 1960s

In the nostalgic memory of some liberals, William F. Buckley is fondly recalled as an avatar of a more cerebral and genteel conservatism, one that rejected extremism. In this misty-eyed view of the past, Buckley was the type of conservative liberals could get along with, open to debate and willing to denounce extremist cranks like Robert Welch, founder of the conspiracy-obsessed John Birch Society.

Walsh counters this sentimental myth by noting that

 "the relationship between the far right and the “respectable” conservatives was far more intertwined than Buckley would later suggest. Not only were Welch and Buckley once friends—Buckley had approached Welch in 1955 for seed funding for the magazine that would become National Review—but many of the men in Buckley’s orbit blurred the boundaries between the respectable and radical right…. The first book review editor for National Review, Revilo Oliver, was a professor of classics at the University of Illinois who believed that communists and Jews were behind the civil rights movement and that the ultimate goal was the genocide of white people. Oliver would eventually become a major figure in the American neo-Nazi movement."

Walsh’s concept of a “right-wing popular front” is extremely clarifying. We can see how this popular front functioned in popularizing Holocaust denial. This subject is described in a superbly researched article, “The Pre-History of American Holocaust Denial,” by John P. Jackson Jr., which appeared in American Jewish History in 2021. Jackson, who teaches at James Madison College at Michigan State University, documents that “Holocaust denial, far from being the sole province of the extreme antisemitic right, was often embraced by the mainstream right wing of American politics.”

There's only one motivation for Holocaust denial, it's because you like Nazism or are at least OK with it and that stuff has been present in the mainstream of the American right before the Holocaust happened and, so, the Republican Party since at least the 1930s.   I remember the news coverage of the 1964 Republican Convention, the one where those who left the Democratic Party after the adoption of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts let their freak-flags fly for the first time,  the acts which the Roberts and, before him, Rehnquist Courts were overturning even as Republicans in the Congress had voted to reconfirm them, including that head-case Clarence Thomas.  It's all the same thing as those who had to fight against the Klan in the 1920s knew.  You are part of our indigenous equivalent of Italian fascism and German Nazism, which is why you're OK with it.

Atheist Hate Mail

OR IS IT "DEIST" hate mail?

The YOUNG Thomas Jefferson was sufficiently bothered by there being no naturalistic formulation from which he could assert the self-evident truth of rights that inhered to "all men" so he appealed to the late 18th century "enlightenment" idea of "nature and nature's god"  because he had no rational alternative.   If he had appealed to God, the God of Moses, Jesus, he would have had to really take the equal endowment of rights and he could not have done that and pretended that slavery, genocide and land theft that his wealth, the wealth of his fellow slave-holders and the financiers who would be voting on his Declaration of Independence rested were compatible with his declaration.   

All human inventions, including constitutions and governments and everything else, including the products of science are in some way deficient, all of them are in some way bound to fail.  Many of those deficiencies are a product of the impossibility of human beings controlling all parts of any problem or project, which is why science is not the exact view of the physical world that the ubiquitous common superstition that originated in the 17th, 18th and 19th century "enlightenment" asserted it was.  It was one of the great discoveries of early 20th century science that science cannot ever be an exact description of even one electron, as I am still smug about forcing an especially arrogant physicist to admit about fifteen years back. 

Other deficiencies in human inventions and creations aren't a product of unintentional omissions, they are a product of generally unadmitted human intention based on baser motives.  The defects in our Constitution flow from the moral and intellectual dishonesty and crookedness that was on display at the original Constitutional Convention, perhaps most evident in the repeated and successful blackmail by the slave-power, especially the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina as can be seen in the arguments made in favor of accepting that blackmail by Northern delegates such as Alexander Hamilton* and Oliver Ellsworth made to their fellow Northern aristocrats. 

In that short description of American history I gave this morning, showing how, over and over again through slavery, genocide, the Civil War, the replacement of de jure slavery with the de facto slavery of Jim Crow, the grinding economic inequality against working People and the destitute, the Great Depression, the ongoing reimposition of white supremacy by the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, etc. the Constitution has proven its deficiencies and dangers.  Most if not all of those deficiencies and dangers are based on the various blackmails made at the Constitutional Convention and accepted on the kinds of bases that Hamilton and Ellsworth argued for them AND ALL OF THOSE APPEALED TO THE SELF-INTEREST OF THE WEALTHIEST MEN IN AMERICA.   They weren't based on equality or the Golden Rule.   Until we face that those corruptions are baked in to our governing document and the dishonest lies made up by Constitutional scholars, lawyers, judges and "justices" and bought by us all despite the clear lessons of leaving those corruptions in the Constitution those corruptions will bite us again and again.   

The imaginary god of the 18th century deists is clearly morally inferior to the God of Moses and Jesus.  And, unlike God, it's stupid as well.  We've tried the god of the deists, the naturalistic claim that allowing the wealthy and the poor the kind of liberty and law that would make it illegal for billionaires and the destitute to sleep under bridges and the rest of it and it's gotten us the fruit of that kind of laissez-faire liberty,  Trump.   Pretending that materialism, atheism, scientism is going to produce more than that is, I hold, an idea that has failed in the failure of "liberal democracy" as that started in that 18th century Constitution and was copied by others.   Though some 20th century constitutions have learned a bit from our bad example, they have their own problems. 

*  Here, from a post I did about eight years ago:

But the part of that piece that inspired me to go back to what I would say has been the most important book I've read all year, so far, and revisit my idea of going over large parts of it to debunk the mythology of the "founding fathers" and the brain cancer of "originalism" or "Constitutionalism" or whatever that is certainly more to blame for Republican fascism than The New Testament.  The book is an old one, first published in 1844*,  The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact:  or, Extracts from the Madison papers, etc. selected by Wendell Phillips.  I would recommend that Charles Pierce read the words of Madison as a balance to what sounds like a hagiographic biography of James Madison by Noah Feldman.  I haven't read Feldman's book, though I have to say that what I've read from him in the past wouldn't lead me to suspect it is anything like a rigorously objective reading of the primary record.  Reading his own words as published by Phillips, not to mention the other "founding fathers" in the book, I don't see how anyone could not be skeptical of anything he had to say which would be productive of egalitarian democracy.  The sordid materialism of the founders, discussing not only slaves but free working people as chattels and in terms of useful productivity is truly disgusting.  I hope, this week, to go farther into the discussion starting with the section impeaching the Northerner, the "abolitionist" Alexander Hamilton on the basis of his part in promoting the original corrupt bargain in our politics, the selling out by even such supposed abolitionists as him to the slave power on the basis of advantage to the commercial class in the Northern states.   This extract, alone, shows how Hamilton's legend is pretty much a fiction.

Article 1, Sect. 2, provides --- "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed,  three fifths of all other persons,"

Here, as in the clause we have already examined, veiled beneath a form of words as deceitful as it is unmeaning. in a truly democratic government, is a provision for the safety, perpetuity and augmentation of the slaveholding power  a provision scarcely less atrocious than that which related to the African slave trade, and almost as afflictive in its operation,  a provision still in force, with no possibility of its alteration, so long as a majority of the slave States choose to maintain their slave system  a provision which, at the present time, enables the South to have twenty-five additional representatives in Congress on the score of property, while the North is not allowed to have one,  a provision which concedes to the oppressed three fifths of the political power which is granted to all others, and then puts this power into the hands of their oppressors, to be wielded by them for the more perfect security of their tyrannous authority, and the complete subjugation of the non-slaveholding States. 

Referring to this atrocious bargain, Alexander Hamilton remarked in the New York Convention  

" The first thing objected to, is that clause which allows a representation for three  fifths of the negros.  Much has been said of the impropriety of representing men who have no will of their own. Whether this be reasoning or declamation  (!) I will not presume to say. It is the unfortunate situation of the Southern States to have a great part of their population, as well as property in blacks. The regulation complained of was one result of the spirit of accommodation which governed the Convention ; and without this indulgence, NO UNION COULD POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN FORMED. But. sir, considering some peculiar advantages which we derive from them, it is entirely JUST that they should be gratified. The Southern States posses certain staples  --tobacco, rice, indigo, &c., –  which must be capital objects in treaties of commerce with foreign nations ; and the advantage which they necessarily procure in these treaties will be felt throughout all the States." 

If such was the patriotism, such the love of liberty, such the morality of Alexander Hamilton, what can be said of  the character of those who were far less conspicuous than himself in securing American independence, and in framing  the American Constitution? 

So, fuck all with abolition, there was indigo and tobacco to trade.   Which anyone who wants to groove on and boogie to "Hamilton" might want to consider before they buy the Broadway tripe as accurate history.   I, somehow, doubt it's going to keep Rosie O'Donnell from buying her 32nd ticket to the thing   It's got about the same intellectual status as Star Wars, so why not?

Update:  In discussing the corrupt and infamous 3/5ths provision which counted slaves by that fraction in giving the slave-states Congressional representation AND IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE,  it shouldn't ever be forgotten that one of the defects of the Emancipation after Reconstruction was ended was that, when the slave-holders regained power and prevented freed Black People from voting, they got the entire 5/5ths of representation and Electoral College power on exactly the same basis that they had it during legal slavery at 3/5ths.   They benefited by two-fifths on the basis of Jim Crow.

The Roberts Court in overturning the Voting Rights Act, in allowing the gerrymandering of districts has revived that increased white supremacist power in Congress and in the Electoral College and, so empowered racist white supremacists across the country.   John Roberts is a genteel Virginia white supremacist as are the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Supreme Court, including the mentally ill Clarence Thomas.  And the original defects of the 18th century Constitution are in full and enhanced effect, right now.

As Entertaining As It Would Temporariy Be

to just keep posting off of the neo-Nazi who is going all OC over what I post, he's going over too much old ground.   Like "neo-classicism," "neo-romanticism" and most other brands of neo prove, nothing gets old faster than the neo.

That doesn't mean it's not necessary to keep on with what their gods like Elon and Trump are up to, just that we can't allow them to set agendas.  They are liars and cowards and if there's something the right wing media, FOX, CNN, the networks and bots and now the major dailies like the NYT and WaPo practice, when what you say is unattached to reality, you can just keep lying up anything.  I haven't gone into the role "opinion journalism" has played in our descent into fascism in a while, have I?

Reality is what's real, it's what's important.  The Trump crash is happening a bit faster than I anticipated and the most mentally deficient president in our history isn't going to learn what tariffs are and who pays them.  He'll NEVER, EVER admit that he didn't know what he was talking about, like any spoiled rich asshole baby man like himself, he'll insist that he was right and everyone else is wrong.  You know, like Bruno Ganz acted out  when he was told Steiner's attack wasn't going to happen.   Republicans and the 30 or so percent of Americans who voted for Trump have put the big, fat, stupid despot into power for the next four years and they are going to crash everything like when they put Coolidge and Hover in office.   I hope and pray there is real and deep Constitutional change this time when the country turns to democrats, perhaps Democrats to save them, yet again.   Only hopes and prayers aren't enough.  We tried to save democracy with keeping the Constitution after the Civil War and slavery was abolished in its de jure form, after the Great Depression, after Jim Crow was temporarily overturned and it has never worked.  We need to dump the presidential system with fixed terms and we need, more than anything to level billionaires out of existence.   We need a whole new thing and this time it has to be based on equality, not libertarian notions of liberty.  "Nature an nature's god" doesn't automatically right things if you just let them sort themselves out.  You need rational judgement to carry out moral imperatives and equality is one of those, do to others what you would have them do to you needs to be the basis of the law, the economy and society.

Reading The Denials Of Elon's International Pro-Nazi Acts And Talk

it's not my fault but from now on I see driving a Tesla as a pro-Nazi act.  Driving one is making a statement whether or not that's the intention, it would be like someone driving a KdF here in 1942.   

Elon should be deported, not supported. 

Support the Lincoln penny, it's beyond symbolic that Musk wants to dump the Emancipator.

As Trump And His Neo-Nazi Brain Musk Forfeit The United States Leadership

of not only the free world but torches our economic relationships around the world,  you should add up the enormous cost of that as the cost of American racism.   

When I said that the American racism, white supremacy that has thwarted American democracy is probably the greatest unproductive cost to the American common good, the common wealth, that was exactly the kind of things I meant.  

The Chinese government simply by a show of respect to the countries Trump and the white supremacists are insulting and flaming on social-disease media is overtaking the United States, as Trump overturns all of the good will that Joe Biden cultivated.  

Racists are costing America everything and no one is pointing that out.   Remember that as American racists whine about the cost of coffee.  Though they'll probably be duped into blaming Biden for it.   They're America's idiots, after all.

As I Have Proclaimed On My Masthead

and unlike the neo-Nazi who is trolling me whose latest screed which I have not posted has a list of imaginary lefty billionaires* he claims I've never slammed, I would destroy all billionaires by leveling their amassed wealth out of existence, reducing them to equality with the least among us.  AND REMOVING WHAT IS INEVITABLY AND CLEARLY A DANGER TO EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY, THE ONLY LEGITIMATE FORM OF GOVERNMENT THERE IS.

When I say I "Level Billionaires Out Of Existence"  I MEAN EVERY ONE OF THEM. 

As well as liars, right wingers are cowards because they kick down at those without the power to rob them and keep them under water instead of those on top who do that to them.

Conservatives are either those deluded into believing they can become the rich or the many, many millions who are cowards who are afraid to face the reality that their real enemies are rich and so powerful  Their racism makes them stupid, their cowardice keeps them struggling.   They're really just not as good as they love to believe they are.  I've never held back in criticizing the left but at least they have some notion as to where the real source of oppression lies. 

*  Here, from his latest lies about where I stand:

And had no problem with these billionaires (and many more) getting involved in politics:

Arthur Blank (Atlanta Falcons)
Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg, former New York mayor)
Neil Bluhm (Real estate)
John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins)
Amy Goldman Fowler (New York real estate)
Avram Glazer (Tampa Bay Buccaneers)
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)
Robert Hale, Jr. (Granite Telecommunications)
Amos Hostetter, Jr. (Cable)
Bruce Karsh (Oaktree Capital Management)
Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures)
Seth Klarman (Baupost)
Henry Laufer (Renaissance Technologies)
Stephen Mandel, Jr. (Lone Pine Capital)
George Marcus (Marcus & Millichap)
Michael Moritz (Sequoia Capital)
Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook)
John Pritzker (Hyatt hotels)
George Soros

Is it me or does that list not seem to be rather top heavy with people with Jewish sounding names?    Anyone who wants to see how unimpressed I am with the billionaire would-be liberals,  all they have to do is look at my archive.  Here's a representative sample of my thinking on billionaires during Trump I:

Friday, July 13, 2018

Abolishing Billionaires And Multi Millionaires Would Do More To Protect Democracy Than Just About Anything Else
 

Yesterday's outrageous show trial by two House committees under the control of thugs proves that government by the hirelings of even American billionaires will end up, inevitably, turning the Congress into a den of traitors.  Trey Gowdy,  Bob Goodlatte, the mentally defective Louis Gohmert, and the rest of the Republican thugs prove that while Trump is a fully owned asset of the Putin crime family, the Republicans in Congress are owned by Putin's American associates.

I wonder if even with this display of  Putin collusion by the Republican caucus in the House will lead people to admit that our domestic billionaires have no sense of patriotic duty or a sense of obligation to the United States, the People of the United States, our allies who have shed their blood on our behalf, etc.   It's obvious that the billionaires who put a lot of these thugs in office,  Murdoch, the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelson own the likes of Gowdy, Goodlatte  and Gohmert, not to mention Paul Ryan and Jim Jordan, when you see them in action you are seeing the will of those billionaires being put into effect by the government of the United States.

That American billionaires and those like Rupert Murdoch who came here to corrupt the United States happen to have legal citizenship doesn't make them any less dangerous to American democracy or even American security than billionaires who speak Russian or are part of the Chinese mafia establishment.  While a few, like Sheldon Adelson makes some kind of pose of dedication to Israel (from what I understand, lots of Israeli's don't welcome his malign influence there) or perhaps his fiefdom in whore houses and gambling dens in Macau and other Pacific venues, none of the billionaire patrons of the Republican Party seems to have any feeling of loyalty or obligation to American democracy.

As I've been mentioning over the past few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that falling for the pretense that the great struggle for democracy has been against anti-democratic ideologies was a smoke screen.   All of them, the Nazis, the fascists, the communists were first, foremost and last gangsters who exercised power to steal stuff and land and enslave people.   That is how the Soviet Union turned seamlessly into what developed into the Putin crime family, the Maoist dictatorship into China's Victorian capitalism on steroids as communism, all in the hands of a class of billionaires largely formerly members of the communist establishment.

The existence of billionaires is the greatest danger to democracy, certainly the greatest danger to egalitarian democracy.   While I'm sure you could identify billionaires who haven't been, some who seem to favor democracy over oligarchy, they are more than made up for by those who aren't only ready to sell us out to their fellow billionaires in other countries, they already own the Congress and the Executive and are about to have bought themselves the Supreme Court, too.

And I'm not that impressed with the record of the most allegedly pro-democracy of billionaires.   George Soros has been making all kinds of noise and spending money for "civil society" for a long time and look at the results, no time since 1945 has there been a greater danger from fascism in Europe, North America and elsewhere.   The Hungarian fascist leader Viktor Orban, who is kicking Soros' Open Society group out of Hungary was someone Soros nurtured, financing his study in Britain.   I would like to know exactly how "Open Society" has worked to counter the promotion of fascism by the Putin and other billionaire organized criminals because I'd like to know just where it's alleged to have worked.  I don't have any confidence in his judgement and as he doesn't seem to be changing direction, I'm not confident in his actual intentions.

With the explosion in the number of billionaires, with the hoarding of such a huge majority of the wealth of the world into a tiny percentage of the world's population has come a decline in the material well-being of people which softens up people for the appeals of fascism and neo-Nazism, communists having pretty much given up any pretense of socialism in favor of ultra-capitalism, which turns out to also be a mafia style of economics.   I don't think anything but squeezing the hoarded wealth out of billionaires will do it.   Which won't be easy, among other things the civil liberties industry which has so many liberals hoodwinked will fight against economic justice and equality under law on the basis of "freedom".   As I've also pointed out many times, they have had a large role in producing this catastrophe in the United States. 

Whenever you hear someone say "Soros" as the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Republican-fascists do (if you'll excuse the tautologies) what they really mean is "Jews" in exactly the same way proto-Nazis, Nazis and previous neo-Nazis have said it AND THAT'S PRETTY MUCH THE ENTIRE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST PARTY AND THE MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN MEDIA, THE "FREE PRESS" THESE DAYS.  As for Jewish billionaires who support that, like the widow of the pimp of Macau do, they are Nazi dupes.   The irony is that it's their Zionism that has led them into league with those who want to murder them.   But that's a larger and more interesting discussion.   Wealth tends to make those who pursue it or inherit it or marry into it stupid.  Any billionaire is rightly suspected of mental illness, their obsessive wealth craving is an irrational obsession.  Egalitarian democrats should cure them of it, definitively and permanently.

The United States Is Ruled By A Mentally Defective Nut Case Loon

and our media is OK with that.  

This is what the entire American establishment, legal, judicial, political, media, financial, etc. has brought us to. 

America has forfeited the leadership of the free world under Biden to Donald Wack-a-Doodles with the absolute power the Republican-fascists in the Congress and on the Supreme Court have given him. 

We can't avoid it, the Republican-fascist Party is incompatible with American governance.   Europe, other democracies have to face the fact that America has degenerated to the point to where they can't depend on it for leadership and they will have to do the best they can without it.   And it's our establishment, from the media right up to the Roberts Court and the American billionaires who run them that has done that with eyes wide-open.

As The White Supremacist Churns - Hillary Clinton Is The Most Massively Exonerated Human Being In History

Republican-fascist thugs in the 1990s, the 2000's, the 2010s and now in the 2020s have been claiming that Hillary Clinton was corrupt and a criminal, they have unleashed Congressional committees, their staffs, special prosecutors (including the massively money spending Starr and others), the FBI, countless other governmental agencies and, certainly, private investigators to build a case against her,  they have had corrupt Republican-fascist Attorneys General trying to nail her AND THEY HAVE COME UP WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ON HER AND NEXT TO NOTHING ON HER HUSBAND.

Lie it or not, you racist, misogynist, HILLARY CLINTON IS THE MOST EXONERATED HUMAN BEING IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS.   

And Donald Trump is a convicted felon and an adjudicated sexual criminal. 

Hate Mail - Racists Are Stupid

or, perhaps, stupider than they would be if they gave up racism.   That's as clear as the American racists who put Trump and Republican-fascists in power AND IT WAS AMERICA'S RACISTS WHO PUT THEM IN POWER.   No amount of disaster within recent lived memory educates them.  I used to expect them to get it when they made a huge mistake:

Nixon, his crimes, his continuation and expansion of the war he lied about having a plan to stop in 1968:

Reagan-Bush I and the economic disaster they created:

Bush II, his and his National Security Director, Condi Rice leaving us vulnerable to the 9-11 attacks, him and his brain, Dick Cheney using the ignorance and racism of the majority of Americans to sell them the even more horrific disaster of their Iraq invasion and war AND YET ANOTHER AND BIGGER ECONOMIC DISASTER (you'd figure that one of those of that size would have educated the Repubican racists, but, no).

Trump I with the economic disaster, the hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million AMERICANS DEAD from his Covid criminal insanity.  But, again, no. 

Racists, from the most ignorant bro-kulcha sub Joe Rogan cultist to the intellectual racists in the Ivies, their law schools, on the Supreme Court are stupid or stupider than they'd be if they gave up their racism but they're too stupid to think their way out of it.  Such stupid people are endemic among the billionaire class, apparently, and especially the ultra-billionaires.  If Elon can achieve that status, it's clear you don't need brains to harness the corruption of our laws and legal system which are kept in place and enhanced by our racist residual slave-power.  

I don't much care what clap trap of academia promoting erudition you can mount in a comment to me, if you can support Trump and Republican-fascism, you may be primarily motivated by your greed - another thing that makes People stupider than they might normally be - but I know it's your racism that is the foundation of it.   You will never forgive Democrats for nominating and electing one Black Man - what gave us Trump instead of a less stupid white-supremacist, Republican-fascist to start with - and you'll certainly not forgive Joe Biden for choosing a massively qualified Black Woman as Vice President and for Democrats for believing that she could, through reason and appeals to moral judgement, overcome the media-promoted racism and sexism that put Trump in power, again, after the debacle of his first regime.  

How stupid your racism makes you is indicated by how stupid your man-god is,  and he's world-class stupid.   Here, you can listen to this piece about how even Brit Conservatives know it and talk about it among themselves. 

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.