Category: Justice and the Courts

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Treason – Trump crosses the line—twice

Treason

Trump crosses the line—twice

June 13th 2019

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Trump said, “I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

An incredulous Stephanopoulos then asked what Trump would do is the country in question was China or Russia. Would he take the information, or call the FBI? Trump blandly replied, “I think maybe you do both. It’s not an interference, they have information – I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI… but when somebody comes up with ‘oppo research’, right, they come up with oppo research, ‘oh let’s call the FBI.’”

The President of the United States just announced that he would be happy to let a hostile foreign power directly interfere with an American election. This despite the fact that he is very strongly suspected of having done exactly that during the 2016 campaign and is in an ever-deepening morass of investigation and scandal as a result.

He’s already been driven to claim executive privilege over documents already made public, ordered people to ignore subpoenas, and even tried to get the Supreme Court to rule that Congress could not investigate him.

It’s already far deeper and darker than Watergate ever was, and he’s learned nothing from it. He just announced to the world that he would do it again, and suborn his own country in order to get dirt on a possible opposition candidate.

We already know that Rudy Guiliani was planning to go to the Ukraine in order to get dirt, not on Joe Biden, but his son Hunter, to use as kompromat against Biden.

It’s obvious this sort of filthy and unpatriotic behavior is his game plan for the upcoming election.

Remarkably, some alleged Americans are already trying to excuse this. One guy on one of the cable yammerfests last night was arguing that proving intent was key to a successful prosecution of Trump, and that all his actions since 2015 didn’t include strong evidence that he maliciously intended to violate the law.

I hope the guy was talking about the conspiracy charges, where intent is key, since conspiracy by its nature usually involves criminal activity that hasn’t happened yet, or cover up actions that might be embarrassing. If he was talking about the crimes that Trump has openly and blatantly committed, then it shows how corrupt and morally dissolute some in the legal profession have become. It would show the chasm between justice for the rich (“Prove he intended to do any harm when he broke the law”) and justice for the poor (“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”).

It came on the heels of something that was, if anything, even viler. His love affair with Kim Jong Un, the vicious despot running North Korea, is well known. I guess it’s part of some addle-pated effort to show that he has tamed Kim, and now that Kim is belled and leashed, they’re best of buddies. It’s not a very convincing performance, a middle-school performance by an alleged grown-up.

Back in 2017, Kim had his half-brother murdered in a Thai airport by two women who sprayed VX compound in his face. It was both grotesque and ludicrous. Two years later, it emerged that Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother, was on his way to meet with a CIA operative, and in fact was secretly reporting to the CIA.

For a President who welcomes interference by a hostile foreign power in US government, Trump was appalled that the US might interfere with North Korea’s government. When a reporter asked him about the reports that Kim Jong Nam was working for the CIA, Trump appeared to be caught flat-footed. “I don’t know, I have not heard about that.”

Then he said, “I saw the information about the CIA with respect to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices.”

Apparently shaken by this horrid example of American perfidy, Trump continued, “I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un. I can’t show you the letter, obviously, but it was very personal, very warm, very nice letter. North Korea, under his leadership, has great potential,”

It’s difficult to gauge if Trump really wants to prevent US espionage against North Korea. He lies about everything, so there’s no particular reason to suppose he’s telling the truth now. But we can’t really know. He’s too random.

But for North Korea, his words provided considerable aid and comfort.

Now, here’s the thing. Back in 1950, when North Korea attacked South Korea, the two halves of the country promptly declared war on each other. The US came in on S. Korea’s side, as the Soviet Union and later China came in on N. Korea’s side. The US involvement was fig-leafed as being a part of a United Nations action. Since the UN Charter forbade the organization from waging war, they called it a “Police Action” instead. The death toll from this “Police Action” both civilian and military, all sides, came to well over two million people. So let’s not be stupid: it was a war. Period.

It ended with a cease-fire armistice in 1953, but there never was a peace treaty. South and North Korea are still at war, and the US, by terms of their own treaty with S. Korea, are at war with N. Korea as well. North Korea is considered an enemy regime.

The Constitution defines treason thusly: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

I’m pretty sure more than two people saw Trump prattle on about his good buddy Kim Jong Un and promise to never let the US conduct intelligence operations against him. Given his feckless disregard for American security and willingness to shaft his own people, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if Trump revealed the identity of the CIA people Kim Jong Nam was reporting to. You know he’s capable of doing such a thing. After all, he sent his thugish lawyer to the Ukraine to dig up dirt on a family member of a opposition candidate, called his own appointee to head the FBI a liar, and grandly announced he would commit the same felonies again in the next election. It’s no outside the realm of possibility.

But Congress can stop this traitor. They can do it right now, by opening formal impeachment hearings and putting the evidence of Trump’s disloyalty and criminality out where Faux News can’t sweep it under their carpet.

But they must act quickly. There was already a serious incident in the Gulf yesterday, two tankers attacked and set ablaze. Iran will certainly be blamed, and it was most likely the US was actually behind the attacks. Oil prices are plunging, and Trump desperately needs a big war in order to distract and exploit the American tendancy to rally round the flag when war breaks out.

Trump is not interested in America, and won’t mind seeing millions of Americans risk their lives so he can avoid prison.

Trump is a traitor. He needs to be tried for treason now.

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Decompensation – Trump is at his most dangerous

May 23rd, 2019

According to Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, decompensation, among other things, is “failure of defense mechanisms resulting in progressive personality disintegration.” Basically, if a person with mental illness is confronted by a reality that shatters the comforting lies with which he has cocooned himself, he shatters, both mentally and emotionally.

Donald Trump appears to be in a state of decompensation and seemingly can no longer sustain the pretense of being a functional person able to interact with others.

Yesterday was remarkable enough. In a pre-planned meltdown (and one apparently vigorously opposed by his aides) he declared that he would not be interacting with Congress on legislative negotiations at all until the investigations of himself were ended. That was astonishing.

He concluded this utter spectacle by declaring grandly, that he was “the most transparent president in history, who doesn’t do cover-ups.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the performance “jaw-dropping” and it’s pretty hard to take issue with that.

By way of example, three presidents before him have faced serious impeachment proceedings: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. All three continued to do their jobs and even on the eve of impeachment votes, continued back-and-forths with Congress regarding major legislation. They had a job to do, and they all had the courage and character to do the job, no matter how bleak their political futures appeared.

He had already declared that investigating him was treasonous, and today he doubled down on that, declaring that James Comey, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe were the traitors he had in mind. The reporter asking him that added, “Sir, the Constitution says treason is punishable by death. You’ve accused your adversaries of treason. Who are you talking about?” Trump didn’t seem to have any problem with the inference that he would want to have those four individuals put to death.

At a rally last night, he declared that William Barr, his lickspittle and contemptible Attorney General, was “looking into” investigating Trump’s political foes.

This is Nazi dictator stuff that is happening here.

Trump’s entire world is collapsing. He is a man who not only has lived a lie, but has been an utter lie since he was about three years old. He loudly proclaimed (and presumably believed) that he was a great businessman and one of the best negotiators on Earth. In the past fortnight, a stunning investigative piece by the New York Times revealed that not only was he a poor businessman, but in terms of money lost, the worst businessman in America over a ten-year span. Despite his efforts to utterly stonewall all investigations, Congress has his bank records from Wells Fargo and TD banks; Rex Tillerson gave hours of secret testimony about his pathetic meetings with Vladimir Putin, and he is losing court case after court case, unable to even use litigation as a delaying tactic.

Imagine the thing in your life that most defines you as a person, and is something your entire self-respect and self-image relies upon. Maybe you know it’s a lie, and maybe you don’t, but suddenly, you are totally and utterly exposed in such a way that the whole world knows about it. This is far worse than dreams about no pants in school, or getting caught downloading porn of 14 year olds. This is something that utterly smashes your entire public persona.

That’s what happened to Trump.

Now, I’m not trying to present him sympathetically. His is a tawdry, sordid, vicious life in which he has coldly and even joyfully hurt and cheated many people. He was utter sociopathic scum before he became president.

He also had Nazi proclivities. During the campaign, people warned that his bedside reading material consisted of one book: “My New Order” by Adolf Hitler. He admitted to this readily enough, but claimed that it was OK because the person who loaned him the book was Jewish. (He wasn’t, and it doesn’t exactly explain why Trump would fixate on a book that, along with many of Hitler’s speeches, provided a step-by-step description of how he attained and consolidated his power.) Even without Trump’s blatantly and viciously anti-Semitic, racist, bullying and dishonest tactics, the fact that he would put in considerable amount of his time studying this particular book is deeply disturbing.

So we have a President who is a sociopath and deeply admires a murderous long-dead dictator, and has a self-evident trait of finding and wanting to kill scapegoats. His actions in the wake of Puerto Rico’s hurricane should have put us all on notice: he doesn’t mind killing people.

Now all the rest of his defenses are crumbling. He is losing court case after court case, and even some Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from Trump. One, a Michigan representative, Justin Amash, called for impeachment hearings, meaning that Trump will want to try and execute him for treason. Pelosi is openly goading him into overreacting to the point where even Congress will have to consider removing him, not through impeachment, but on 25th Amendment grounds. She called on the GOP, his cabinet and his aides to stage an intervention, the way you might with a nephew who just got popped for drunk driving for the third time.

The worst of it is that Trump has toadies in Congress such as McConnell who will do nothing to stop Trump. He has frantically populated the Justice Department and the courts with stooges, and doubtlessly hopes his two appointments to the Supreme Court might shield him. It’s horrifying to realize that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh might do just that; they never were anyone’s idea of independent and impartial jurists, and Trump loves to use the Russian tactic of kompromat; who’s to say what he has on those two? It’s unlikely he would have named either without a file with nasty personal information.

Make no mistake: facing utter personal and professional ruin, Trump is at his most dangerous. He is capable of casually horrific acts; now he has, from his perspective, unlimited reason to employ such tactics.

Brace yourselves, people: the next chapter in this story is going to be very, very ugly, and quite dangerous.

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Aborting America – “Pro Life” shows its pro-death face

May 15th 2019

Imagine if some religious cult sprang up that declared that cancer was God’s way of calling his children home, and thus it was a sin to do anything to treat cancer. Thus anyone trying to eliminate cancer, including the removal of tumors, should be punished, up to 99 years in prison.

If that sounds pretty whack-a-doodle, reflect on the strange things the mainstream religions in America teach. Bible literalists have to believe such utter nonsense as the talking snake story in Genesis, the Ark story, and the sun holding still in the sky for three days. Non-literalists have to accept such oddities as virgin births, miracles, and power of prayer as being a real thing.

So having a group rising up and declaring that blastomas are an expression of God’s love and must be protected at all costs really isn’t all that far fetched.

That there is no biblical basis for such a belief is pretty irrelevant. After all, ‘God’s Will’ has been used to justify most wars, even against other Christian enemies, an unending bitter strife over mostly worthless land in the middle east, slaughter of indigenous tribes in Africa and the Americas, and even the massacre of cats in Europe (led to the plagues, that, as the rodent population exploded). Jewish and Islamic countries have (and still have) similar atrocities stemming from similar beliefs. Indeed, many of the worst elements of religious savagery in all three main faiths stem from the same source—the Mosaic Law of what Christians call the Old Testament.

But religious-based lunacy can exist independently of weird texts translated hundreds of different times that were originally written by people who didn’t know the Earth was a globe or that lobsters weren’t fish.

This leads to the abortion movement. In America, the Catholic Church always opposed abortion on grounds similar to my hypothetical pro-cancer faith; they thought all human seed was sacred, an expression of divine love, and thus it was a sin to waste seed. At various times and in various places, the church punished and even executed men for the ‘sin’ of masturbation.

When fundamentalists glommed on to the notion of stopping abortion in the wake of Roe v Wade, they brought their own brand of fundamentalist lunacy to the table. Every zygote possessed a soul and was an expression of God’s will.

Years ago, I came across a ‘public service announcement’ put out by some of the religious lunatics that featured an animation of a full-term baby being aborted, and as she (curly blonde hair and pink bow in her hair, the way most female babies are born) is dying, she’s screaming “Mommy! Mommy! Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you LOVE me?”

I laughed at the sheer absurdity of that cartoon, but here we are, 30 years later, and millions of Americans believe a truly savage blood libel spread by Republicans and Fox News that babies—real, actual babies—are being aborted after they are born because that is what Roe v Wade demands.

John Oliver had a clip of some intellectual abortion standing in the Alabama Legislature, droning on about “Baby Fetus” and even providing supposed quotes from this etymological absurdity. Two days later, Alabama passed a draconian law banning all abortion and providing life sentences to anyone performing or getting an abortion.

There’s an old saying: “People who can be persuaded to believe absurdities can be led to commit atrocities.”

It’s not even Biblical. The Bible doesn’t mention abortion, although it does condone ripping babies from the wombs of the women of vanquished foes and dashing their brains out against a rock. The New Testament has nothing to say about abortion, even though Nazareth had no shortage of midwifes who had abortifacient herbs and crude tools to physically induce abortion. Further, in many levels of society in that time and place, it wasn’t uncommon for female babies to be drowned or used to break rocks because female children were expensive and of limited use. For some reason, Jesus never did have an opinion on that.

Dressed up as a religious and moral crusade, the anti-abortion movement is neither. It doesn’t really care about “the life of a child,” as witness the fact that few if any of the people running the movement have any provisions whatsoever for the care and feeding of these involuntary children, or helping the mothers in any significant way, or otherwise assuming any responsibility.

It is, instead, a naked authoritarian power grab. It places a large segment of the female population in a precarious role where they can be effectively enslaved, either by pregnancy or the mere fear of pregnancy. If Alabama’s law is allowed to stand, the move will be on to ban birth control of all kinds. In the name of God, of course.

It’s a political movement, as well. The brownshirts of the GOP have long used the religiously insane as a handy bludgeon to enforce their more authoritarian dictates, such as enforced worship of the police and military, and to justify discrimination and segregation.

And if you take a look at the states joining the rush to knock down Roe v. Wade, with the exception of Ohio, all are in southern states with long histories of repressive authoritarians backed by the iron dictates of corrupt pastors.

It’s time to recognize the ‘pro-life’ for what it is: it’s not pro-anything. It’s anti-women, anti-choice, anti-individual, and anti-freedom. It opposes everything America stands for, including the right for every person not to have someone else’s religious dictates imposed upon them. No woman should be enslaved by some politician lying about God’s will. Nobody should have to follow the religious taboos of some church if they don’t want.

They are anti-America, and should be treated, not as voices of some god, but as enemies to American rights and freedoms.

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There was music in the cafés at night – And revolution in the air

May 7th 2019

It’s a bit strange right now, comparing the headlines in the news with the general calm in the population at large. Trump and the Republicans are actively staging a coup against the United States, and seemingly inviting a revolt with their open sneers at the Constitution and rule of law.

But for now, people are just going about their business, outside of the cable stations and general media. Folks watched Game of Thrones the other night, and if they drew any correlations between Cersei and Trump, they didn’t speak of it. John Oliver did discuss what he calls “Stupid Watergate,” but the balance of his show was on the topic of lethal injections.

Some people are watching closely, of course. Even a majority of Americans are watching now. In the cesspools of Faux News, the viewers and readers are being assured that this is a plot against the wildly successful, patriotic and deeply Christian Donald Trump by Democrats seeking revenge for the Clinton impeachment or something. They have succeeded in making their audience so self-isolated that they can tell them anything, no matter how objectively ridiculous it is.

Just to show how insular and divorced from the mainstream this Republican cult really is, a fellow named James McDaniel set up a fake ‘right wing news’ website that featured stories of Hillary Clinton sacrificing children and Barack Obama running a secret coup from an underground bunker in Washington DC. He then promoted the site on actual right wing sites, mostly by forwarding his fake news stories.

In just two weeks, his site received a million unique visits, and hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. He said, “If I wrote about CNN being fake news and connected to ISIS, readers would agree wholeheartedly with my fabricated article. If I wrote about a black liberal or Obama supposedly saying something controversial, the response was unbridled racism and hatred. When I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s new emails that proved she was a child sacrificing maniac, people screamed for her head.”

Alarmed by the type of response he was getting, he posted a message saying everything on the site was fake, and added a disclaimer to every news story. Didn’t help. He wound up parking the page because right wingers kept right on believing the fake news stories.

So it’s not surprising that about 35% of the population has been brainwashed into supporting what amounts to open treason against the United States. But what’s going on with the rest of America?

In light of the Mueller report, in which the redacted version shows such a vast array of criminality and corruption on the part of Trump that over 700 federal prosecutors have signed a document stating that the evidence was so compelling that anyone who was not a sitting president would be facing multiple indictments right now, his popularity has actually improved somewhat, from a -16 on the aggregate polls in late January to a -10 now. Fully 78% of Republican voters believe the Mueller Report cleared Trump of any wrongdoing. Pfft! What do 700 federal prosecutors know, anyway?

Part of this response, ironically, is a tendency of people to ‘rally round the flag’; the thinking, if that’s the word for it, is that our president is under attack, and we must forget our partisan differences and defend the country. If you think that it requires a stunning level of ignorance to achieve that mindset, you are in a minority; relatively few Americans know who William Barr is, or even Mitch McConnell. These vaguely ‘support the President’ sorts take pride in “not paying attention to that political stuff” so all they know, in a dim sort of way, is that Congress and the President are having some sort of tiff, and it’s along party lines. They know who Trump is, but Jerry Nadler is just some Democratic politician they never heard of, so they side with Trump. And they are lacking the intellectual and educational tools needed to understand just how serious Trump’s defiance of the Constitution is, and how grave the consequences for them might be if he should succeed in his drive to become a dictator.

That still leaves over half the voting population of the US unaccounted for. And one of the strangest things about the coverage of all this is the utter lack of attention to what the voting public thinks about all this. Outside of the right wing sewers, media response is all but unanimous and vociferous: rule of law must be upheld, Trump must be held to account. But you can search the web in vain for reports of any outcry amongst the public. The aggregate polling sites ask if people think Mueller ‘cleared’ Trump or not, but not how the feel about what is going on. Activists sites such as MoveOn are rabid about the contempt Trump is showing for America, but not discussing actions outside of the power of the subpoena.

It’s perplexing. In just about any other country, a situation like this would result in massive rallies in every city, and talk of general strikes. Hotheads would be discussing revolution, and broadcasters would be urging calm.

Let me be clear: nobody sane wants a revolution, and I’m talking about rallies, not riots. (I don’t trust the right not to stage riots, either on their own behalf or provoking riots at rallies just for purposes of ratfucking the rest of us). But the country is in a very clear and immediate danger, and if Trump wins this, the only likely outcomes will read like the plotline from Game of Thrones. We can either move peacefully now and help save America from Trump and the Republicans, or face far less palatable options later on.

Why the ongoing silence?

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Mueller to Pissmop – Yes, you are fucked

April 19th 2019

Back on May 17, 2017, Confederate Pixie and then-AG Jeff Sessions told Trump that Rod Rosenstein had just appointed Robert Mueller to be a special prosecutor looking into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump slumped, and said, “Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”

It’s a side of Trump we don’t see very often: the one that is capable of doing an honest and forthright analysis of a situation. Usually all we get from him is demented and hateful gibberish, a trashy and despicable President playing to a trashy and despicable base.

Much has been made of Trump’s reaction. Not in the morally upside down world of the Republicans, where if Obama had said ‘fucked’ they would have impeached him for using cusswords in the White House. However, Republicans normally would think it’s OK for Trump to do so because he’s bravely fighting immoral people who might say “fuck” in the White House. But they’ve been strangely silent for other reasons.

Trump’s reaction is, prima facie, the reaction of a man who knows he is guilty. It’s the kid snapping his hands behind his back as the teacher walks in the room, the husband slapping off the computer screen as the wife walks in, the guy turning his face away as a police cruiser goes by. It’s not an admission of guilt, but it is the reaction of someone who is guilty.

The rest of the report, even Bawdlerized by Barr, makes it amply clear that Trump repeatedly and knowingly obstructed justice. There’s at least a dozen felony actions by Trump detailed in the report.

And yes, Mueller felt the Department of Justice could not indict a sitting president, and that only the House, through the power of impeachment, could do so. He strongly urged the House to do so, since he believes that no man is above the law—or in Trump’s case, in the sewers below the law.

We now know that in an action that is a felony in and of itself, Barr conferred with the Trump administration on what to censor in the report. Barr needs to be indicted and prosecuted for tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice, and die in jail.

But what we’re seeing now is what Trump felt he could get away with the public knowing. He has utter contempt for the resolve of the American people or their ability to stand up to an self-entitled millionaire autocrat. We do not yet know what remains hidden in the report.

Yes, there’s no doubt that some is hidden for legitimate cause; because it may interfere with other ongoing investigations. (Remember how war criminal and traitor Oliver North was able to skate because of Congress’ reckless release of evidence from a grand jury?) And there may be items that could harm national security if made public.

But this is the corrupt, self-centered and morally bankrupt Trump dictating to his loathsome toady of an Attorney-General what should not be allowed into the public eye. There remains stuff the public is entitled to know, and it’s probably the worst stuff of all. Congress must get the full, unredacted report. I’m happy to say the Congressional subpoena has been issued.

While other legal investigations into Trump’s tawdry life continue, the political battle is now joined.

Some Democrats are still saying it’s too early to consider impeachment. One of them is a presidential candidate, Cory Brooker. In a bizarre show of equivocation, he is saying that Congress should not impeach until the evidence is in, apparently unaware that impeachment is the gathering and evaluation of evidence of presidential misconduct.

He eliminated himself from any support from myself with that statement. What is the point in replacing Trump with a man who was unable to stand up against Trump when the time came to do so. What do we gain from replacing Trump with someone who is afraid of Trump?

We’re hearing the usual political arguments against impeachment hearings, of course. “Democrats are cowards and won’t start a fight they can’t win.”

Well, yes, some Democrats are cowards. And some, like Brooker, are just far too fond of political calculation. But if the Democrats aren’t willing to join this battle now that the time has come to begin fighting, then they will not win in 2020, or ever again.

There were politicians in England and France who, even after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, urged against a declaration of war against the dictator because Hitler had a massive military and England and France were too weak to beat him. In fact, that was the case, but the politicians who still urged appeasement are forgotten to history, because because while they were right in terms of the immediate situation, they were so horribly, horribly wrong on the bigger picture.

Dems who argue that impeachment must not happen because Republican will never support it need to realize that we’ve passed the Polish invasion point of the opposition to Trump, and that political headcounting no longer protects.

Republicans can also count heads, and some of them are cowards. They know, first hand, the political calculus of an impeachment, and how it can blow up in their faces. But they also know that this is a whole lot bigger than the man in the White House lying about getting a blow job. Trump is a felon hundreds of times over, and a serious and immediate threat to the continued existence of the United States. To not act is treason.

Even the redacted Mueller report makes it clear that we are at the point where we must impeach. We’re long past any reasonable excuse to let the Trump regime continue.

Yes, Pissmop: You are fucked.

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Gorsuch Nonesuch – He’s our bear to cross

March 30th, 2019

Alleged Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil “Son of Anne” Gorsuch is one of four members of the court who are pretty much indistinguishable from one another. The other three are Clarence “Slappy” Thomas, Samuel “Little Scalia” Alito, and Brett “Hold My Beer” Kavanaugh. They are all members of the Federalist Society, breeding ground for right-wing lice and essentially just the John Birch Society with a makeover and more money. All four are corporatists, authoritarians, and, typically of authoritarians, profess strong religious beliefs.

Of course, authoritarians always stand foursquare for religious supremacy, since there’s nothing like religion to compel obedience from the masses. The entire GOP is hag-ridden with toy despots who love to chant “God is with us” (“Got Mitt Uns”) and disparage the rest of America as socialist atheist Moslem Jews.

Like most of his ilk, Gorsuch regards ‘separation of church and state’ to be a doctrinal error forced upon Americans by a liberal elite.

In the infamous Hobby Lobby case, which ruled employers were free to cheat their employees out of birth control, even when offered at no cost to the employer, Gorsuch said it, “was not, is not, the place of courts of law to question the correctness or the consistency of tenets of religious faith, only to protect the exercise of faith.” It stands as a really excellent reason why employers should have no say in employee health care—at all. Who wants to have their life ruined by a treatable condition just because the boss is a religious nut? That’s basically what the ruling permits.

Gorsuch once wrote in a decision, “[A]ll human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.” Note the use of the word ‘private’. The state must always be allowed to kill at will. It’s the Dominionist theology in a nutshell; it’s not piety that drives them; it’s authoritarianism.

Only Gorsuch knows if he subscribes to Dominionist philosophy or not. Dominionists believe that the United States is subservient to the will of god, and that Holy Writ supercedes secular law. Gorsuch has made it clear he believes in freedom of religion, in that religion is free to avail itself of public assets and impose its will on others, and he is absolutely silent on the doctrine of freedom from religion, the right not to be subject to church doctrine and church costs.

There’s a pair of cases pending before the court right now,  American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association. 

The subject of the case is the Peace Cross, a forty-foot tall granite cross that sits on a small patch of land in Bladensburg, Maryland at the crux (no pun intended—OK, I lied, it was intentional) of a three way major intersection in the town. The cross was erected between 1919 and 1925 (six years to do what the Romans could do in six minutes) on what then was private land. While the monument was purportedly to honor the 49 residents of Bladensburg who died in the Great War, the purpose was unabashedly religious. Donors were required to sign a card before even being allowed to donate that read, “WE, THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND, TRUSTING IN GOD, THE SUPREME RULER OF THE UNIVERSE, PLEDGE FAITH IN OUR BROTHERS WHO GAVE THEIR ALL IN THE WORLD WAR TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY. THEIR MORTAL BODIES HAVE TURNED TO DUST, BUT THEIR SPIRIT LIVES TO GUIDE US THROUGH LIFE IN THE WAY OF GODLINESS, JUSTICE, AND LIBERTY. WITH OUR MOTTO, ‘ONE GOD, ONE COUNTRY AND ONE FLAG,’ WE CONTRIBUTE TO THIS MEMORIAL CROSS COMMEMORATING THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN.” Yes, all upper case. Religionists do like to shout.

There must not have been enough religious louts floating around at the time because in 1922 the project ran out of both money and Christians, and the American Legion took it over. The Legionnaires had a lot of fun with their new toy, holding many religious services (all Christian, of course) and patriotic hootenannies on the Fourth of July and Memorial Day and the like.

But along about 1961, the city elders looked at that big old top heavy stone cross that sat in the middle of a heavily-trafficked intersection with vehicles running around the cross in a tight circle. Possibly, they reflected that it was erected on behalf of a deity with a long and colorful history of arbitrarily smiting people, and it being an era when government actually looked out for the welfare of the citizenry, decided it might be wise to prevent a sudden gust of wind from dispatching some of the town’s good Christian folk to whatever reward they had coming. So they bought the land from the Legionnaires (records don’t indicate the Legion was particularly upset about this) and started doing maintenance. The new owners, the Appellee Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, are a state agency and they have spent a cool $217,000 in tax dollars on that cross since 1961.

Right wingers like to howl that the suits exist only because the plaintiffs were “offended” and unfortunately, that idiotic argument does appear in the court filings. But in reality, and the reason it’s in front of the Supreme Court Biblebangers is because this unabashedly Christian icon is being maintained on the public dime.

Gorsuch has argued that nobody can sue on behalf of separation of church and state unless they have Standing—some sort of direct involvement in which they can show demonstrable loss or impairment of their rights.

Something R. Muse at Daily Kos wrote, “Gorsuch did, in fact, claim that any plaintiffs who challenge government establishment and endorsement of one specific religion should be banned from suing the government to force it to uphold the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. According to Gorsuch, there is no situation that allows any American to have ‘legal standing to challenge’ a Christian religious display on government property; something that is in fact establishing religion. He claims that because ‘their only injury is that they take offense’ at the religious display on taxpayer’s land, in his theocratic mind being offended is not enough to demand the government abide by the law of the land – any more than expecting Christian conservative justices to support, uphold, and decide cases based on the Constitution.”

It seems likely that Gorsuch, along with the other Court godpounders, will ignore the fact that the public is being forced to maintain a Christian icon, but instead focus on whether the offended have any rights. I kinda hope he does. If he rules that religious folk have a right to offend, then I might take up a fundraiser to buy a piece of property facing a prominent church and erect an 80-foot tall bronze statue of a naked Satan, complete with bifulcerated penis with little snake heads on each tip. It would be great for tourism. If the court rules that churches can use public lands to offend, then I’ll start a crowdfund for a 600 foot wide plush Flying Spaghetti Monster to drape over Half Dome in Yosemite, that as hikers walk pasta, they may gaze on His Noodley Appendages and marvel at the wisdom of humanity.

Of course, there is a simple and elegant solution that could have prevented this case in the first place. Just have the Commission sell the land to a private buyer—a consortium of the local churches, a fast food chain, whatever. They assume all costs and responsibilities (including potential flattening of passers-by) and they can have all their little services and whatnot on their own dime.

You see, most people aren’t offended by displays that are religious in nature. If you put up a Nativity in your front yard, I might, at worst, shrug and ignore you. If I think you’re just trying to wind me up, I might respond with a tasteful tableau from a favorite movie, say by Tarantino or Cronenberg or maybe even Larry Flint. I got a holy right to offend too, you know.

But as noted, it’s unlikely this Court will rule from piety. They simply want to assert power, and the best way to do that is by asserting a right to control the rest of us. And there’s nothing like religion to compel obedience from the masses.

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Barr None – A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion

Barr None

A-G’s efforts to subvert Mueller cause confusion

March 25th, 2019

OK, I’m going to beobvious the labor here and tell you that I think William Barr’s third-grade book report version of the Mueller Report is somewhat short of credible.

Barr, you’ll recall, was the architect of the Iran-Contra pardons issued in the final day of the George HW Bush administration that basically destroyed a six year investigation of some of the worst felonies committed since the previous time a Republican was president. Back then, William Safire referred to Barr witheringly as “the Coverup-General” and here we are, some 23 years later, and we still have a Coverup-General, and it’s the same despicable toady.

Safire was a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew (‘nattering nabobs of negativism’) and he found Barr contemptible in his willingness to subvert the legal process in service to party.

Safire’s dead, but the evil spawn of the far-right takeover of the GOP live on.

Barr’s letter is nothing more than a last-ditch effort to confuse the Mueller Report with Trump administration talking points. We still don’t know what’s in the Mueller report. We know that Mueller did not indict Trump for treason or even conspiracy against the United States, but that was never part of his remit. He could recommend such a course to the Justice Department or the House of Representatives, and he still might. And even Barr couldn’t manage to pretend that serious evidence of obstruction of justice didn’t exist; the best he could manage was that the Report “does not exonerate him [Trump].”

So we watch to see if Congress can wrest the report from Barr’s greasy paws and bring most, if not all of it into the light of day. We’ve gotten the talking points from Trump’s dancing monkey; now let’s see the actual report.

Even if Barr and Trump do manage to bury the report, there are three grand juries and at least a half dozen state investigations underway to determine the extent of Trump criminality in everything from using inaugural donations as a laundry for foreign influence peddling to the wild shenanigans surrounding the Trump Tower in Moscow to the demand that Moscow ferret out Hillary’s emails. Even without whatever Mueller has, Trump faces decades in prison for the potential charges he will face.

But Congress will subpoena the report, and possibly Mueller himself. Barr can’t prevent that, and Trump might face a revolution if he tried.

And remember, we still don’t know what is in that report. All Barr did was show up with an empty plastic bag draped over a hanger and grandly announce our tuxedo was back from the cleaners.

The media, in general, got completely played. I even heard a lot of them transposing Barr’s book report with the Mueller tome, and saying Mueller exonerated Trump. Most TV journalism is a vast wasteland, but even for them, that was a limp performance.

The right wing online circus weighed in, of course. One meme read, “Why are so many liberals in tears over learning that their president is not a traitor?”

I still think he’s a traitor, or at least conspiring against the United States for personal gain. (In just about any other country, conspiracy against that country would be considered treason, but the US has a very specific definition of the term ‘treason’ that sorta takes Trump off the hook.) If anyone’s crying, it’s because they just realized that Trump and the Republicans may have so badly broken the United States that it may no longer have any legal address to rid itself of an enemy in high office. That would be a death knell for any country. That would leave any thinking person in tears.

Well, Barr gave the empty-headed goosesteppers of the far right something to cheer about, and managed to confuse the equally empty-headed fluffers who purportedly keep us informed, but I doubt it’s going to last for very long.

Just the things Trump has openly admitted to should have gotten him impeached two years ago. Maybe the United States is that badly broken, in which case expect bloody and horrible times ahead.

Or maybe it’s like 1940, where the United States was suffering massive attacks on life and property from Germany on the high seas (the equivalent of a 9/11 every two weeks) and needed 18 months or so to gather the resolve to crush their vicious tormentors.

It may be that Trump himself, vicious and heedless in what he seems to believe is a victory, will trigger that himself. He has already said he would “call for organizations to fire members of the media and former government officials who he believes made false accusations about him”.

Ever heard an American President say anything like that? Nope. Not even Nixon.

Still, he needs to maintain the pretense that Barr’s Cliff’s Notes version is a substitute for the actual report, and not the real thing. And he has to do something about all those other investigations going on.

At which point, people will have to decide if they want to simply surrender to this vicious five-and-dime despot and his brown-shirt devotees, or put up a fight.

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Trumpenstag Fizzle – Even Coulter thinks he’s an idiot now

February 15th 2019

I usually don’t watch Trump on TV any more. It’s not just because he’s a vile jerk and a jackass—after all, I watched George Bush the lesser for eight years—but because he is so fundamentally dishonest the only way you’ll actually learn anything is if he has an unguarded moment and blurts out a truth of some sort.

Yeah, stopped clock and all that. Even the blind nut finds a squirrel.

Sure enough, Trump committed a MUT—Moment of Unintentional Truth, when he blurted out, “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

OK, so it’s not actually an emergency. It wasn’t an emergency for the first two years Trump was in office, and with nothing materially changing on the border in the month since, still isn’t an emergency. The only thing that made it an emergency was Congress changed hands, and Trump wanted to blame the Democrats for not getting his wall. But Trump has put it in terms that no court or Congressman can ignore: as an “emergency,” this is pure bullshit.

Ann Coulter, now the moral compass of the GOP, had her own MUT when she blurted during a radio interview, “The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”

Another blind nut, another squirrel. Will wonders ever cease?

I’m sure Ann has her own reasons for hating Trump, and I’m equally sure those reasons reside in an utterly alien universe, but it is sort of fun watching her and Trump get in a pissing match. Two baboons, feces at five feet. Duel of the century, folks. Gitcher popcorrn here.

As mentioned, I watched Trump for as long as I could stomach it. It was hilarious in the way that Rufus T. Firefly was hilarious, or Charlie Chaplin as The Great Dictator. Except this is real. Ann’s idiot, burdened with dementia and underlying personality disorders, is the most powerful man on the planet, militarily speaking, with the ability to kill us all.

But, overlooking his ability to ruin or end your life, it was pretty funny.

He spent a fair bit of time praising Rush Limbaugh, passé radio demagogue, for his ability to speak for three hours straight without taking a phone call. Apparently being able to rant for hours at a time is considered a virtue with Trump. Certainly some leaders have been noted for it: Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini all spring to mind. Limbaugh is only fair-to-middling long-winded by radio gasbag standards who are free to repeat themselves endlessly and make stuff up for the edification of their audience, whose IQs are generally measured in units of birdseed.

Trump claimed (falsely) that drugs flowed freely over the border in those areas where there is no wall. Since most drugs come in by plane or through border crossings, that’s sort of true, but Trump wants to stop drugs from flowing into the country, he says. To that end, of the $8 billion he wants to steal for his vanity project, $2.5 billion would come from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction program.

Very good, Donald. Next, you can shut down the IRS in order to pay for a committee on tax cheating.

Trump admits that his declaration would do poorly in the courts, comparing it to his fatwa against Islamic immigrants. It would lose in the ninth, and then the appeals (he got the order reversed, of course, but “We’ll end up in the Supreme Court and hopefully get a fair shake and win in the Supreme Court just like the ban.” Yup, you have two partisan hacks who owe you in the Court.

But it’s unlikely to even make it to the courts.

The House will take it up, probably today, and will probably pass a resolution negating the Declaration of Emergency in the following days next week. Already, Democratic congressionals are sidling up to their Republican counterpoints and whispering, “Say, I can’t wait for President Ocasio-Cortez to Declare a State of Emergency in order to make the Green New Deal the law of the land.”

The Republican’s face turns white and his pants turn brown at the thought of such a demonic presidential power unleashed. 2018 taught them the ability to steal elections is not absolute, and public will can thwart corporate design.

Most of them have already realized the only thing worse than having someone other than Trump as a candidate in 2020 is having Trump as a candidate in 2020. It’s an offal thought.

They will decide not to give Trump this power. I’m guessing the resolution might get 350 votes.

So it goes to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell can’t simply kill it by refusing to let it come up for a vote. The law mandates open debate and a public vote on this sort of resolution within two weeks.

Mitch had already crouched and urinated a profession of undying love for Trump and his Emergency declaration, so I’m predicting that Mitch is going to have a really shitty time of it, especially since many Republicans are either unwilling to give any president a blank check like that, and/or are thoroughly fed up with Trump and deeply apprehensive of what bizarre stunt he might come up with next.

So Trump will claim the $1.4 billion he got for border security is far better than the $1.57 billion he was offered in December, and far better than the $8 billion he wanted. That boy spins like the Tasmanian Devil on meth.

Winning is his! Medals for Everyone!

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Barr None – He hit all the right notes, but…

January 15th, 2019

I watched the William Barr hearing this morning, and came away with mixed feelings. He hit all the right notes, vowing not to interfere with the Mueller investigation (but not swearing to recuse himself) and agreeing that the investigation was valid and important and needed to continue.

He agreed that a primary role of the DoJ was to prevent foreign interference in US elections, but undercut it by saying that Russia “appeared to interfere” in the 2016 election. That’s a bit like saying Boston appeared to have won the 2018 World Series. The equivocation is pointless, and leaves one with the unsettling feeling that Barr doesn’t really understand the nature of the investigations against Trump. At best, that’s what he doesn’t understand.

He also had a weird equivocation about the Emoluments Clause, appearing uncertain as to whether it could pertain to Trump. It reads, “And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” An emolument is “profit, salary, or fees from office or employment; compensation for services: Tips are an emolument in addition to wages.” OK, Trump is holding an office of trust, and is getting gifts and kickbacks from a variety of foreign states. Seems pretty straightforward. And it would be insane to pretend that presidents are above the law on conflicts of interest, bribery, self-dealing or misuse of office for profit. All of which Trump is demonstrably guilty of.

The Founders wanted a chief administrator, not a Divine Right King.

That a former Attorney General and lifelong Constitutional lawyer would profess uncertainty about this is troubling. At best, it’s disingenuous.

Barr also equivocated on whether he would allow Mueller to indict Trump. This, too, is troubling, since on a previous occasion he interfered with an investigation that would quite possibly have led to indictments of then-President George Bush and former President Ronald Reagan. As reported here:

“Mr. Mueller indicated to Mr. Rivera and to me as well that they would prefer that our indictment — that we work aggressively on it as much as possible… I received a phone call a little bit before noon on August 22 from Denis Saylor who indicated to me that I was directed not to return the BCCI indictment. And I asked who was directing me not to return it, and he said Attorney General William Barr…” (US Atty Lehtinen)

“As Robert Mueller III, the Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department now in charge of the BCCI investigation, testified in October, 1991: BCCI was not an ordinary bank. It was set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs are extraordinarily complex. Its offers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection” (“The BCCI Affair A Report to the Committee on Foreign RelationsUnited States Senate by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank BrownDecember 1992“) https://archive.org/stream/TheBCCIAffair/The-BCCI-Affair_djvu.txt

It’s important to remember that in 1991-2, Barr was a very partisan lawyer, one who helped Bush write a series of last-minute pardons that effectively destroyed the Iran-Contra investigation, something that threatened to throw some 80 members of the Reagan and Bush administrations, including Reagan himself, in jail.

And now he is in a position to potentially short-circuit Mueller again. Yes, this is cause for concern.

It didn’t help that he was mouthing administration talking points on the wall, immigration in general, and indicated a willingness to make marijuana illegal again.

Well, it’s not like Trump was going to appoint a liberal. It couldn’t have been easy, searching someone who combined plausible credentials with the type of selective moral, ethical and legal blindness needed to serve under Trump.

It may be that it doesn’t matter. Mueller is close to end game, and in any event, even if Barr decided to be a Bork and fire or impair Mueller, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee could simply subpoena Mueller’s records and go from there.

It’s possible I’m being unfair. Yes, Barr was a partisan ratbag in 1992 and contributed to the vast amount of damage the corrupt Reagan and Bush regimes did to the country by making their criminals exempt from the law.

But that was 26 years ago. People change, mature, develop some ethics. Sometimes. Perhaps Barr did, and perhaps he was sincere, if overly lawyerly in today’s testimony. Perhaps the equivocations were those of a man used to dotting eyes and crossing tees.

Perhaps. But Barr needs to know this going in: This isn’t the America of 1992. If he, and the GOP, try to evade justice and put themselves outside of legal reach though obstruction and misuse of the pardon, they won’t walk away. America will come after them.

They aren’t free to spit on the country the way they did in 1992. It’s a different world, and people have learned about the nihilism of the far right.

If Barr lied, he will end up in jail.

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End Game – It’s us or him

December 21st 2018

Even by the vicious, arbitrary, capricious and sometimes insane standards of the Trump administration, the past 48 hours were beyond belief.

First, there was the Michael Flynn sentencing. Judge Emmett Sullivan was expected to give the seditious and disgraced General a slap on the wrist as a result of supposedly very valuable evidence provided to the special council’s office in relation to Trump and Russia. But Flynn, whose common sense is the equal of his sense of loyalty to his country, ran his mouth to the press, whining that the FBI fooled him into thinking it was OK to lie to them because he thought the 11 separate interviews they hauled him in for were just friendly chats. Koffee Klatches. They talked about the latest Vogue magazine, you know. Just more proof the FBI was evil. Sullivan’s patience snapped, and he let Flynn know just how big a pile of human shit he really is, delayed sentencing, and let it be known if he spread any more right wing bullshit, he would be treated as a near-traitor.

That happened just a day after California Congresswoman Jackie Spier penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle titled, “Did Putin Buy Donald Trump?” She didn’t actually use either the word “traitor” or “kompromat,” but the concepts were definitely intrinsic to her narrative.

So now even the mainstream press is starting to use the word “treason” in relation to Trump. It’s about time.

Trump made Spier’s case for her by suddenly and unilaterally announcing that all troops would be pulled out of Syria, a sudden action that betrayed the Kurds (again) and no doubt delighted Putin. Make no mistake: I’ve argued for pulling troops out of Syria right along, but I don’t for an instant believe that Trump went about it the way he did because he gave a shit about the troops, let alone the Syrians who are dying by the thousands. He did it because Putin wanted him to. And time is running out for him to do stuff like that.

This in turn caused Jim Mattis to quit in disgust. No flowery language about it being an honor and privilege to serve Trump; just a letter that boiled down to, “I can’t help you, get yourself a defense secretary who will do your bidding.” I used to joke about how it came to be that the only adult in the Trump administration, the sane thoughtful one, was known as “Mad Dog” but that Mad Dog might be one of the very few to leave that benighted administration with his reputation as an adult and an American still intact.

It is scary to contemplate Trump’s foreign policy now that his only remaining advisor is John Bolton.

Then Trump blew up the Continuing Resolution. This was a kick-the-can-down-the-road measure to keep the government running while the ludicrous impasse over the Wall continued. Nothing too unusual there: it’s been pretty much what passes for Republican governance since 1993. They love America but hate the United States, and don’t want to pay for anything other than a big military and an economy that consists mostly in the form of raping the workers. So they’ve been running government by extortion, whittling down any stake Americans might have in their own country.

Trump, apparently upset that such intellectual luminaries as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh no longer loved him, changed his mind after most of Congress had left for their indeterminable vacations, so the government will have a partial shutdown at least until January 10th. It will cost billions, and Trump should reflect on the fact that the Secret Service agents following him won’t be getting paychecks for Christmas.

Even the most stupid mob boss knows you gotta pay your muscle. But then, Trump is extraordinarily stupid.

The stock market is showing signs of a possible crash, having lost 4,000 points this past month. Investors are no longer confident we will survive Trump. That’s not a very comfortable thought.

Then there is the Whitaker thing. The swindler-turned-top-cop had a Department of Justice board of unknown parties say he was not required to recuse himself in the Mueller investigation, then they put out another statement an hour later saying he was supposed to recuse himself, and then an hour after that Whitaker said he was going to disregard the advice to recuse himself.

Kremlin watchers thought as of yesterday that Rosenstein was still overseeing the investigation, since Whitaker didn’t want to go to jail for obstruction, but was acting on the QT since if he did recuse himself, he would get the Jeff Sessions treatment. Now nobody knows that the hell is going on. In some ways, that’s the most terrifying development of all, since it smells like Trump is preparing to purge Mueller’s ass.

Finally, there was the Trump Foundation. A judge shut it down, effectively labeling it a criminal enterprise. I had to shake my head at the wonder of it all. Remember all those Republicans who prattled on endlessly about the Clinton Foundation because it took money (legally) from foreign concerns. For all the huffing, they couldn’t find any quid pro quo, unless you count the ridiculous conspiracy theory about the Canadian government selling uranium to Russia. (Would Trump hesitate to give Russia uranium if Putin asked him for it?). Are they apoplectic in rage over the open criminality of the Trump Foundation?

Hmm. Apparently not. Like cheating on wives or banging porn stars or blowing up the deficit or bombing kids in other countries, or screwing kids domestically, it’s only bad if Democrats are accused of it.

The people who worked directly for Trump aren’t the only ones who trashed their reputations; any Republican who whined endlessly about the Clinton/Obama “scandals” and is silent now can expect decades to pass before anyone wants to hear their thoughts on much of anything again.

Meanwhile, the country is now in deep crisis, and when Congress returns, it may have to put aside the budget and the wall and all that, and drive Trump from office.

It’s him or us.

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