Month: October 2024

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Supreme Court Fights Democracy — Fascist judges march against freedom

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 30th 2024

A decision, that a few years ago would have utterly shocked court observers but was now met with the usual weary resignation, was handed down this morning by the corrupt fascists on the Supreme Court.

The ruling upheld efforts by the Republican-controlled state of Virginia to purge some 1,600 voters from the polls just days before the election on the dubious grounds that DMV registrations didn’t indicate that they were citizens.

Glenn Youngkin, the rabidly Republican governor, issued an executive order on August 7th that mandated daily checks of voter registration against DMV records, and demanded full nine-digit social security numbers as well as drivers’ licenses from voter applicants. There was also a provision mandating paper ballots.

The date was no accident: August 7th is exactly 90 days before the November 5th election, and federal law forbids significant changes to the electoral process within 90 days of an election.

Gleeful Republicans found 1,600 voters with DMV discrepancies; either the citizenship box was checked ‘non-citizen’ or not checked at all. Given the vanishingly small number of non-citizens who knowingly try to vote, it’s unlikely that more than 1% of those 1600 were, in fact, acting with fraudulent intent.

Suits were filed, pointing out that August 7th was “within” 90 days and challenging the scope and scale of the changes, all of which were imposed, not by legislation, but by executive order from a partisan governor. Per the Guardian, “The US district judge Patricia Giles granted an injunction request brought against Virginia election officials by the justice department, which claimed the voter registrations were wrongly canceled during a 90-day quiet period ahead of the November election that restricts states from making large-scale changes to their voter rolls.”

The Supreme Court sprung into action as only galvanized zealots can, and today slapped down the Giles ruling without explanation. The vote, of course, was 6-3. As usual, the zealots put Donald Trump, or at least God, ahead of the law.

Expect the Court to overturn other, similar legal findings by federal courts over the next day or so. After all, the howling lies of the Trump campaign supercede all evidence or legal protocol.

Trump’s three charlatan judges have destroyed the legitimacy of this Court, and if Harris overcomes the frantic efforts by the GOP to steal the election, she’ll have her work cut out for her in finding ways to restore public trust in the Court.

Clarence Thomas is arguably the most corrupt justice in the history of the United States. Just the known, provable evidence in public light should be enough to impeach him a dozen times over. There is strong evidence that the Trump administration blocked the findings of the FBI background check on Bret Kavanaugh that would have disqualified him from public office, or even a shop at a fast food joint. Neil Gorsuch has a grubby record that was somehow not brought to light by the FBI under that same administration. Amy Coney Barrett is a member of a cult that makes the Stepford Wives look normal and uncreepy. And Samuel Alito reduced the rights of women to rubble and tragedy in his Dobbs decision, which he based in large part not on American law, but on the writings of a 17th century English juror who opined at length on matters such as witchcraft and heresy, two concepts not recognized in American law. Roberts, the Chief Justice, is a weak and compromised man unable to stand up to the onslaught of Opus Dei freaks and Ayn Rand nihilists that have flooded his Court.

If they help Trump get back in despite popular vote, (and that’s a strong possibility) then you will think of this sad excuse of a Court as being “the good old days” back when your vote, your rights, and your freedom actually still meant something.

Further, if Trump does get back in, he’ll add vigorous young fascists to the Court, ensuring corrupt and antipathetic rule for the rest of our lives—lives likely to be ‘nasty, brutish and short’ under a fascist zealot regime.

Anyone who has studied real political history in America knows that legislatures—state legislatures in particular—can pass all sorts of laws that are capricious, unfair, bigoted and flat out insane. The main role of the courts is to hold such up to the writing of the Constitution and strike down the ones that infringe on the rights of the people. For a list of ridiculously unconstitutional laws non-corrupt Supreme Courts have struck down over the years, visit this fine website: https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/unconstitutional-laws/

When the courts are knowingly corrupted and subverted by people who want unresponsive power or even worse, want to wield power in the name of their ever malleable gods, then that one wall against the madness of fools and knaves has fallen.

And that’s what Trump wants. That’s what the fascists underwriting him want. And that’s what the zealots want.

November 5th is your last chance to stop them.

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Trump in the Garden — Lice on Ice

Trump in the Garden

Lice on Ice

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 28th 2024

Well, that whatever-the-hell-that-was at Madison Square Garden last night boiled everything down to just two possibilities: either Donald Trump completely lost the election, or America completely lost its mind.

I thought that comparing the Trump MSG rally to the 1939 German-American Bund rally was a bit over the top. Yes, I’ve been saying for some time that Trump and his followers are fascists with disturbing amounts of Nazi influence, but I figured that this would be their single biggest audience draw since the convention, and with barely a week left until election day.

And yes, it is unfair to compare the Trump movement to the German-American Bund. The Bund were far more restrained, diplomatic and less bigoted and vile.

The tone was set early, when comedian-in-waiting Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” So what’s the difference between a Puerto Rican and our Tony? Tony sank.

It wasn’t even the low point. It just set the general tone. The other speakers were the same B-listers that have worked so hard to keep audiences entertained while waiting for the always-hours-late Donald Trump: Hulk Hogan, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Don Junior and Rudy Giuliani. They all spewed their usual blend of bigotry and lowest-common-denominator demagoguery.

Junior claimed Trump was reclaiming his title of King of New York, which is kind of like the Chicago White Sox claiming they’ll be facing the Dodgers in this year’s World Series. Even before this debacle, Trump couldn’t get 20% of the vote in New York City. They hate him, and have for many years, and for many reasons.

I checked always-dependable Faux News for their take. They had one headline, “Trump supporters outside Madison Square Garden say deep blue New York is in play” (In their world, the Dodgers are playing the Toronto Maple Leafs) with a blurb about how “exhilarated” they were about the rally. I couldn’t help but note that that was from BEFORE the rally. I’m guessing that the ones that made it to the end of that marathon event were feeling…well, deflated.

I’m sure if you want to watch it for yourself, it’s all over You Tube by now. It’s only six hours long, and the Trump speech by itself is only an hour and twenty minutes. If it helps, think of it as cinematic history. No, not Leni Riefenstahl; I was thinking more of the role Alex played in “A Clockwork Orange,” when his eyes were taped open and he was forced to watch disgusting and vile acts of violence and depravity for hours on end while experiencing acute nausea.

Indeed, Trump’s rally makes for a good Ludovico technique of aversion therapy; watching that Trumpenorgy will give you a deep aversion to fascism, nazism, and hopefully ignorance and stupidity. Bit of a shame you won’t be able to watch a Rangers game ever again, though. Well, Alex had to give up Beethoven; the Rangers are no great loss.

The rally should have finished the Trump campaign off. If it didn’t, then it finished America off. The two cannot coexist. If there’s anyone out there who is doing the Olive Oyl bit and can’t decide between Trump and Harris, go to YouTube and watch the rally. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Seriously, if you haven’t made up your mind, watch that rally. If you STILL can’t decide, then maybe voting isn’t for you and you should go back to dithering for three hours each evening over what color socks you should wear in the morning.

Trump is ramping up the bile and nastiness at a time when he should be petting kittens and expressing approval of apple pie and baseball. Maybe kiss a few babies, only watch where you put those lips.

Instead, he’s showing America as the worst that it can be. If there is a floating island of garbage in America, then it took up residence in Madison Square Garden last night. And that island of garbage is sinking rapidly.

Last week I estimated Harris would win by ten million votes nationwide.

After last night’s spectacle, make that twelve million. A lot of people who watched that aren’t going to vote for Trump now.

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The Poison of the Plutocracy — America falling to the social evil it rebelled against

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 26th, 2024

 

In the past week, billionaire owners of two of America’s leading newspapers, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, forbade their respective editorial staffs from endorsing a candidate for President. Both publications have a long history of doing just that. If either owner hoped to avoid controversy, they were in for a rude shock.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the South African-born billionaire owner of the Times, tried to explain his decision to Spectrum News, saying, “I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division.” According to the Guardian, this “prompted the public resignations of multiple editorial writers, including a recent Pulitzer prize winner, Robert Greene, and the section’s widely respected editor, Mariel Garza, who said: ‘I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent.’

It also prompted the beginnings of a revolt among the paper’s subscribers, with nearly 2,000 of them cancelling their subscriptions for ‘editorial content’ reasons on Tuesday and Wednesday alone.”

And then two days later, Jeff Bezos did very nearly exactly the same thing with the Washington Post. While Bezos had maintained a general “hands-off” approach to the editorial stance of his newspaper, this move was widely seen as an indication that Bezos, whose other endeavors such as Blue Origin and Amazon, are heavily dependent on a good working relationship with the government, was acting out of fear of a possible Trump return. If, indeed, he did think that this move might curry favor with the erratic and vindictive Trump, he showed appallingly bad judgment. Former managing editor Martin Baron wrote of the decision, “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,[…] Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others).”

I suggested the Washington Post change its Bezos-generated motto from “Democracy Dies in the Darkness” to “I For One Welcome Our New Galactic Overlords.” [Kent Brockman, news anchor in “The Simpsons” during an invasion of galactic overlords]

They aren’t alone, of course. Australian fascist Rupert Murdoch has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into poisoning the well of American political discourse for five decades now. Canada recognized the danger of this vast right wing conspiracy machine and kicked him out, with the result that Canada isn’t in the terrible mess the US is today. And yes, much of our current trouble can be laid directly at the feet of Fox News.

Elon Musk bought up Twitter with the sole objective of having a platform for his crack-brained, erratic and irresponsible “philosophy” which is a poisonous blend of Ayn Rand, QAnon, MAGA, and Vladimir Putin.

It came to light this week, he had been having nice friendly secret phone conversations with Vladimir Putin, just as it’s come to light Donald Trump was. I can’t say I’m surprised. As with Trump, Elon, through SpaceX and Starlink, has a large number of defense and national-security contracts, and, as with Trump, I doubt Putin was calling just to discuss the differences between Russian and American heroic literature.

Indeed, we may have a new Axis power we have to fight. If it was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo in the 1940s, it’s Putin, Trump and Musk now.

Imagine it’s 1938, and you’ve just learned that William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford had been calling Hitler regularly for ‘friendly chats.’ See a possible problem there?

Billionaires, many far less visible than Bezos or Soon-Shiong, have been buying up media big and small for a couple of decades now, with devastating results. Many parts of America are in “news deserts” where local papers have vanished or been converted to local advertising sheets. Much of the radio is in the hands of repressive and even fascistic outfits like Clear Channel or Sinclair. All the major networks are mere appendages of massive international corporations who consider the news branch as mere items for generating profits and or creating a favorable political atmosphere for expansion of said profits.

We need to bring back the laws limiting the reach and scope of individuals over our media. Anti-trust laws need to break up the vast corporate conglomerates that control 95% of everything we hear, see, and believe.

And we need not-for-profit publicly owned corporations like the BBC and the CBC to provide us with news that isn’t designed to fit the preferences of billionaires. Because no matter how nice and democratic any given plutocrat might be as an individual, there inevitable comes a time when the needs of the plutocrat are no longer aligned with the needs of the rest of us, and that’s when we learn that plutocrats are not our friends.

America was founded on the notion that the people should be self-governing and free of the excesses of the churches and the aristocracy. It was a great idea. Time to return to that.

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The Future History of MAGA — Operation Hummingbird

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 22nd 2024

Let’s suppose Trump attains the Presidency next January. It’s not out of the question. At this point, I fully expect Kamala Harris to win by some 10 million votes, but we all know the opinions of the lowly American voters may not be the determining factor, given the groups of eager little fascists who will be counting and certifying the votes, the ignorant morons in Congress who were only stopped last time by Mike Pence, and the five and dime toadies on the courts. Trump may be President again no matter what the American people want.

What Trump wants may also not be a factor. His obvious dementia is worsening by the day, and if he even knows he’s President, he may not be able to rise above the level of Rufus T. Firefly (“Medals for Everyone!”). But the sleek vicious people backing and propping up Trump know exactly what they want, and they are operating on the same game plan that brought Trump this far.

Their position is going to be very precarious. Much of America is going to be shocked, and then angry. Donald’s been threatening to send out the military and the national guard to “deal with” protesters, and I can’t feel certain that they won’t open fire on unarmed American protesters. That almost certainly will not pacify the population.

Some of Donald’s most fervent supporters, the ones in the red caps and flag-bedecked clothes, are going to start fulfilling some of their sick fantasies. They have people they want to round up and deal with. Gays, ‘immigrants’ (pretty much anyone with dark skin or an accent), Blacks, infidels and drag queens will all be at risk. Even though the party line is staunchly pro-Israel, Jews will be on the list.

The Trump cabal know it will be hard enough to quell a popular uprising without the aggravating factor of the MAGAts, who will be proudly noisy and public in the persecution of their perceived enemies. They will be seen as loose cannons, and worse than loose cannons.

We’ve been here before, in history. Just 90 years ago, in fact.

It’s been called the Röhm purge, or Operation Hummingbird, but it’s best known around the world as The Night of the Long Knives.

Adolf Hitler rose to power in part through the street violence, real and implied, of the SA, the Sturmabteilung. This was just a collection of thugs, loonies, stilyagi, and militia types, disaffected, resentful and alienated males who felt dispossessed and deprived and had long lists of villains and “types” to blame for that. Then, as now, they were fertile ground for a demagogue seeking street power. Then, as now, they were more than willing to step into a new role that made them feel empowered and part of something greater than themselves. They would cheerfully loom threateningly at political rallies of opponents, lurk armed near polling places, and just generally give Hitler street muscle.

After he became Chancellor, Hitler quickly realized that the untrained and undisciplined thugs, the Brownshirts, as they were known, would be a massively destabilizing feature of his still-precarious regime. They needed to be brought to heel.

He couldn’t just shoot the lot of them, of course. They numbered in the millions, and people would talk. But Hitler understood that the bellicosity and bluster of those people was mostly for show, and they could be brought to heel.

Hitler had two other paramilitary groups at hand—the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Himmler, and the Gestapo, under Heydrich. Both were better trained, better disciplined, and critically kept a much lower profile during Hitler’s rise to power. They were designed to be his agencies of vengeance, persecution and suppression after he attained power. Eventually, they would be the backbone of Hitler’s “Final Solution” that sent twelve million people to their deaths in his camps.

On the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler had them strike against the Brownshirts. In one of those supreme strokes of irony that only utter despots can come up with, the purge was justified on the grounds that the Brownshirts were agents of a group of immigrants intent on overthrowing the new order—about the only ‘crime’ they weren’t guilty of.

The purge was over by July 3rd, and while the official number of extrajudicial executions was only 85, the number killed is estimated at being between 700 and 1000. While the purge was aimed at the Brownshirts, a large number of other Germans wound up as collateral damage—traditional conservatives, trade unionists, members of the Reichstag, including former Chancellors and cabinet members.

It would be pretty easy to extrapolate current day equivalents, in additions to the red-capped loudmouths who hate libruls and “illegals”; people like Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Laura Loomer. Yes, some of those are staunch Trump supporters who, once he’s back in office, will no longer be of any use, but would still be loud embarassments, disappointments, and so on. His opponents will go, of course.

Most of the Brownshirts survived the Night, of course. Many wound up in the SS or the Gestapo, a sleeker, darker, disciplined and vicious army designed to kill and terrify. Those less morally and politically nimble wound up in the army, or the camps. In the end, none of them did well in Hitler’s doomed Reich.

So if you’re a member of MAGA, and you are envisioning a bright future where an avuncular Trump beams at you as you kick liberals to death in the streets or rape the daughters of immigrants or cut the beards off rabbis, read your history and ponder this:

After he takes power, Trump (or the people propping him up) is going to look at you. And he isn’t going to see a brave patriot who sacrificed for the cause. He’s going to see an uncontrolled and unkempt loudmouth who already betrayed his country once.

He won’t like you. He won’t trust you.

You might even wind up in the camps before I do.

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He Does Mean It — We know the truth behind Trump’s lies

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 14th 2024

The New York Times may not be a particularly good source, because it’s utterly incapable of acknowledging, let alone challenging the threat Donald Trump poses. They cling to a safe and reassuring pretense that this is just a routine election where Democrats favor the middle class and the Republicans favor the upper class. They are incapable of recognizing that one of the candidates is a violent, sociopathic fascist with Hitlerian ideations.

But they aren’t alone in this delusion. Trump supporters, the ones who don’t wholeheartedly embrace his paeans of hatred and revenge and suppression, are telling themselves that Trump doesn’t really mean those things he says.

An article by Shawn McCreesh appeared today titled “The Trump Voters Who Don’t Believe Trump.”

The subheader read: “When the former president endorses violence and proposes using the government to attack his enemies, many of his supporters assume it’s just an act.”

This appeared in today’s…[drumroll]…New York Times. I see it as a sign that even the Old Grey Lady has realized that horse-race coverage of an ordinary political contest just isn’t cutting it.

The opening line reads, “One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.” He goes on to list some of the more egregious threats Trump has made, including weaponizing the Justice Department, imprisoning political opponents, purging the entire civil service and replacing it with loyalists who take office swearing loyalty, not to the United States Constitution but to himself. He notes Trump’s blood-curdling threat to have a day of violence, or his cheerful brag that deporting millions of immigrants, documented and undocumented would be “a bloody business.”

None of this is news to anyone who has been following the news. Even the Times has reported on these, and is starting to pay attention to the wilder and more deranged statements Trump has made.

But the heart of the article is this: “Many of his supporters assume it’s just an act.”

We’ve heard that before in history. Less than a century ago, in fact. In 1933 Adolf Hitler got 37% of the vote for Chancellor, and his party, the NAZI party, got a slim majority in the Reichstaag. He was able to leverage that thinnest of wins into one of the most horrific regimes in history.

After the war and Hitler’s suicide, a lot of surviving Germans murmured, “We didn’t think he meant it. We thought it was just an act.” Some of them were doubtlessly just trying to avoid culpability, but a lot were sincere. How else could you explain that Hitler got votes from 3% of German Jews in that 1933 race?

Hitler made no secret of his murderous and psychotic desires. He wanted to rid the world of Jews. He wanted to enslave and decimate “the mud races” to the East and exterminate all Asians. He regarded Americans as a weak and self-indulgent nation of shopkeepers and race-mixers.

But he also had an immense and effective propaganda machine. Historian Robert Wilde has written, “Hitler was able to present an image of himself as a superhuman, even god-like figure. He wasn’t portrayed as a politician, as Germany had had enough of them. Instead, he was seen as above politics.” It’s easy to laugh at the portraits of Trump presented as a superhero (reminding me most unpleasantly of The Boys’ Homelander) or even as a divine figure, Christ-like. But Hitler used the same tactics and imagery to promote himself as a god-savior of his nation.

Wilde goes on to say, “Hitler managed to look like someone who would unite Germany rather than push it to extremes: he was praised for stopping a left-wing revolution by crushing the socialists and communists (first in street fights and elections, then by putting them in camps).” Between “left wing lunatics” and “people with bad genes” Hitler and Trump pounded away at enemies largely of their own devisements.

Critically, there remained one other element that Hitler and Trump used to attain power: they persuaded the power elites, the rich and the industrialists, that he was a true-blue capitalist who would promote industry and weaken the roles of workers and consumers. He would stand tall against communists, socialists, and unionists. So in either iteration, business and the aristocracy supported this mad figure, convinced that once he attained unlimited power, they would be able to control or at least manipulate the erratic figure.

If this all sounds familiar, then you know a bit about history, and you’re realized that I’m not comparing Trump to Hitler just as a cheap and lazy rhetorical device, but because Trump is consciously and deliberately tracing the steps Hitler took to attain power.

You can go to Amazon to find Adolf Hitlers “My New Order” for sale. https://www.amazon.com/Order-Collection-Speeches-Adolph-Hitler/dp/4871879089

The blurb for the book reads: “My New Order has attracted the attention of the press with the rise of Donald Trump as candidate for President of the United States because his first wife Ivana Trump revealed that Donald Trump reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. It can be seen that there are clear similarities between the speeches of Trump and the speeches of Hitler. Here are examples: They repeat themselves constantly, saying the same things over and over again. They never admit they have made a mistake nor do they ever take anything back. To any criticism, they respond by insults and name calling. They use a low form of language, with simple sentences even a person with the lowest level of education or with no education at all can understand. Another contrast is the sheer volume of words. Hitler gave a thousand speeches and spoke millions of words. Hitler communicated almost entirely through his speeches. Hitler’s speeches were long, usually one and a half to two hours long. Trump made one of the longest speeches ever to accept the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States. His speech lasted one hour fifteen minutes. Trump communicates almost entirely through his speeches and through his tweets.”

Sound familiar? It should. Trump is no reader, but he read this one carefully, night after night, according to his then-wife Ivana, now buried on a Trump golf course. Nor does he deny it, justifying the fact that he had the book in the first place by claiming it was given to him by “a Jewish friend.”

My New Order is in effect a explanation by Hitler of how he rose to power. Trump took it to heart.

Stop pretending Trump is a normal candidate who wants to govern. He’s a vicious madman who learned from the ‘best’.

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Trump and the Seven Calls — What are he and Putin up to?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 10th 2024

When Bob Woodward, renowned investigative journalist, revealed in his just-published book War that Trump had secretly sent Vladimir Putin seven COVID testing machines, possibly dooming hundreds of Americans, I shook my head in disgust. But I didn’t expect much to come of it.

Trump would issue a blanket denial, and his mindless supporters would immediately reduce it to the level of “he said – he said.” A normal person wouldn’t have much trouble of weighing the veracity of Bob Woodward against that of Donald Trump, but Trump’s followers have pretty much abdicated all human skills of judgment. They would dismiss it, just as they have dozens of other stories about Trump, many of them proven, that would have destroyed the career of any public figure who wasn’t a cult leader. Cults are dangerous, and about one third of American voters have been brainwashed into becoming followers of a cult.

But then something unexpected occurred. The Kremlin weighed in on the story. Per Bloomberg News, “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the tests had been sent, but denied the book’s claim that the two leaders had spoken by phone several times since Trump left office.”

I had just expected the Kremlin would issue a denial, or more likely, just ignore the story altogether. After all, the Russian disinformation media loves to portray Trump as a brave hero beset by liberals and Jews in the American press. This would have fed right into this narrative. (One Russian outlet today managed to find a way to portray Hurricane Milton as being somehow Jewish! Dot’s funny…Milton doesn’t look Jewish…)

That was devastating to Trump, and not because I expect the scales to fall from the eyes of his followers. That’s not going to happen overnight. But it struck me as a clear signal that Putin and his mob have written Trump off as a useful asset and no longer expect him to regain the White House. Clear and independent thinking around exactly staples of the Putin regime, but careful analysis and calculation are. They no longer think Trump is useful. Oh, they’ll keep spreading disinformation on his behalf and supporting him because anything that destabilizing to the United States is for the good, but they no longer take him seriously as an ally. (They already reported today that Milton destroyed Disneyland, which will come as a surprise to the City of Anaheim in California). Keep up the good work, Ivan. There will be an extra potato in your paysack this week!

Now, about the seven calls. There may be tapes—there’s reason to suspect both the FBI and CIA have been monitoring Trump’s calls abroad because of suspicion he is a foreign agent. That’s speculation, of course, but not wholly unwarranted speculation.

But it was JD Vance who tried to ride to the rescue aboard the epileptic cow he calls a brain, telling reporters, “I honestly didn’t know that Bob Woodward was still alive until you just asked me that question.” Dismissing Woodward as a hack, he went on to say, “Even if it’s true, look, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?”

Well, actually, yeah, there is. Trump is a private citizen, and there’s this thing called the Logan Act. It says, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.” It was passed in 1799, so if any of the stooges on the Supreme Court are minded to bring up their originalist bullshit, they might consider that the people who passed the Act were either founders or knew them personally. You might think someone running for Vice President with an ailing 78 year old man a heartbeat away from Ayn Rand heaven would know that, yeah?

Vance clearly thought that was a valid defense. Vance is a moron. But it wasn’t a confession the phone calls took place. The twin enigmas-wrapped-in-a-riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery, the Kremlin and Mar-A-Lago, have both denied the calls took place.

But Donald couldn’t resist the opportunity to swan about in his own imagined importance, trumpeting it was “a good thing, not a bad thing,” that he got along with Putin “very well.” “A lot of people think that’s a bad thing,” Trump said. “No, no, that’s a great thing.”

I’m guessing those calls did take place. And they didn’t benefit the United States in any way. Hopefully the FBI and CIA are on this, and we won’t have to wait three years while Merrick Garland dithers.

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In the Wake of Helene — Trump finds new lows

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 6th 2024

In the days following the passage of Hurricane Helene through the deep South, the shitposters came swarming out of Truth Social, Newsmax, and other anal orifices of the web to decry the horrible, even non-existent response by the Biden administration in the way of disaster relief.

It’s going to be a while before we can even really assess the amount of damage Helene did. Certainly, the region suffered more damage than it did during the Civil War. The number of homeless may number in the millions. A lot of regions are accessible only by helicopter, due to the number of roads and bridges that were swept away.

But to the right wing shitposter, no crisis should go to waste. The tone was often openly gleeful; it would make Harris look bad, which would help Trump, so the more dead Americans the better. They even showed up in non-political corners of the web (non-partisan weather-related sites were especially targeted) to spray lies about the catastrophe like AR-15s in a kindergarten. Biden wasn’t answering calls from southern governors. FEMA was showing a clear “anti-Republican bias” in aid efforts. In a bout of wishful thinking, the Lord Haw-Haws reported the entire nation was furious over the lack of response. Harris spent all the FEMA money on “illegals.” Over a billion dollars was supposedly missing. And there were no signs of rescue operations at all in North Carolina.

These were all blatant lies, easily debunked. Some didn’t even make sense on the face of it. The Vice President has no say in FEMA spending, or access to same. Air traffic over NC was triple what it would normally be due to the huge amounts of helicopters flying food, water and shelter in to ruined areas.

The source of these lies was easy to pinpoint: it was Donald Trump himself. The king of American shitposters. Just last night, he posted, “This has been the worst Hurricane Response by a president and vice president since Katrina—and this is simply unacceptable… Kamala wined and dined in San Francisco, and all the people in North Carolina—no helicopters, no rescue. They’re offering $750 to people whose homes have been washed away—meanwhile, they send our money to other countries by the billions.”

It’s a disgraceful response by a disgraceful man. But his followers are ecstatic. They flooded social media with an AI picture purporting to show Trump, in full business suit, wading into floodwater to rescue victims of the storm. No, really. It’s a shame the image isn’t real; they desperately need rafts down there right now, and Trump would make a fine raft.

Normally these shenanigans wouldn’t warrant a response from me. We’re all so used to self-serving, self-aggrandizing bullshit from Trump and his followers that ranting more about it would just put my readers to sleep. Some of you are probably nodding off like Trump in a courtroom right now.

But there’s a couple of more elements to all this that put this up to a higher level.

First, FEMA really is nearly out of funds. Like most of the rest of government, they’ve been getting by on Continuing Resolutions, which means they aren’t even getting cost-of-living adjustments, let alone funds to deal with the ever-increasing weather disasters that stem from climate change. And no, the money wasn’t spent on undocumented immigrants by Kamala Harris.

Congress is in recess. All the representatives are at home for the campaign, sucking for dollars. But responsible members from both parties have been clamoring for an emergency session to provide FEMA with the needed funds. That seems like a no-brainer, and I’ll repeat that the demands are bipartisan.

The man empowered to call Congress back into session isn’t Joe Biden. The President doesn’t have that authority. Neither is it Kamala Harris, even in the role of Presiding Officer of the Senate. Only House Speaker Mike Johnson can do that.

And he will NOT be calling the House back early to vote on a disaster aid supplemental He told Politico’s Olivia Beavers the cost of damages has to be ‘tabulated’ before a supplemental is considered. And that could take some time.

Remember that $750 that Trump was sneering at? It wasn’t to “rebuild homes”–it was just to give people in areas not totally destroyed money to get food, water and shelter right now in order to stay alive. And it will save thousands of lives. Johnson, in effect, is saying “don’t do anything for desperate people until we have some idea of how much they lost.”

I don’t know if it’s an act of political calculation or just pure sociopathy, but Johnson obviously sees merit in crippling rescue and recovery operations. I’m sure that Trump is delighted.

But there’s more. Another hurricane is coming. Hurricane Milton. It is aiming straight toward Tampa Bay, Florida, and is projected to arrive as a major hurricane. It’s a nightmare scenario, since the heavily populated areas around Tampa Bay are particularly vulnerable to storm and tidal surges. It will arrive at new Moon, when tides are particularly high. The result could be a far smaller area devastated, but far more deaths and property damage than we have seen from Helene.

But not to worry. Congress will reconvene after the election, and if they aren’t too busy figuring out how to steal the election for Trump, they might consider throwing a few bucks to the survivors, even if the survivors were too thoughtless to submit an itemized bill first. It’s the Christian Nationalist thing to do, after all.

Also, the long range is hinting at another hurricane which may sweep up past Miami and up the eastern seaboard and into New England. Unlike Milton, it’s far enough in the future to hope that it won’t happen, but it’s a signal that the climate isn’t finished with us just yet, no matter what Congress thinks.

Call your own reps and demand they meet to establish emergency relief aid. It is critically needed, and it will get far worse in the next week. Or go here (https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/hurricane-helene-how-to-help/story?id=114345534 ) and donate to the charity of your choice.

And if you encounter Trump’s shitposters, don’t bother being polite. They don’t deserve any human courtesy.

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Smith’s Second Filing — More “ruh-roh” moments for Donny

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 2nd, 2024

Jack Smith’s new 167-page filing against Donald Trump contains several bombshells.

Trump, of course, was hoping his lunatic pet fascists on the Supreme Court would give him full immunity against any actions he performed as President. But even his six corrupt right wingers knew they had to figleaf their ruling to give it a pretense of Constitutional law, and they stipulated that immunity only applied to “official acts.” Still “law” on the level of the Dredd Scott decision, but it was enough.

Very little of Trump’s activities between the month or so prior to the election and January 6th fell under the aegis of ‘official acts.’ Even after the Supreme Court decided the United States needed a king instead of a president, most of his activities were flat-out illegal.

So Smith rewrote his filing to stipulate that Trump’s actions did not fall under the official duties of a president. While you can argue that various presidents in American history would have been delighted to see their vice presidents lynched, it is, in fact, not an official presidential duty. The constitution is curiously mute on the issue of when it is proper for a president to have his first-in-line murdered even though at the time of the Constitution, the vice president was whoever got the second-most votes. “Uneasy lies the head,” indeed!

Of course, the endless delays meant that Smith had more time to broaden his investigation and include new allegations in his superseding document. The delays were caused, not by Smith but by Trump, who hoped to delay it all past the election, where hopefully he would win or steal a second term and fire Jack Smith.

Smith had an allegation missing from the first filing: that Trump knew his claims he won the election but it was stolen from him were false. The new filing contains eyewitness allegations that Trump dismissed voting results as “details” that “don’t matter” and the strategy was simply to throw doubt over the results, justified or not. In Trump’s own words, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

Trump couldn’t even be bothered with a coherent theory as to how the votes were taken from them. His claims vary wildly from filing to filing, even in appeals of the same case! His estimates amounted to “whatever sounds good,” and the only thing they had in common was an utter lack of evidence to support them. That’s why he lost every single voter fraud filing he made, even though a third of the judges reviewing his filings were Trump appointees. Smith includes first-hand accounts of Trump mocking allegations that voting machines “changed the votes.” I wonder if Fox News will sue Trump if he is found guilty of willfully lying about that; after all, it was repeating those lies that cost Fox News three quarters of a billion dollars in a defamation suit.

Smith hardened the allegations that Trump planned to not only contest, but cast doubt on the election prior to the election. One Trump lawyer’s quote that made it in this time: “What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory. … That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner … that’s our strategy.”

Trump hired Giuliani because Giuliani had stated he would support Trump’s lies. In Smith’s words, Giuliani “was willing to falsely claim victory and spread knowingly false claims of election fraud” The filing contains one tidbit that Rudy might find interesting: Trump planned to stiff him if the filing failed, and of course it was bound to.

On January 6th, Trump posted to his enraged MAGA monkeys that by failing to invalidate the electoral count, Mike Pence lacked the “courage to do what should have been done.” Learning that Pence had been taken to a safe location so the monkeys wouldn’t lynch him, Trump’s response was “so what?”

Trump’s own people knew he was a lying sack. One staffer’s quote Smith saw fit to include was, “It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” Some of Trump’s lawyers have already been sanctioned, and even disbarred for filing his nonsense. More are sure to follow in light of these new revelations. Even the chair of the RNC was warned that Trump’s motions were “fucking nuts.”

More details on the hours Trump spent watching TV and grinning at the chaos he brought to the capitol on January 6th have emerged, and those are included in the filing.

Apparently Jack Smith doesn’t think that watching coverage of a Trump-caused riot is an “official duty.” It’s about on the same ‘official’ level as watching a movie about the French Revolution while munching chips.

It’s pretty safe to assume that Trump’s delay tactics have whipped around and bitten him on the ass.

And this all serves as a warning: Trump plans to pull the same shit again next month.

Smith made it that much harder for Trump to convince Americans with brains of his bullshit.

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Walzing to a Win — Vance dance slick, but hobbled by Trumpentruths

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 1st, 2024

On the surface, tonight’s vice-presidential debates harkened back to debates prior to the Trump era. Both candidates were articulate, reasonable-sounding, and civil. If you stripped the content of the debate of all context, they seemed evenly matched. Give Vance credit: he came across as human, a feature he has struggled with since he was nominated.

But he was badly crippled by the fact that he had to present the general lunacy of Trumpentruths. Thus, he had to spout utter absurdities as “Trump saved the ACA” Really? Nobody remembers Trump’s campaign to repeal it, a drive that was stymied in the final minute by a dramatic midnight thumbs-down gesture by a dying John McCain? Walz, thinking fast, immediately brought up that seven years later, Trump only has a “concept of a plan” to deal with health care.

He had to mirror Trump’s waffling on the issue of bodily autonomy. So he had to simultaneously pretend that Trump ended abortion while saying that the public wanted the states to determine a woman’s right to abortion. Walz parried it beautifully, noting that fundamental rights should not be subject to geography. It was the perfect response to the GOP pretense that it’s a states’ rights issue: the constitution supersedes states in the matter of establishing rights, and no state may suborn a national civil right.

On health care, in addition to the ACA blunder, Vance tried to argue that costs of health care needed to be distributed, and not the sole domain of government. He managed to say it in such a way that he wasn’t saying people should depend on churches for health care.

Vance had to evade answering the yes-no-no question, “Is the climate changing?” His response went, “One of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions, this idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change … let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument.” He fluffed the question, saying that the all-powerful Harris should have reduced pollution by bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US, saying (falsely) that the US has the cleanest economy in the world. He claimed, again falsely, that solar panels are all made in China, although when pressed, he muttered that the parts that go into solar panels were made there. Under Biden, of course, manufacturing jobs have been returning to the US (Harris may have supported him, doubtlessly did, but vice presidents don’t have any particular authority on this). He tried saying that Trump did not consider climate change despite the fact that Trump is on record, repeatedly, for making that very claim.

Vance had to bash immigrants since that’s the centerpiece of Trump’s Naziesque hate campaign. He tried blaming immigrants for the high cost of housing, but had to back off when Walz noted that immigration was dropping. I would have noted that few immigrants are financially able to buy a home.

Confronted with the fruits of his hate campaign against Springfield, Ohio, he tried saying that the only reason they were there was because Harris (apparently the most powerful vice president in history) let them in under a special refugee law. They did in fact enter under such a law—one signed by Donald Trump. Oh, and at the invitation of Springfield, which needed labor.

Finally, and this was where Vance successfully knocked himself out, he tried the pretense that Trump did not want to overturn the 2020 election, and wanted only a peaceful protest at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He couldn’t handle the question that he had stated that if he had been vice president instead of Mike Pence, he would have rejected the electoral vote citing “questions” and thrown it to Congress. (In the event of a legitimate tie in the electoral college, Congress could vote on who won. And it isn’t a straight up-and-down vote: each state gets one vote, and in 2021, the outgoing Congress had a majority representation in 27 states. They might have overturned the election had Mike Pence not done his job.)

A lot of people have said that Trump made a poor choice when he selected JD Vance as his running mate. But watching him squirm and battle to toe the party line, the absurd Trumpentruths that have turned the GOP into an anti-American and savage cult, I think it wasn’t Trump who made the bad choice for a running mate. It was JD Vance who made the poor choice for a running mate.

Vice Presidential debates rarely shift votes, and it’s unlikely this one did. Walz won, both on presentation and debate points. It wasn’t the utter carnage of the first two presidential debates, and won’t get a lot of attention.

But watching Vance, and how slick and mentally agile he was, I realized how fantastically dangerous this soulless man would be if he elects to run in 2028, armed with his own Trumpentruths.

 

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