Yes, Rudy is Contemptible and It's His Own Damn Fault

While donald trump skates free of any real punishment for his 34 felony convictions - what the hell is "unconditional discharge?" Sounds like a bad infection - his would-be Roy Cohn just keeps digging himself deeper into the mudpits. Former NYC mayor, once-federal prosecutor, Noun-Verb-9/11 propagator Rudy Giuliani was found in contempt for the second time regarding his defamation verdicts when he lied about Georgia election officials (via Alex Galbraith at Salon):

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell tore into Giuliani on Friday for violating a permanent injunction against bad-mouthing Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two women who successfully sued the former New York City mayor for defamation. Howell said that Giuliani continued to disparage the women on his online radio show, "America's Mayor Live," telling the conservative media figure that continuing to speak ill of Freeman and Moss after the court handed down a massive punishment takes "real chutzpah." 

Giuliani's attorneys argued that the Trump hanger-on genuinely believed that Freeman and Moss committed election fraud, a point that held no water with Howell.

“So, what? You’re saying this defamation is never going to stop?" she asked. "He’s never going to stop saying this because he thinks he’s right?”

To make sure that Giuliani is completely clear on the facts around the 2020 election in Georgia, Howell required him to sign a declaration that he's read all the evidence against his claims of fraud. She threatened Giuliani with a $200 fine and potential jail time if he failed to complete the declaration within 10 days.

Giuliani was found in contempt of court by another federal judge earlier in the week, who ruled that Giuliani was failing to turn over his assets to help pay off his nearly $150 million defamation judgment...

With regards to Giuliani's failure to stop repeating the falsehoods that the court trials revealed as lies, this is how damaged the entire Republican Party / Far Right is when it comes to the Real World. Having built up this huge (false) Narrative that Republicans are honest and true and the liberal Democrats are lying cheaters over the decades, when it comes time to prove that Narrative in places where lying isn't allowed - courtrooms - that Republican Narrative falls apart.

Only, the Far Right wingnuts can't ever admit they were wrong (even if they were genuinely misled by others). Admission of lying or deception in one part of that Narrative draws that whole Narrative into dispute and it would collapse on themselves.

And the Far Right profits from that Narrative. Their talk shows, their podcast, their political campaigning and fundraising all draw on the Narrative that "Republicans can never lose, Republicans are the TRUE Americans, Everyone on the side of the Liberals and Democrats are evil Communists looking to eat your babies." 

Look at Rudy. All those millions of dollars that he's supposed to turn over to his defamation victims: All of that earned by decades of Republican pandering, all of that earned by decades of demonizing others not of their tribe. Giuliani can't stop lying about the results of the 2020 election because doing so destroys his audience, and he loses even more money down the road.

As a side note, you'd think that after trump won re-election this 2024 that the "damage" done by his losing in 2020 would fade away. But no. Remember, trump (and the Far Right) can never admit they lost, so even now trump and his lackeys are gearing up further legal attacks against those they still claim "stole" trump's "rightful victory".

This is the pit in Hell that Giuliani made for himself, by the by. He volunteered to be trump's legal attack dog and now he's paying the price in ways that trump can't save him (unless trump and his corrupted DOJ decide to undo centuries of civil court jurisprudence).

If only 77 million voters understood the corruption they voted back into power this election cycle. If only our fellow Americans realized the contempt trump and his Far Right MAGA base have for the Real Truth: Truth based on Facts and Reality.

We're entering into a dark age of disinformation, constant lying and gaslighting, coming at us from all angles and entering every nook of our lives, even into a judicial system that's supposed to stop lying and deceptions as a means of upholding the Constitution and the laws that preserve our rights and our responsibilities.

Gods help us.

I doubt God will help Rudy. He's doomed to either admit his lies or keeping lying straight into a jail cell.

Flooding the Zone With Lies

The wave of outright lying by the Far Right Noise Machine - and their Republican Party allies hacks - is overwhelming us now as the 2024 election day nears.

It's been well-documented that trump lies nearly every line he says in public; but he's been spewing offensive allegations the past few months that hospitals in Blue states are "performing post-abortions" (which is legally infanticide), and the past few weeks that there are schools forcibly performing transgender surgeries on children (the second part of that covered by Matt Lavietes at NBC News):

Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgery during their school day, worsening fears among some conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state.

Trump made similar remarks — saying children were returning home from school after having had surgical procedures — the previous weekend at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a parent activist group that has gained outsized influence in conservative politics in recent years...

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the U.S., nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere...

According to trump and his Far Right acolytes, our public schools have the medical facilities and the means to perform surgeries at a whim: Considering how most of our schools are struggling to keep up with office supplies makes this deluded narrative a clear fantasy.

You'll notice trump doesn't mention where these things are happening: No mention of which school, which state. If any school has been transitioning kids without parental consent we'd have heard of it by now, even by the traditional media outlets expressing some level of outrage. If any hospital has been killing newborns as trump is claiming, the pro-fetus crowd in those states - even in deep Blue states like California or New York - would be massed outside that building protesting every minute of every day. Vague allegations without any eyewitnesses or documentation, not a thing that could stand up as factual evidence in an actual court of law.

So we know he's lying, we know he's fearmongering to his MAGA base... and yet the mainstream media isn't holding trump accountable - they are not challenging him to his face - for these blatant lies.

And now just over the past few days, JD Vance and several of his GOP buddies are sharing the outrageous and debunked claim that Haitian immigrants are out there eating our pet cats. Even Ian Millhiser over at Vox's Explainer can't fully explain it:

For the record, there is no evidence that any Haitian immigrant ate a cat in Springfield, Ohio, or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter. But the lack of factual evidence hasn’t stopped the GOP from pushing the nativist narrative, which seems designed to play off bigotry and suspicion against the mostly Black population of Haitian immigrants.

More than 300,000 previously unauthorized migrants from Haiti received temporary protected status in June, which means these Haitian immigrants are now — despite Vance’s suggestion otherwise — legally present in the United States. Still, Vance and other Republicans’ attacks on these immigrants come at a moment when more Americans have grown skeptical of immigration...

Springfield’s Police Division said on Monday that there have been no reports of any pets being stolen or eaten in that city. However, there apparently was an incident in Canton, Ohio — a nearly three-hour drive from Springfield — where a woman was charged with cruelty to animals for allegedly killing and eating a cat. But there’s no evidence that this woman is an immigrant or of Haitian descent.

Despite that lack of evidence, the woman appears to have been identified as of Haitian descent in far-right tweets...

The wingnuts are twisting the facts to make it fit their narrative that Haitian refugees - that immigrants in general - are inhuman. That's the only explanation here. And these wingnuts are desperate to turn the manufactured fear of immigrants into easily-promoted hate.

So it’s not surprising that many prominent members of the Republican Party, a party that frequently flags isolated crimes committed by immigrants to fuel nativist sentiment, latched onto an unfounded internet rumor about Haitians and cats as “proof” that immigrants present a problem (that Republicans can fix).

Still, none of this context changes the fact that Republicans at the pinnacle of the party, including sitting US senators and even one of the party’s two nationwide candidates, see no downside to spreading racist, completely unfounded rumors based on random social media posts spread by far-right trolls...

Millhiser spells it out at his conclusion even though he doesn't want to discuss the implications further: Vance and everyone else at the top of the GOP chain of command are happily spreading the fearmongering lies because there's no one willing to hold them accountable for being liars. The ones who could sue for defamation - right now, the entire Haitian community in the United States have every right to sue the GOP for their slander - are too poor or too constrained by their legal status to fight any courtroom battles. The media outlets that are supposed to maintain professional standards of journalism are too cowed by their rich owners - and too blinded by the need for "access" - to push back.

There's been a long and troubling history of the Far Right - especially as trump rose to power among their ranks - to exaggerate at best and outright lie at worst about so-called "criminal" acts committed by liberals and Democrats in order to excite their base into violent action. Think of every attack on Planned Parenthood facilities whenever the wingnuts claim that "baby killers" are farming for body parts. Remember how accusations about a child sex smuggling ring involving Hillary drove a man to attack a pizza parlor in Washington DC.

This is where we are at now in America, as the November general election draws nearer and trump - fearing he is going to lose the Popular vote again and likely the Electoral College - is desperate to stir up the passions of his MAGA base... but not to show up and vote, instead to show up with guns and commit acts of terror and chaos to do whatever it takes to disrupt any voting at all.

Gods help us. The lying is going to get worse until November and beyond, not until every wingnut liar is out of power... and in trump's case sitting in a jail cell.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND TRUTH, AMERICA, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Hold them accountable. That IS in your power to stop their lies.

Update: A historian from Northwestern University is raising the warning flag that violence aimed at immigrants is sure to follow:

So let's not get confused: the debunked claims that refugees are eating cats aren't just nonsense. They are the beginning of a wave of violence. The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they're doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time. (3)

— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) September 10, 2024

trump wants the blood to flow: It's how he knows he has his mob doing his dirty work for him.

The Damage of Far Right Lies

I don't know if I'd mentioned this on the blog, but one of the outcomes of the 2020 post-election madness - where trump claimed "rigged" or "stolen" voting happened, to incite his followers into acts of insurrection - was that one of trump's targets decided to fight back against the Fox News network for promoting trump's falsehoods.

Dominion, one of the companies that manufactures voting machines, got targeted with allegations of rigging their machines to where it cut into their ability to win contracts with states (and I believe other nations). So they filed a massive defamation lawsuit against Fox, and thanks to the discovery process of acquiring evidence to back their suit, revealed a lot of intraoffice scheming and plotting by the media corporation to shill trump's lies to keep their audiences and their profits.

To quote from Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (paywalled):

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact...

The most compelling example of Fox News consciously lying to its viewers, however, arrived yesterday with the evidence in the defamation lawsuits filed by the voting-machine company Dominion, over claims aired on Fox News echoing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been fixed by compromised voting machines. Dominion’s latest filing argues that privately, Fox News hosts admitted that the allegations of election fraud being floated by Trump allies were baseless, but they kept airing them, in part because they feared another right-wing network, Newsmax, was stealing their audience. The filing shows that when Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities were livid, complaining internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” the Fox News executive Bill Sammon wrote to a colleague about the network’s coverage of the “fraud” conspiracy...

The Fox executives knew they were violating journalistic ethics - yes, those do exist - in pursuit of ratings.

The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive. Another is that despite the long-standing right-wing argument that conservatives distrust mainstream media outlets because they do not tell the truth, Fox News executives and personalities understand that their own network loses traction with its audience when it fails to tell the lies that the audience wishes to hear. There are infinite examples of the mainstream press making errors of omission, fact, or framing. But as the private communications in the Dominion filing show, the mainstream media’s unforgivable sin with this constituency is not lying, but failing to consistently lie the way conservative audiences want them to...

Not only is there a closed wingnut echo chamber, that chamber is bolted shut by an audience that wants to remain ignorant of the facts and angered by their own fears.

There is also a story here about how social media and analytics can compel even powerful media institutions to meet a strong demand for falsehoods. Fox News executives understood the election-fraud allegations were nonsense, and they also understood their audience wanted to hear them. Misinformation and propaganda are not novel problems, but modern technology renders the incentives to lie to an audience particularly clear, and the means to reach that audience particularly easy to access. There will always be a potentially profitable demand for self-flattering lies; ethical people and institutions resist supplying them. The ability of individual hustlers to amass an audience of sycophants by feeding them conspiracies puts pressure on more mainstream outlets to gently appease conspiracism, if not to fully capitulate to it.

This is where decades of Fox Not-News - and other Far Right media figures like Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and James O'Keefe (who's not having a good month anyway) - twisted free speech protections to shill conspiracy instead of facts, lies instead of truth.

There shouldn't be a First Amendment right to lie, especially when those lies are malicious, designed to enrage a handful of followers into acts of violence driven by unfounded fear and hatred. We've seen the effects of conspiracy "replacement theory" racism towards Blacks and Jews that have led to mass shootings and constant harassment of innocent Americans.

What Fox Not-News does on a nightly basis - promoting fear, selling rage - has done legitimate harm to the American political discourse. This lawsuit by Dominion could well put a clamp on that harm, but we need to understand that the Far Right punditry will continue to shill that fear and rage until they can no longer profit from it.

We are long past due bringing out the big guns of fraud charges and going after that Far Right Noise Machine with professional malpractice laws. Go after Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's wallets, people. Every penny they earn comes from lying, and no one should be allowed to profit from lies.

trump's Criminal Referrals

Today wasn't exactly Christmas, but it's close enough to Saturnalia to feel festive about how the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Insurrection wrapped up their work and submitted their findings.

Facing the reality that the incoming Republican majority of the House would shut them down - and likely repudiate everything they uncovered and documented - the committee gave a summary presentation, and voted on submitting their recommendations of further action against those they found deeply involved in the creation, managing, and execution of the violent riots that tried to disrupt Congress from voting on the Electoral College results.

Andrew Prokop at Vox goes into the details and what the next steps should be:

The committee argues that the former president not only bears responsibility for the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but that his effort to overturn the presidential election was incredibly extensive, corrupt, and illegal...

The committee presents the most comprehensive effort to make the case against Trump we’ve seen so far, with much more evidence about, and understanding of, what actually happened than Congress had back when the House impeached Trump for these events days after they transpired...

The latest version of events reads a lot more like a prosecutorial brief, and, in a sense, it is one — committee members voted Monday to recommend Trump’s referral for prosecution by the Justice Department. They argued he likely committed four crimes: 1) Obstruction of an official proceeding, 2) Conspiracy to defraud the United States, 3) Conspiracy to make a false statement, and 4) Assisting an insurrection. (Helpfully, a federal judge, David Carter, already ruled months ago that evidence suggests Trump committed some of these crimes, and the committee cites his analysis.)

The referral will mean little in practice, because the DOJ has long been investigating these matters on its own, with special counsel Jack Smith now in charge of that probe. But reading the executive summary gives a sense of what some future prosecutor like Smith might say if an indictment of Trump does proceed...

That's one of the sticking points why we as a nation can't celebrate yet: Congress may investigate matters and reveal evidence much like a grand jury, but actual prosecution rests with the Executive branch with the Justice Department. In theory, the Attorney General (Merrick Garland) could ignore the committee's recommendations entirely. If there's any good news here, it's that Garland appointed a Special Counsel in Jack Smith, and he's been aggressively pursuing trump's electoral interference well enough to suggest he'll follow through on some of what the committee's uncovered.

And what the January 6th committee uncovered was just how close our nation came to a straight-up coup d'etat:

When the nation watched Trump’s attempt to stay in power unfold in real time, it often seemed faintly comical. Unhinged figures like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and pillow salesman Mike Lindell played starring roles spreading utter nonsense as establishment Republicans tried to avert their eyes. Judges constantly threw Trump’s lawsuits out of court, and GOP state officials refused to act on his behalf. Fiascos like Giuliani’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference ensued...

But the committee’s investigation and the executive summary of its report put forward a very different interpretation of events. Rather than flailing and silly, they argue that Trump was deadly serious all along. They say his conduct was generally part of a larger plan. They say there’s some evidence it was premeditated. And they don’t buy the argument that Trump may have believed his own lies — they say he was knowingly prevaricating.

First, the committee argues that when you look at Trump’s conduct after the election in totality, it does look like a larger plan. Early in the executive summary, the committee lists among its key findings that Trump:

* Spread false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 election

* Plotted to overturn the outcome of the election

* Corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence, US Justice Department officials, state officials and legislators, and members of Congress to help him overturn the election

* Oversaw an effort to send fake electoral certificates to Congress

* Submitted and verified false information as part of his court challenges to the outcome

* Summoned thousands of his supporters to Washington, inflamed them on January 6, and then delayed intervening to rein them in once many of them stormed the Capitol

All this, the executive summary asserts, amounts to a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” That is: this wasn’t ordinary politics, it was a criminal conspiracy...

Second, the committee argues that Trump’s decision to falsely declare victory on election night was “premeditated.” They cite evidence that Tom Fitton of the conservative group Judicial Watch advised Trump to do this days before the election, and that outside allies like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone predicted Trump would do this. (Speculation that Trump would do this was also widespread in the media...)

I personally doubt trump needed others like Fitton, Bannon or Stone to push him to lie about winning. It's BEEN in trump's nature to never admit he loses, so lying about it was going to happen anyway. What the committee found was trump's closest advisors were going along with that lie, hence the criminal conspiracy.

Third, there’s the issue of prevarication. The committee argues Trump was not just mistakenly believing conspiracy theories about election fraud, but was rather “purposely and maliciously” lying to the public. One striking table in the executive summary lists 18 incidents in which Trump was privately informed a specific claim he was making about election fraud was false, only for Trump to subsequently repeat that false claim in public. These include claims about thousands of dead people voting in Georgia, “rigged” voting machines, and reported malfeasance at vote count sites. Again and again, he was told these claims were inaccurate, but he just kept making them.

Whether Trump was knowingly lying in claiming election fraud is an important question to sort out, because it gets to the question of his intent and has implications for the strength of criminal charges against him. If Trump knew he was lying as he made his false claims, that could help any future prosecutors make their case. The committee again and again takes the position that their evidence supports the view these were knowing, deliberate lies...

We've known - I speak in the plural 'we' about my fellow Americans, both Republican and Democrat alike - for years that trump lies, and he lies at a level of gaslighting that no other public figure has done in ages (it's been proven his political opposites like Obama and Hillary don't lie as much as trump does). The horrifying thing is that trump's supporters ignore the lying, happily buying his lies because it's the Narrative they need to justify their fear and their hate.

It's been a problem all these years, because trump's gaslighting made it difficult to ever hold him accountable, as his political allies kept passing the buck on where trump's lying needed to stop. As David Frum notes at The Atlantic (paywall), it's been a problem that's been avoided for too long:

There has never been any mystery about what happened on January 6, 2021. As Senator Mitch McConnell said at Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There’s no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

Thanks to the work of the congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Americans now have ample detail to support McConnell’s assessment. They know more about when and how Trump provoked the event. They have a precise timeline of Trump’s words and actions. They can identify who helped him, and who tried to dissuade him.

But with all of this information, Americans are left with the same problem they have faced again and again through the Trump years: What to do about it? Again and again, they get the same answer: “It’s somebody else’s job.”

Frum points out, at every turn investigating trump's potentially criminal behavior trying to hold him accountable, the government failed to do so. Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 elections revealed a lot of criminal behavior by others - and to successful plea agreements and jury trials - but when it came to holding trump to account for his acts of obstruction, Mueller refused to indict a sitting President - blame that damned OLC memo arguing for immunity - and tried to pass the buck to Congress to impeach him instead. The Democratic-controlled House refused.

Soon after that, Congress had a chance to hold trump accountable for his attempted extortion of Ukraine to force that country to falsely claim "investigation" of Hunter Biden to give trump mudslinging material against Joe Biden in 2020. They had him both making the threats and trying to hide the evidence, but the failings of impeachment - the partisan divide making Republicans refuse to impeach their own - meant trump walked away from that.

Frum then points out the accountability trump faced with voters - with 81 million siding with Biden - only led to trump pulling every criminal scheme he and his advisors could think of to overturn those results. In Frum's view the rejection by voters should have been the end of trump, but trump found political allies among wingnut Republicans in Congress to assist him with the January 6th riots, and who are publicly defending trump to this day.

Frum doesn't even mention the ongoing scandal that was trump's open violations of the Emoluments Clause, because the legal argument of "who had authority to file charges" delayed the matter long enough for trump to avoid it. Again, an accountability moment set aside by a legal system that didn't want to dig too deep into trump's greed and malice, much to the detriment of our nation's ethics.

And so the circle was complete. Criminal prosecution? No, it’s up to Congress. Congressional impeachment? No, leave the decision to the voters. Refusal to accept an election defeat? Back to criminal prosecution.

To repeat McConnell’s phrase, it’s “practically and morally” very difficult to hold a wayward president to account. An American president is bound by law and operates through legal institutions, but a president also has sources of personal authority that are not beholden to the law and are exercised outside institutions. Trump drew more deeply than most presidents on nonlegal, non-institutional authority.

trump dodged accountability because no previous President broke the rules the way trump did. Our system of federal checks and balances relied on a practice of "Good Faith" between parties that no longer means anything, and with branches of government - the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial - unable to determine who does what.

And now Frum - much like the rest of America - is wondering if this Select House Committee's findings will be taken seriously by the one federal office - the Justice Department - finally left holding this ever-passed hot potato.

There are serious signs - evidence of DOJ grand juries examining a number of trumpian crimes - that justice may indeed be coming for donald trump. But it needs to be swifter than ever before, because trump will keep finding ways to avoid his fate and mock our laws again and again.

The real celebrating should kick in when these criminal referrals on trump's violent lies turn into criminal charges, and a perp walk in handcuffs for the ages.

Get to it, Justice.

With My Mind, It Makes It Unreal

Okay, with all the craziness in the past twenty-four hours, there's a little too much about trump's legal woes to cram into one blog article at the moment, but I will focus on this (via Crooks & Liars):

No, seriously, what the hell?

I understand a little that trump is desperate to gaslight his way out of a legal jam here, by claiming every classified document the FBI recovered at Mar-A-Lago was secretly declassified - so he can avoid the serious espionage charges he's facing - but he can't fit those lies into the reality that NOBODY who worked for him can confirm he gave any "standing order" to declassify the documents he kept. So he's taking the "when the President does it, it means it's legal" argument and pushing it into the meta-level by claiming "when the President THINKS IT, it means it's legal."

That argument still runs into the problem that NOBODY ELSE CAN READ HIS SHIT-FILLED MIND, and can confirm what documents were declassified or not.

Jesus. This is like claiming "Well, in my mind I ate a slice of pie, so that pie must have been real." Or worse, imagining that you're secretly married to (insert current fantasy sexy actress/model) and that it's alright to stalk her now.

YOUR MIND DOESN'T MAKE IT REAL, trump. THE LAW MAKES IT REAL. And the law says you took documents you had NO RIGHT to take.

Insert GIFs of President Bartlet headdesking to infinity here.

Too Little Justice Or No Justice At All (w/ Update)

Update below:

You'd think the legal system under a Biden administration would be fighting harder to punish both the liars and thieves that made up trump's administration, or at least go after the January 6 Insurrectionists with more fervor.

Alas on both counts. Although some justice is served for one of the rioters, it still doesn't seem like eight months is enough does it? (via Ryan Lucas at NPR): 

A Florida crane operator who walked onto the Senate floor during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has been sentenced to eight months in federal prison and two years of supervised release.

Paul Hodgkins' sentencing is the first in a felony case stemming from the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. It is viewed as a potential bellwether for how other Capitol defendants charged with similar offenses are likely to be treated.

Hodgkins pleaded guilty last month to a single count of obstructing an official proceeding. On Jan. 6, he marched from then-President Donald Trump's rally near the White House to the Capitol, where he walked inside and onto the floor of the Senate while carrying a red "Trump 2020" flag...

You could argue that Hodgkins by pleading to a felony does some measure of mercy, but dammit there are still too many who participated in that attempted coup who haven't even been caught yet, and there are too many trumpian supporters eager to try another takeover. We ought to be seeing more felony charges against these rioters, more than just the single indictments of Obstruction that our Justice Dept. seems to think sufficient enough.

Another act of injustice reported today relates to trump's corrupt Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who was facing the possibility of Perjury charges relating to false testimony he gave before Congress during his tenure. Due to legal chicanery, Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland decided not to press the matter further, stirring up commentary like Paul Waldman's at the Washington Post (likely behind paywall):

There’s a temptation to view what Ross did as simply politics, which in a way it was: When he repeatedly made false statements to Congress under oath about the administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, Ross was operating in the service of a broader lie being repeated by multiple Trump officials and advocates. But that makes it worse, not better...

I can’t say why they decided Ross’s case did not warrant prosecution, though it’s true that people are not often prosecuted for lying to Congress. That doesn’t mean it’s unheard of, however. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former factotum, pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress on Trump’s behalf. Figures in the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals were also indicted for that crime.

Upon taking office, the Trump administration decided it wanted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time in 70 years. The reasons were plain: The administration was doing its best to intimidate immigrants, both documented and otherwise, and a citizenship question would make them fearful about answering the census. That would make their communities look smaller, which would then deprive them of resources and political power.

But the administration couldn’t just come out and say that. So it came up with one of the dumbest cover stories in an administration that was full of them: adding a citizenship question to the census, they said, was necessary for the Justice Department to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act. It made no sense at all, and nobody believed it for a moment.

But on two occasions, Ross was questioned under oath about it and made specific factual assertions — assertions that were false. Ross testified that his department (Commerce has authority over the Census Bureau) only pursued the citizenship question because it was asked to do so by the Justice Department.

But emails obtained in a lawsuit revealed that not only was that false, but Ross and his aides had pressured a reluctant Justice Department to essentially create a bogus paper trail that would give support to the lie that the whole thing was the department’s idea...

In a sane and just world, it's that kind of deceit in government that ought to trigger warrants and court trials. But why not, why allow one of trump's biggest corrupt cronies to skip merrily away from ANY accountability? Back to Waldman:

It wouldn’t be too surprising to hear that the department figured it wasn’t a serious enough crime to justify indicting someone so high-ranking. But that’s just the trouble: When you communicate that you can perjure yourself before Congress with impunity, the result will be more perjury.

And it reinforces the idea that in politics, anything is justified — manipulating the system, lying to the public, lying under oath, anything — and you might well get away with it. At this particular moment in our history, is that a message we want to send?

It's as though there's a strain of cowardice within Democratic ranks that pursuing justice against partisan and corrupt Republicans could stir up more trouble for themselves rather than push back against the lies that break our nation further into pieces.

The only way we can rebuild America is to return to our efforts to build towards justice. We need to hold the likes of Ross - and William Barr, and Steve Mnuchin, and trump himself - accountable for the lies they spewed that warped our reality.

I just wish Biden and Garland and other Democratic leaders realize that, and act soon. trump's lies keep spreading every day that we don't do anything about that.

Update 7/20: It turns out myself and the other Paul - and other commentators - jumped the gun on this. The decision to NOT go after Ross for perjury was done under Barr's watch, not Garland's.

An update on the Wilbur Ross story from yesterday: Turns out that the decision not to prosecute him for lying to Congress was made during the Trump admin, so everyone who said "Damn you Merrick Garland!" was jumping the gun a bit.

My updated story: https://t.co/xMYcZHuHix

— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) July 20, 2021

So, apologies to Merrick Garland.

(beat)

Um, why isn't Merrick Garland reversing Barr's bad call here and prosecuting Ross anyway?! CMON MAN.

The Big Lie And the One Truth (w/ Update)

(Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for adding me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round Up! As always, you're invited to leave a comment and visit the rest of the blog. Today (Wed. May 12) is looking like it's going to be an insane day...)

So the Republican downward spiral seems to be gaining speed. Via Zach Beauchamp at Vox: 

Remaining in the GOP’s good graces requires that elected officials either actively embrace lies about 2020 or, at very least, refuse to condemn them. As a result, 2020 conspiracy theories are exerting a dominant influence on the party — shaping both legislation and the base’s worldview...

From top to bottom, the GOP has been conquered by the Big Lie (note: trump claiming the 2020 results were stolen and that he won both the Popular Vote and the Electoral College). Much as North Korean state press proclaims that Kim Jong Il invented the hamburger, Republicans must now proclaim that was something fishy about Joe Biden’s victory...

Trump’s pronouncements, endorsed and spread by a number of prominent Republicans, radicalize the base — undermining faith in democracy itself. Republicans inclined to challenge this view realize they’re out of step with the party and mostly stay quiet; those that do speak up publicly, like Cheney or Raffensperger, get marginalized or stripped of their power. This weakens the constituency to challenge any future lies from Trump and other like-minded Republicans.

It’s a one-way ratchet, where a faction of the GOP elite led by Trump pushes the party further and further down an anti-democratic road. And there’s no obvious way to stop it...

What is happening now is that the Republican Party and all of its apparatus - not just the elected officials but the party handlers and above all their media punditry allies at Fox Not-News and elsewhere - are stuck defending an incredibly Big yet easily-disprovable Lie. 

They got stuck partly because they got stuck with a Big Lying Bullshitter in trump placing himself at the head of their table. trump came in lying on Day One, proclaiming himself the most popular and most beloved even at the emptiest Inauguration in memory, and forced not only his underlings to shill that lie but got the rest of the GOP to either buy in or stay silent (which re-enforced the lie's power).

I said it before: Once you become trump's Bitch you will ALWAYS be trump's Bitch. Once he gets you lying for him to prove your worth, he will make you lie even more with even flimsier bullshit until your reputation is worthless.

But this isn't entirely trump's fault the Republican Party has caught itself trapped defending an indefensible Big Lie.

The Republicans are stuck with the Big Lie because it happens to fit this One Truth:

The Republican Party cannot and will not share power with a Democratic Party they view as un-American and thus illegitimate.

Somewhere back in time - you can argue happening between the rise of the conservative Southern Strategy in the late 1960s or the rise of Saint Ronnie in the 1980s or the corruption of Newt's Contract On America in the 1990s - the Republican Party bought into the idea that only they were true God-fearing God-chosen Gun-worshiping patriots. (Letting the Far Right Christian forces take control of the Party had a lot to do with that mindset winning out)

The ongoing slander of accusing liberal Democrats of being Socialists or Communists or both from the 1940s grew like a cancer into the belief - even as Socialism faded and Communism collapsed in the 1990s - that Democrats are destructive and anti-American. It doesn't help that a lot of liberalism brought Blacks and Jews (and slowly among more Women) in large numbers into the Democratic ranks to where the Republican paranoia fell even more into racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism.

All of that fuels the fear and anger and paranoia of not only the Republican voting base but also a Republican leadership that has driven out any moderating voices and replaced them with more rabid and aggressive haters. It's gotten harder and harder for the GOP to even reconsider its world-view against Democrats because it keeps adding more members to their ranks who will never change their hatred of the Dreaded Other Democrats.

This Republican Truth - Democrats Should Never Hold Power That Rightfully Belongs To Us - fits easily into trump's Big Lie - Democrats Stole My God-Given Rightful Power - and now those two parts have fused into one.

But the Republicans have a problem. Where their One Truth was merely a world-view that did not expose itself to self-destructive implosion (Republicans could keep believing it and still function rationally in polite society), the Big Lie is a direct attack on the Real World that sooner rather than later is going to hit the Brick Wall of Unbreakable Facts. The Big Lie compels trump's believers into direct action - SEE the January 6th Insurrection - and these actions have legal consequences where the Big Lie has not and cannot prevail.

The Republicans are betting on their Big Lie carrying them forward into the future. But it's a Big Lie stuck in the past of a failed 2020 election, pushed constantly by a Big Liar in trump who cannot avoid his impending fate either in civil or criminal courts.

The Republicans' One Truth has become their Big Lie.

It's just a question now of when they pay for that lie, because it's too big to avoid.

This trumpian Winter of Discontent

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this blog on Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Io Saturnalia to you all, and stay safe for 2021!)

In this past week or so - after the Electoral College performed its duty and officially confirmed Joe Biden as our next President and Kamala Harris our next Vice President this January 2021 - I felt the need to apologize in some way. I was looking back at all the things I'd been blogging since before Election Day, taking note of all the times I was raising alarm at some of the more unsettling and violent things donald trump and his fervent Far Right voting base were plotting to do. 

I looked at some of the stuff I was posting and I'd come to a shameful understanding that I seemed to be fearmongering much in the way the wingnuts had been fearmongering about Dems and Progressives. I'd kept posting stuff like "Oh SHIT they're arming and marching stay alert America" at every trumpian outburst, and it didn't look good. I mean, fear is a rational response to an irrational situation, but I might have been overdoing it.

And then THIS SHIT happens - like an ex-cop on a wingnut payroll kidnapping a repairman and his truck in a desperate attempt to prove thousands of ballots had been "stolen" - and I retract my apology, because CHRIST ALMIGHTY it's getting crazier out there. Here's the statement from the Harris County DA office:

According to a court document describing probable cause for the charge, Aguirre told police shortly after the Oct. 19 incident, that he was part of a group of private citizens called, “Liberty Center,” who were conducting a civilian investigation into the alleged ballot scheme.

According to Aguirre, he had been conducting surveillance on the victim for four days under a theory the victim was the mastermind of a giant fraud, and there were 750,000 fraudulent ballots in a truck he was driving. Instead, the victim turned out to be an innocent and ordinary air conditioner repairman.

Aguirre ran his SUV into the back of the truck to get the technician to stop and get out, according to the document. When the technician got out of the truck, Aguirre, pointed a handgun at the technician, forced him to the ground and put his knee on the man’s back – an image captured on the body-worn camera of a police officer.

Aguirre directed police to a parking lot nearby where another suspect, who has not been identified, took the truck. There were no ballots in the truck. It was filled with air conditioning parts and tools.

Aguirre never told police that he had been paid a total of $266,400 by the Houston-based Liberty Center for God and Country, with $211,400 of that amount being deposited into his account the day after the incident...

It's that last paragraph where I think the media is burying the lede. Aguirre was on a payroll for this obscure but obviously well-funded organization focused on proving voter fraud that no one has been able to prove. This ex-cop was getting paid a handsome sum - few people are paid six-figure wages like that! - to prove a lie. Results were expected for that kind of money, you'd think. There's a saying from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” There should be a related saying to that: "When a man is getting paid to prove a lie, expect that man to commit crimes to make that lie come true."

There are hundreds of political operatives and consultants - there is an army of trump lawyers charging back and forth across every courthouse - trying to force trump's lie of a "stolen election" to come true. There's millions of dollars floating out there paying every single one of them to subvert any morality and commit any sin, just to gain a foothold somewhere to keep trump happy.

But the courtrooms - despite all the partisan hackery that trump and Mitch have pushed through the Senate to fill those benches - are crucibles, in them we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product: The Truth, for all time. (Yes I am quoting Picard, actually the screenwriter is Melinda Snodgrass). trump's lies about voter fraud can find no safe haven in the legal system, and so any legitimate excuse for trump to seize and remain in power cannot exist.

It doesn't mean trump won't stop trying. Which is why this past Friday when word got out about trump plotting with some of his crazier allies about seizing the ballot machines and declaring martial law, it should have activated every DEFCON-1 warning among Americans that shit is getting real:

SCOOP - Sidney Powell was in Oval Office last night as POTUS discussed making her special counsel for election fraud. @KannoYoungs and me https://t.co/wUB8ZMrPxp

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) December 19, 2020

If we can go to Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine for more details:

At the White House on Friday, President Trump held what may have been his most deranged meeting yet. In it, the president raged at his loyalists for betraying him, and discussed taking extralegal measures to overturn the election.

The meeting, first reported by the New York Times, included lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, convicted felon Michael Flynn, and Rudy Giuliani. One plan floated at the meeting was for Trump to appoint Powell as a “special counsel” overseeing allegations of voter fraud. Powell’s voter fraud claims are so fantastical she has been mocked even by other far-right legal conspiracy theorists. Andrew McCarthy, a former birther and author of one book titled How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda and another calling for his impeachment on multiple counts, has described Powell’s vote-fraud claims as “loopy.”

Trump also reportedly brought up Flynn’s proposal, which he has expounded on cable news, to impose martial law and direct the military to hold a new election. “At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea,” reports the Times...

There is no reason to believe Trump commands the power to actually implement any of these wild ideas. Trump’s best chance to steal the election was to have the decisive voting margin in the Electoral College determined by the counting of mail-in ballots that were mailed before, but arrived after Election Day. This would have let him either persuade the Republican-controlled Supreme Court to invalidate those decisive ballots, or Republican-controlled state legislators to disregard their state’s voting results and appoint pro-Trump electors to represent their state...

They tried to force "competing Electors" last week in publicly-staged counter-votes during the Electoral College's actual count, as though these fake results could be presented in Congress to force a negation of the real thing. Problem is, there's no guarantee that Congress will overturn the voters and put trump back in office. At best it would still evict trump and Pence from office on January 20 and make Pelosi (as Speaker) promoted to the Presidency due to the succession rules of the 25th Amendment.

None of this is stopping trump or the Republicans from arguing that Biden is an "illegitimate" winner, although by all measures - legal voting results, no evidence of mass fraud, a verified Electoral College - Biden is indeed our President-Elect set to swear into office exactly one month from now.

None of this is going to stop trump and his cohorts - his rabid fanbase, the wingnuts paying themselves to perpetuate their own lies, the greedy and corrupt - from pursuing even more outlandish and likely violent reactions to the basic norms of political reality. The legal filings are going to get worse and the Freudian slips marginally funnier ("Plenty of perjury"? Don't they have these legal forms on a bloody template by now? Where's the damn Spell-Check on WordPerfect?!)

 

I am not apologizing one bit for fearmongering about trump's efforts to start up his coup and break the Constitution.

I am not going to relax until January 20th rolls around and the Secret Service drags him out of the White House by his feet.

Anything can happen in the next 30 days. Stay alert and stay safe. AND GODDAMMIT WEAR THE DAMN MASKS, COVID IS GETTING WORSE. /muttergrumble

 

trump Lied, We Died. DO SOMETHING TO STOP HIM, America

So this dropped today (via Adam L Silverman at Balloon Juice, but seriously this should be on all the major Non-Right Wing news sites by now):

Lordy! There Are Tapes! Bob Woodward’s Rage Has Leaked To CNN & By Leaked I Mean Bob Woodward Gave CNN the Book and the Tapes

Whenever anyone tweets "Lordy" on Twitter it means someone has tapes of trump tripping over his own ego to expose his sins (we still haven't seen a hair of the reported Pee Tape though). When I saw it trend, I knew it was bad, but I had to find out how bad (from here Silverman reports from the original CNN source):

President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” and that he repeatedly played it down publicly, according to legendary journalist Bob Woodward in his new book “Rage.”

"This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward on February 7.

In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. “Pretty amazing,” Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times “more deadly” than the flu.

Trump’s admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was “going to disappear” and “all work out fine.”

The book, using Trump’s own words, depicts a President who has betrayed the public trust and the most fundamental responsibilities of his office. In “Rage,” Trump says the job of a president is “to keep our country safe.” But in early February, Trump told Woodward he knew how deadly the virus was, and in March, admitted he kept that knowledge hidden from the public.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19, even as he had declared a national emergency over the virus days earlier. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic...”

Well, we still had a national panic. And then the nation split into two factions: One faction that believed every word from trump that the panic was overblown and the whole thing was a hoax to make trump look bad; the second faction that realized real quick that trump was LYING as usual and did everything they could to self-quarantine and wear masks everywhere they had to go.

And because trump downplayed the crisis, because trump added confusion to the public awareness rather than giving honest warning to the hazards of COVID, because trump lied to the press and the public and everyone else, the United States is facing one of the highest death totals the planet will witness (nearing 200,000 total COVID-related deaths this September).

We're nearing the death count of our major wars, far higher than any terrorist attack or natural disaster.

Because trump lied. Because trump knew the virus would strike at people he did not have to care about, even though his OATH OF OFFICE should compel him to defend this nation from all threats.

There's a word for that.

Genocide.

And trump is doing everything in his power to cheat his way to another four years of this insanity, with an entire Republican Party willing to commit every sin to help him.

Gods help us.

Voting him and every GOP official out of power is the only way we're going to survive, for the LOVE OF GOD every honest American wishing to protect their loved ones need to understand that.

The Nation Plans Accordingly...

I hear always the admonishment of my friends:

"Bolt her in, constrain her!"
But who will guard the guardians? 
The wife plans accordingly and begins with them.

-- Juvenal, Satire VI

I've been struggling the past few days to get into words what it is I want to say about the current protests and community uprisings against police brutality, tying it in with the remembrances of Tank Man and the need for protesting injustice under all circumstances.

In the meantime, this article - written by an ex-cop under the pseudonym A.Cab (the newest acronym for All Cops Are Bastards) about the systemic bias, rage, racism, sexism, and bullying in law enforcement - on Medium has turned into the must-read thing of the moment: 

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.

But enough is enough...

If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.

We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years...

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it...

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force: “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity...

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not “try to be helpful” with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is “important” or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith.

Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops...

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people...

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started...

This is where, in a sane and just world, instead of sending out more cops we need to be sending out more social workers. But gee, who wants to spend a billion dollar budget on social workers...? Back to the anonymous op-ed:

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.
No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.
Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.
Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won’t motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.
Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you’d see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.
One final idea: consider abolishing the police...

As for all the calls (like this one) to "abolish the police" sounds like extreme demolition, but in the context that the op-ed writer is telling us, it's more along the lines of extreme reform. That things need to be broken down in order to rebuild something without the stain and sins of the previous shape of things. The current system, there's almost nothing good to salvage. The entire setup has to go, and a new, more humane and less violent system put in place. This requires not a revolution but determination.

A lot of this were warning signs back during Ferguson. I went back to look at what I wrote then. When the anonymous cop writes about "No More Civil Asset Forfeiture," that was one of the biggest takeaways we got from the official reports about those dark months. The way that department operated - fining the hell out of poor residents in order to raise their own revenues - created what I called an extortion racket the police couldn't give up. We had a legal system that relied on bad police behavior to the point our prosecutors and judges were accomplices after the fact. In Ferguson, much like what we've had in our cities this month, we had cops carrying firepower equal to most standing armies all to shoot and maim unarmed civilians. I still remember that quote from an actual Iraqi veteran: "We rolled lighter than that in an actual war zone."

SIX YEARS AGO, we had all these warning signs, and we've done nothing since then but let the local and county law enforcement get worse.

The need for accountability out of our guardians has always been high. The failure of our nation to hold them accountable has always been a great tragedy. Too many people have been killed and harmed already.

Who polices the police? We should, otherwise like the wife of Juvenal's satire we need to plan ourselves accordingly.

Just the Facts Jack In This Age of trumpian Bull

One of the more frustrating things about The Darkest Timeline has been how trump would take to his Twitter account to post and retweet nonfactual statements, wild accusations, and straight-up lies.

However over the past week or so, trump has gone overboard pushing a discredited conspiracy theory about former Congresscritter-turned-MSNBC-talking-head Joe Scarborough, a story involving a staff worker who died at a district office back in 2001. It's gotten so bad that the woman's widower sent formal letters to Twitter and the press begging for the social media outfit to use its authority to delete the offending tweet(s).

The public outcry against trump's abuse of Twitter's code of conduct had been an ongoing protest ever since 2017 - no previous President Loser of the Popular Vote has been so vulgar towards the general population the way trump has - but this moment seemed to have crossed a line even for the notoriously lax Twitter bosses.

The next time trump went to Tweet an outrageous falsehood - about the legitimacy of vote-by-mail - Twitter took the extraordinary step of adding a footnote that basically accused the Tweet (and trump) of being wrong. Let's refer to Gilad Edelman at Wired for the rest:

What prompted Twitter to finally break the seal was a two-tweet tirade about the supposed dangers of expanding vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic...

Later that evening, Twitter added a note to the bottom of the tweet: a big exclamation mark and a message reading “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” which linked to a Twitter Moment fact-check. “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud,” read the bold heading. Beneath it came some bullet points on vote-by-mail, followed by a curated feed of tweets picking apart Trump’s various recent claims about it...

The Twitter spokesperson said that flagging Trump’s vote-by-mail tweet was the debut of a similar policy to protect “civic integrity” by correcting false information about voting or the census. Twitter didn’t say so, but it surely helped that this particular tweet contained one nugget of rock-solid, certifiably false information: the claim that California was sending ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there.” In fact, ballots are going only to registered voters...

This is, for the most part, the first time trump has been contradicted in real-time pretty much to his face (nearly every other countering in the media has been indirectly through op-ed articles and pundit shows).

It's telling that Twitter still hasn't confronted trump on the personal attacks he's done on their service, which are offensive and wrong and deserve him getting his account suspended (AKA Twitter Jail). Still, any little bit helps... Because trump's response to getting punched back has been to lash out in full meltdown. Via Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair:

Trump threatened to regulate or shut down social media companies the day after being fact-checked by Twitter. “Republicans feel that social media platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” the president wrote in a post on Wednesday. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

Funny thing about the First Amendment, it's not on trump's side here:

The president, notes the Associated Press, does not have the power to “unilaterally regulate or close the companies, which would require action by Congress or the Federal Communications Commission,” and Trump’s call to expand regulation on such tech giants “appeared to fly in the face of long-held conservative principles on deregulation...”

Anything trump tries to do to punish Twitter will likely lead to lawsuits taking years to resolve, by which time trump could be out of office (and fleeing for a country without extradition).

The facts, obviously, aren't going to slow trump down on this. he's threatening to issue an Executive Order (remember when Republicans attacked Obama for his EOs?) to compel Twitter and other social media outlets - Facebook and YouTube, both services facing increasing pressure to police their websites for disinformation over COVID-19 and other conspiracy nutcase theories - to bend to his will. trump doesn't have the legal standing but he has the ego of the bully to make life harder for the companies attempting to curtail his - and his cronies' - ongoing efforts to gaslight the world.

But the facts should matter. And these social media sites have an obligation, not only to the First Amendment but also to the common interest of properly informing the public. Forcing trump to confront his falsehoods in real-time, cutting off the Russian bots trying to overwhelm our attention with disinfo, and making sure Americans have the correct facts ought to be their agenda here on out.

Because as we've seen with three years of trump's gaslighting, lies and disinformation kills.

Rat-Tailed Donny Is a Second Hand Hood

Everyone else is documenting the crazy, but what the hell here's my twelve cents after hearing about trump's latest "What The Goddamn HELL Is the Shitgibbon Saying Now?" marathon. Via Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

On Monday afternoon, President Trump told the press that he’s taking a drug called hydroxychloroquine as a preventative to ward off the coronavirus — a practice for which there is no evidence and that could, in theory, have negative side effects as serious as hallucinations and heart failure.

“I take it,” Trump said. “So far, I seem to be okay.”

Hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malarial drug that a non-randomized study from a French lab, publicized in March, initially suggested could be used as a treatment in fighting the coronavirus. In March, Trump frequently touted the drug, calling it “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” But further studies have concluded that it is not effective in many cases and should not be routinely used to treat patients.

As previously noted at this blog, at Vox, and elsewhere, the hydroxychloroquine doesn't help against COVID and actually increased the death rate, most likely from the negative effects mentioned earlier. In short, it's NOT a drug you should be taking unless you're dealing with an actual condition - malaria, I think lupus - it's meant for. Back to Beauchamp:

Trump seems to be taking it not as a treatment for COVID-19 — he’s apparently tested negative — but as a preventative to protect himself from contracting it. There’s no medical evidence supporting the idea that this would work, and the risk of potential psychiatric and cardiac side effects, which are serious, would likely strongly outweigh any (hypothetical) benefits...

One of two things:

1) Either trump really is taking a drug that has no proven effect in combating COVID-19, which has documented side effects that could leave him (more) brain-damaged and dying from heart attack. He's doing this despite the likely medical advice he's supposed to be getting from the experts supposed to inform him on how to combat the pandemic, which shows AGAIN the poor judgment and obsessive self-destructive behavior trump's been showing for decades.

2) trump is lying. Either to allay any fear he himself is sick, or lying to keep his fanbase ill-informed, dependent on him instead of the experts, and likely getting those ill-informed dupes to buy more of the drug - is there any amazement that a solid number of his critics think he's getting kickbacks on drug sales? - to use without care or concern.

Nearly everybody I know on Twitter pretty much talked me into believing the latter instead of the former. Option 1) is so reckless and lethal that even a moran like trump wouldn't seriously volunteer himself to do. Option 2) fits his modus operandi of bullshitting the public, posing himself as a decisive, gung-ho leader, and then backing off with another round of lies to pretend he never said the first set of lies anyway.

The Twitter hashtag #HESLYING was a popular trend for the whole afternoon.

But this is what trump is stuck with. he refuses to make the hard choices - keep up the social distancing, take the economic hits of closing half our public spaces, spend money on keeping people alive and out of debt - that our nation needs right now to survive not just the next few months but what's looking like the rest of the year (and well into 2021).

trump wants that easy rescue. he wants a magic elixir at the doorstep to cure all ails and solve all woes.

trump is still digging hard for a miracle cure.

Problem is, he's pushing a deadly drug like some street-corner hoodlum that'll kill us faster than the virus.

Problem is, trump is digging our graves instead.

A Nation Divided By The Comfort of Right Wing Lies

As the impeachment proceedings into trump's scandalous behavior with Ukraine soldier forward, the likelihood of it ending in peace and with some national solace in justice served grows less.

Mostly because the Far Right of this nation will never believe the truth of it. Via David Frum at The Atlantic:

...Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, opened today with a statement attacking media reporting on the Trump administration. He singled out six stories for attack...

Nunes can complain about this story, but it has since been corroborated by the haul of text and other evidence uncovered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Trump lied about the deal again and again, on Twitter and from his own lips. For Nunes to suggest that Trump was somehow a victim of false reporting on the Trump Tower Moscow project is to endorse that lying.

Nunes knew that his intended audience would not bother to review the history as you and I just did. Nunes is not interested in talking with anyone who is interested in checking claims, or verifying statements. He is talking only with people locked into a closed and sealed knowledge system.

This closed knowledge system entraps millions of Americans in a universe of untruth, in which Trump is a victim and the allegations against him are “fake news.” The prisoners and victims of this system live in a dreamworld of lies. Yet it would not quite be accurate to describe them as uninformed. They are disinformed, and on a huge scale. The false-knowledge system supported by Nunes is closed and sealed, but also vast and intricate.

The Ukraine allegation against President Trump is simple and straightforward. It can all be summarized in a few sentences of plain English: Trump wanted dirty help for his 2020 reelection campaign. He sent messages demanding that dirty help to the Ukrainians directly on the phone and via his henchmen. He stalled military aid to extort the help. The Ukrainians nearly surrendered, until the whistle-blower report reached Congress on September 9 and knocked loose the aid on September 11.

Now watch Fox News or read the pro-Trump websites. Suddenly the story becomes very long and very complicated. It can hardly be summarized at all; it can only be alluded to indirectly by a litany of callout phrases: “Burisma.” “Hunter Biden.” “Where’s the whistle-blower?” “Vindman’s conflict of interests.” “Star chamber.” “#coup has started.” The intricate tale is animated by a burning rage of injustice against “fake news”—most of that “fake news” (like the story about Trump Tower Moscow) in fact true and corroborated...

The House Republicans’ underlying argument is too jumbled and confusing even to be agreed with. It can only be absorbed. It is to be repeated, not to be analyzed. It is not even really an argument at all. It is a hypnotic litany, a creed of faith—a faith all the more compelling for defying sense and experience.  

At Fox News, on talk radio, and on the web, American conservatives have built a communications system that effectively consolidates in-group identity. Much of the time, the talkers and listeners do not themselves understand what they are saying. They use key words and phrases as gang signs: badges of identity that are recognized without necessarily being understood.

This system of communication tightly bonds in-group members. That bond, in turn, exerts tremendous power over American politics.

The price paid for this achievement is that the communications system lacks any means to convince nongroup members. How can you convince people when they cannot understand what on Earth you are talking about?

Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and the others have fenced off conservative Americans from the rest of American society. Within that safe space, insiders hear only what is familiar and comforting. When those protected insiders step outside into the larger world, they find themselves completely unprepared for it. To those not immersed in the fantasy franchise, people like Devin Nunes sound like crazy people. Which in turn, of course, only drives them crazier...

Frum knows the world of which he speaks: Formerly a speechwriter for Dubya (infamously responsible for the Axis of Evil speech), he's since moved away from a Republican Party he can't even speak to anymore.

But it's not even with the upper echelons of the Republicans. Buzzfeed is reporting now how Facebook, a social app with millions plugged in, is inundated with fly-by-night pro-trump groups that form, spread false reports about the impeachment hearings, and close out before the company can close them down. Staying on just long enough to convince the MAGA crowds and confuse the rest.

The entire Republican Media Bubble is self-sustaining now. Holding the pundits and politicians accountable won't stop the GOP base from perpetuating their own bullshit.

The only thing the rest of us can do is vote the bastards out of power. Prevent them from causing more damage within our legal and political and economic systems.

It won't stop their bullshit or their hatred of fellow Americans. It might not even make us safer, because they've been riled up now to the point of violence.

But it's the only way to bring the United States back to some level of sanity.

Gods help us.

Things You Need To Remember About Thursday April 18 2019

Tomorrow is supposed to be when trump's Attorney General Lackey General Barr releases the Mueller Report to the public.

Here's the first thing you should understand:

This is not the real Report.

This will be a redacted - probably heavily redacted - copy of a report that will hide absolutely everything embarrassing (if not documented illegality that Mueller couldn't make a solid court case for) related to trump's behavior during his 2016 campaign and into the early parts of 2017 when trump was trying to stop the FBI from exposing Michael Flynn's bad behavior as his National Security Advisor.

This is part of Barr's attempt to defang any possibility of Mueller's investigations providing a link between the Russian hacking into the 2016 elections that he proved to a grand jury and the trump campaign's eagerness to work with Russians from 2015 onward.

To refer to Michael Stern's observations at Slate:

Here are just some of the ways that Barr has failed the public and the Justice Department he heads.

First, there is a huge piece of the puzzle that is missing in the countless articles that take, at face value, Barr’s claim that he cannot release much of Mueller’s report to the public because it contains grand jury material.

Yes, it is true that federal rules governing grand jury secrecy stop the Department of Justice from releasing testimony that occurred “before the grand jury.” However, there is a practice that is common among federal prosecutors that would allow for the release of the substance of most grand jury testimony without violating the secrecy rule.

While much of the material from these interviews is the same as what is said before the grand jury, the grand jury secrecy rule only prevents grand jury testimony from being released. It does not act as a bar to the release of interview reports that hold the same information. And so, while grand jury testimony must not be publicly disclosed, the attorney general has the authority to disclose interviews of witnesses who appeared before the grand jury. This material could appear in the version of the Mueller report Barr is set to release on Thursday. But these reports will likely present damning evidence of campaign links to Russia and obstruction by Trump and members of his administration. If Barr’s past actions are any indicator, he will do all he can to prevent their release.

From all signs, much of Mueller’s full report, including the interviews, will be missing. As Congress tries to pry the full report loose from Barr, it must ensure that Barr’s public redactions do not include interviews of witnesses who appeared before the grand jury. Since any such redactions cannot be based on Barr’s claim of grand jury secrecy, their release is fair game...

Second: Lacking the details of the investigation will make Barr's presentation ripe for conspiracy-mongering (on both sides). The Far Right will argue there's things in the report hiding proof of HILLARY'S criminal misdeeds, while the rest of us will remain convinced that there had to have been some quid pro quo going on between trump and Putin. To quote Ben Mattis-Lilley at Slate:

Before James Comey got fired, before Robert Mueller was even a twinkle in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s bewitching hazel-green eyes. Before the obstruction question, before offshoots like the Michael Cohen campaign finance case and Trump Tower Moscow and the inaugural fund. At that point, the public knew two things: one, that Russia had likely orchestrated a hacking and propaganda campaign against Hillary Clinton, and two, that Donald Trump’s advisers had made squirrelly efforts, both during the Republican National Convention and the presidential transition period, to advance Russia-friendly positions regarding economic sanctions and the war in Ukraine.

And, to badly paraphrase David Mamet, if there’s a quid and there’s a quo, there is probably a pro. Had Trump been trying to do favors for Russia’s ruling oligarch-gangsters to reward them for sabotaging his opponent? And did they sabotage his opponent because they knew he’d in turn make it easier to launder money into the U.S. by eliminating sanctions against them?

That possibility became the central mystery of Mueller’s investigation into “collusion”: In Rosenstein’s words, the special counsel was tasked with investigating “links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” And when Attorney General William Barr released his March letter summarizing Mueller’s conclusions, he quoted the special counsel as having written that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But Barr didn’t explain how that conclusion had been arrived at, and given that Mueller’s report is defined by a law as a summary of “prosecution and declination” decisions, the most long-gestating question it might be able to resolve when it’s (partially) released on Thursday is why the special counsel decided that a number of publicly known links between Russia and the Trump campaign did not constitute a chargeable conspiracy...

To me, that's the sticking point: Barr failed to explain Mueller's conclusions and substituted Barr's own... and Barr is NOT an unbiased actor in this matter. He's covering for his boss in ways an Attorney General should not behave.

Third: I cannot recall the earlier Special Counsel reports being redacted in any way. In particular, the Starr Report from 1997-98 contained a lot of details - much of it unrelated to Ken Starr's original investigations into Bill Clinton's Whitewater deals - that came from grand jury testimonies, something that Barr's covering up here.

We are facing the likelihood of Mueller's redacted report not even corresponding to news we've long known about trump and the Russians, which makes it even more likely the House Democrats will fight Barr to get the grand jury testimonies released and unredacted.

Fourth: This is not the end of the investigation. Mueller farmed out part of his findings to other Justice Department offices, especially the ongoing trials for the likes of Roger Stone. Unless - damn him - Barr tries to use HIS redacted copy of the Report to shut the whole thing down.

At which point I hope to God Mueller comes back as Special Counsel and hammer Barr with an Obstruction charge for that. Yeah, I'm hoping this happens.

Tomorrow is going to be a crazy day.

Gods help us.

P.S. As John Cole puts it over at Balloon-Juice:

REPUBLICANS IMPEACHED BILL CLINTON FOR LYING ABOUT A BLOW JOB.

That is all.