DeSantis vs. The Right To Think

It's been awhile since I've discussed how bad things are here in Florida so let's check in on what damage Ron DeSantis is dropping on our citizenry lately. 

Let's look at DeSantis' push of an "intellectual freedom survey" that doesn't really do a thing for freedom (via USA Today/Tallahassee Democrat (paywall)):

The questionnaire to survey students and faculty was required by a bill (HB 233) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last June. 

The bill was promoted as a way to safeguard open inquiry and intellectual diversity on state campuses. Opponents of the survey filed a federal suit in Tallahassee over it...

The email that went out reads as follows:

Dear Employee: 

You are invited to participate in a survey on Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity. This survey is designed to assess the extent to which you feel free to express your beliefs and viewpoints on campus. This survey is being conducted by the Florida Board of Governors as part of implementation of House Bill 233, which passed during the 2021 legislative session.  

Please follow this link (or copy and paste the link into your web browser) to complete the brief survey, which should take 5-10 minutes: [The link to the survey was here]

Your participation in this survey is completely voluntary. You are free to not answer any question or withdraw from the survey at any time. No personally identifiable information will be associated with your responses. This survey is anonymous, and responses will only be reported at the group level, not at the individual level.  

Should you have any questions, please contact the Florida Board of Governors.    

Thank you for your time and consideration...

So why are people opposed to this seemingly harmless survey (from another USA Today/Tallahassee Democrat article by James Call in October 2021)?

The United Faculty of Florida, the labor union representing faculty and graduate assistants at the state's public and private colleges and universities, argues in federal court that the measure will gather those facts and data in an unconstitutional manner.

In papers filed Aug. 4 (2021) in Tallahassee, UFF lists numerous violations of free speech protections and rights of assembly in just the law’s anti-shielding provision. A student who finds they have been shielded from what they perceived is speech that is offensive to others may file suit to “vindicate” their rights.

“We cannot imagine a scenario where the survey will go well,” said J. Andrew Gothard, the UFF president. The state has submitted a motion to dismiss the suit, and UFF has filed a rebuttal...

This survey and the bill supporting it raises more conflict over "offensive" speech than it claims to prevent. For example a Proud Boy / Oath Keeper student on a college campus could claim his "speech" about Replacement Theory was wrongly suppressed, and file suit to have his racist Anti-Semitic hate speech shoved down the throats of everyone offended by it.

DeSantis' office may claim the survey is "voluntary" and unenforceable, and the Governor's office already has the ability to cut funding to any universities giving DeSantis the power to punish those schools he feels are not performing how he sees fit: 

The survey provisions neither explain nor put any limitations on how the governor, Florida Legislature or boards might use the results of the survey... Remarks by Gov. DeSantis in support of HB 233 indicate that results will be used to cut funding from public colleges and universities if survey results suggest that a given school has not done enough to foster "intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity..."

If anybody lived through the era of Loyalty Oaths and political witch hunts (called the Johns Committee) here in Florida, welcome to the sequel.

I know a number of academic librarians at the state universities, and I sent out a message this week inquiring if they'd received those surveys as they are faculty (I also asked if I could see one, but no one shared). Some replied back that they got the 2021 survey which they agreed was meager but filled with "leading questions" (questions phrased in such a way that a biased response in the positive was the only way to answer it and still feel clean). They haven't gotten this year's survey but they've heard it's going to be more detailed. My fellow librarians are being told by the teachers' unions not to answer the surveys at all, but you know political pressure will come down if no one does fill them.

And that's what DeSantis is doing to higher education. Wanna see what he's doing to our K-12 schools? (via Ana Ceballos and Sommer Brugal at the Tampa Bay Times (paywall)):

Several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics initiative designed to prepare students to be “virtuous citizens” is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology after a three-day training session in Broward County last week.

Teachers who spoke to the Times/Herald said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught.

“It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School. “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning.”

The civics training, which is part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative, underscores the tension that has been building around education, making classrooms into battlegrounds for politically contentious issues. In Florida, DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature have pushed policies that limit what schools can teach about race, gender identity and certain aspects of history...

Those dynamics came into full view last week, when trainers told Broward teachers the nation’s founders did not desire a strict separation of state and church, downplayed the role the colonies and later the United States had in the history of slavery in America and pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document, according to three educators who attended the training...

Just to point out how wrong DeSantis' trainers are: They are ignoring the Founders' "No Religious Test" provision written into the Constitution itself; they are ignoring how slavery dominated our political debates in the 1800s to where we had a freaking CIVIL WAR about it; and they are pushing an "Originalist" interpretation of the Constitution that ignores the reality it can be amended and evolve under the guidance of current and future generations. Back to the article:

The civics training is the latest effort in a long line of education policies that aims to fight what DeSantis and conservative education reformers say are “woke ideologies” in public schools.

It also provides a snapshot of how national groups, including Hillsdale College, a politically influential private Christian college in southern Michigan, are working with the DeSantis administration to reshape education in the state. The goal is to put a greater emphasis on civics than on socially divisive issues such as race and gender identity, which DeSantis has said is an effort to reorient teaching away from “indoctrination and back towards education.” But to several educators who went through the state’s training, it felt like a broader effort to impose a conservative view on historical events...

This is essentially the next stage in DeSantis' and the Far Right Conservatives ongoing war on Facts. It doesn't help that their main source of "historical facts" happens to be a Hillsdale College accused of racism and religious extremism (via at Kathryn Joyce at Salon.com):

In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular. It has featured lectures describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a hoax and Vladimir Putin as a "hero to populist conservatives around the world."

Quick interruption: THIS COLLEGE IS PROMOTING A WARMONGERING, SEXIST/RACIST SON OF A BITCH IN PUTIN. They are on the side of an Imperialist Russia monster responsible for war, famine, rape, and death.

And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale has become a key resource. Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale's proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the "patriotic education" premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools...

These linked trends amount to a vision of things to come if Republicans win their current war on public education. And war is how they see it. As one Republican leader promised at Hillsdale last spring, if conservatives can "get education right," they'll "win" the country "back." Or as Hillsdale's president himself likes to say, "Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon." 

This isn't about education, this isn't about the facts, this isn't about civics or accuracy in history. This is about war that the Far Right are waging against the rest of the world that doesn't believe the same bullshit they believe. It's about promoting a mythology of "racial harmony" where things would be so much better if Whites kept their privilege, (White) Men were allowed to be manly, the feminists stayed in the kitchen, everyone knew their place and it would all be 1850 again.

DeSantis has been screaming about "Critical Race Theory" and "Wokeism" but he's using that as an excuse to indoctrinate the next generation into religious/racist ignorant extremism.

Our schools are now battlegrounds, and the Republicans want scorched earth to be our national legacy.

Don't let them win.

Quick Notes 7/8/22

1) My air conditioner is running five degrees hotter than the thermostat is set for, so it's a bit too stuffy in my place to sit and write. Which is cutting into my short story projects at the moment as well.

2) I've changed the artwork for this blog's banner. I'm trying out a more professional-looking title image, so let me know if you like it or not.

3) I've called three different air conditioner repair services and two of them have not called me back. The third one did and scheduled an appointment last Thursday that they didn't show up for, didn't even have the courtesy to call and cancel or reschedule. It's the rudeness of not following up that bothers me more than the nagging humidity in my home.

Four For the Fourth: Closing Arguments

Reminder: here are links to my other Four For the Fourth blog articles, one about a plea for silent firecrackers, one about women's rights to independence, and one about the need for fixing our nation to save our freedoms!

When you don't go to the parties or to the firework shows for a 4th of July, you end up at home switching between the movie marathons on cable or watching the 4th of July specials on PBS or NBC.

Only I can't watch the 4th Specials for too long on the networks. I just can't. 

Because there's too much Country music playing.

I'm sorry. I never got into Country. I grew up in the suburbs of Virginia Beach and later Tampa Bay. I'm a Boy from the Harb. I grew up to Led Zep and Van Halen and every arena hard rock band between 1979 through 1991. I miss the Dunedin Record & Tape Outlet store, it's where I got into L.A. punk and British Sixties blues.

Country to me has too much twang, too much proud ignorance, not enough poetry or wit IMHO when it comes to the lyrics. There are few Country songs I can abide, there's practically only one song - this one from Dierks Bentley - because at least it's got self-deprecating humor to it:

I admit if my parents stayed in Albany GA or we moved to a part of Florida that was out in the boonies, I might have grown up different. But nope, I'm a suburban mallrat, I grew up to heavy drums and loud lyrics and screeching guitar licks and that's what I want to hear for my 4th of July goddammit.

Where's the "Stars And Stripes Forever" march played by Metallica, you fiends.

LET'S MAKE SOUSA A METALHEAD NEXT 4th!!!

Four For the Fourth: Fixing the Flaws

Reminder: here are links to my other Four For the Fourth blog articles, one about a plea for silent firecrackers, one about women's rights to independence, and one about needing more metal music on the TV specials dammit!

This is, as mentioned earlier, one of the most dire 4th of Julys I've ever honored.

Because the state of our nation is at a crossroads between majority progressive reform and minority violent retrenchment. As David Atkins notes at the Washington Monthly:

The Roberts Court has imperiled America’s unity. The country’s center-left majority is disenfranchised and under assault from the likes of Samuel Alito. Something has to give.

The large, productive populations of blue states like California and New York—which famously give far more to the national treasury than they get back—chafe under a system that affords far more clout to the citizens of Idaho and Wyoming. The voting majority that won seven of the last eight presidential popular votes and that constitutes 70 percent of the GDP will throw off the yoke of a conservative minority. Most Americans below the age of 40 are progressive—well to the left of today’s median Democrat—and will not buckle under the imposition of a white Christian nationalist agenda by an aging conservative minority.

They know that the Supreme Court has lost its moral authority. Republicans have won the popular vote in a presidential election only once in 30 years, yet Republican presidents have nominated most of the Court’s justices. No Democratic president has chosen a chief justice since Harry Truman in 1946. The last Republican president entered office having lost by nearly 3 million votes even with the aid of a foreign dictatorship, whose help he begged for on the campaign trail. One of those justices was stolen outright by Mitch McConnell under pretenses of it being an election year, only to see the Senate confirm another justice while votes were being cast in the next cycle. The Senate that confirmed those justices is absurdly skewed in favor of small, white, rural conservative states, such that Senate Democrats represent 43 million more voters yet are locked in a 50-50 tie. And the Senate’s skew will only become more blatantly unjust and unsustainable...

The Framers created the Senate and the Electoral College to bring small states on board with the larger national project and to temper what they worried would be the passions of the electorate. They feared demagogues—yet ironically, their solution enabled the rise of one. Their concessions to slave states failed to prevent the Civil War. They got many things wrong and could not foresee or prevent the rise of political parties. Crucially, they also expected future generations to change the Constitution frequently, yet it has barely been amended in almost a century...

The reason I started this blog back in 2006 was to start arguing over the amendments our nation needed to repair a creaky and aging federal constitution: A model of governance that needed to update for a 21st Century that was more progressive than the Founders realized, and stuck to an electoral model that wasn't meant for so many states and a population more than 50 times the nation's original size.

I mean, I got into a tweet debate with Conor Friedersdorf this morning about the problems with the U.S. Senate representation:

Back then the population disparity (10 times) was not as immense as it is today (68 times) between the largest state (CA) and the smallest (WY). You can fit 25 states plus DC into CA and still have room for New Jersey. THAT'S how bad the Senatorial imbalance is now.

— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) July 4, 2022

This is just one of the many things that need to get fixed so that the tyranny of Minority Party Rule doesn't destroy this nation.

Just amending the representation in the Senate - to end the equal seating of two Senators per state regardless of population, which has unbalanced this Senate to where the political minority of small states can logjam the entire legislative process - would be a huge reform. Changing the rules so that the ten most populous states receive an extra third Senator while the ten smallest states shrink to just one Senator would be the most rational means of doing it (although the small states will begin screaming how their representation is being taken away. Too bad. You don't have enough people to justify having that much power!). Just by changing this, the responsibilities of the Senate - especially the consent and advise for judicial appointments - will reflect the interests of the majority of voters nationwide.

Most other reforms our Constitution should focus on would be fixing a Supreme Court that has become too partisan, and too much a source of political brinksmanship that has helped polarize our parties.

The simplest fix to correct the Court right now - the near-permanent Far Right stranglehold on six seats out of nine - would be to expand the court. And this wouldn't even need an Amendment because Congress already has the power to add or subtract from the bench. This has actually happened before in the 1860s when the nation was responding to the last time the political minority - Southern slaveholding conservatives - caused this level of damage. They shrank the number of Justices in 1866 to stop Andrew Johnson from replacing retiring jurists with pro-segregationist people, and then re-expanded the number to nine (where it's been since) to give U.S. Grant and the then-liberal Republicans the chance to ensure an anti-slavery pro-rights Court would work.

So adding four seats - while the Democrats control both the White House (Biden) and the Senate (tie-breaker vote) before the 2022 midterms shake things up - would be the simplest thing but also greatest political hazard for Democrats. They worry that a future Republican-held Congress and White House would escalate like an arms race: If Dems upped the seats to 13 for a 7-6 ideological advantage, the future GOP would respond by added 10 seats for a 16-to-7 sledgehammer. Even though there IS a legitimate reason to expand to 13 seats - there are 13 judicial districts (11 state regions and 2 special jurisdictions) that require oversight by a Supreme Court Justice - the Dems don't seem to want to go that route.

Even though the Republicans would jump at the chance to expand to 13 seats right now if they were in power, and bump it up to a 10-to-3 advantage they would never let go of.

There is another way to fix the Supreme Court but it might involve an amendment: Setting retirement age limits. Right now due to wording in Article III Section I, judicial appointments may be lifetime. Best way to make sure the SCOTUS seats change hands - by either a term limit (12 or 16 years) or mandatory retirement (65 years old) - and make it harder for either party to plan any long-term control of the judiciary.

Another Amendment this nation needs in this dark hour is something, anything, to stop the partisan gerrymandering that gives the state parties too much control over who can actually run for office and who can win. We've seen the evidence and reports about how gerrymandering districts to extremes reduces voter interest and turnout. We know how gerrymandering pulls away power from the urban populations and gives that power to sparse rural areas. We've watched the last 10 years how partisan gerrymandering gave us minority party rule at both the state and Congressional levels. 

Instead of fair districts, instead of ensuring each person's vote will count, gerrymandering diminishes that power and grants it to the special interests - mostly the greedy and the evangelical - who don't care about what happens to the citizenry. If we could get a Congress responsive enough to pass such reforms... but we can't, because there's enough figures in both parties who prefer the gerrymandered status quo. The irony: Gerrymandering makes sure we don't get enough reformers elected to end gerrymandering anyway.

Oh, and getting rid of the broken Electoral College - a system that violates the will of the majority of Americans, may well deny us rightfully-elected Presidents in the future - is a must.

The United States need so many other reforms to our electoral system and to the checks and balances that ought to exist between the federal branches and the states. To get there, we as voters are going to need a concerted effort - by enough Americans across enough states - to use whatever power we have left at the ballot box to pass these reforms and restore both our rights and our safety. 

That means voting FOR those who can reform our system - Democrats - and voting AGAINT those who will corrupt it further - Republicans - for their own greedy sadistic needs.

This won't be a good Independence Day until we're independent from the corrupt powers in high places.

Good luck. Keep fighting.

Blood On the Streets of Highland Park

Just as I was writing my second "Four For the Fourth" blog article today, news popped up that - in honor of our nation's independence from British tyranny - a goddamned gun nut showed up at a 4th of July parade in a Chicago suburb and opened fire (via Michael Tarm and Roger Schneider at AP News):

At least six people died and 24 were wounded in a shooting at a July Fourth parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, and officers are searching for a suspect who likely fired on the festivities from a rooftop, police said Monday.

Highland Park Police Commander Chris O’Neill, the incident commander on scene, urged people to shelter in place as authorities search for the suspect, described as a white male wearing a white or blue T-shirt.

Lake County Major Crime Task Force spokesman Christopher Covelli said at a news conference that the gunman apparently opened fire on parade-goers from a rooftop using a rifle that was recovered at the scene. He didn’t know which building.

Covelli said police believe there was only one shooter and warned that he should still be considered armed and dangerous. He and O’Neill described the shooting as random...

It doesn't matter if it was random. It matters that the mass shooter had easy access to an assault rifle and an angry desire to use it on innocent people.

These gun nuts, these mass buyers of AR-15s, these worshipers of murdersticks, you ask a lot of them "Why" they are so desperate to own weapons of mass death, and they usually answer the same: "It's to defend ourselves against the tyranny of the evil librul government that's gonna take our rights" - namely, the very guns they're stockpiling - "from us!"

These goddamn gun nuts don't care about the reality that "More guns = more gun deaths" all because it doesn't fit their fantasy worldview of being racially pure heroes of some twisted Turner Diaries fanfic. Some of them even celebrate these mass shootings, because then they'll scream "you see? gun laws don't make you safe!" even as they're prepping themselves for the Second Civil War in their bomb shelters.

Tyranny of the British Crown? Gone, old news.

Tyranny of the gun? Thank you, National Rifle Body Count Association, our nation's citizenry is still not free from your ongoing threat of mass shootings that your golden calf the assault rifle affirms every day.

Four for the Fourth 2022: Remember the Ladies

Reminder: here are links to my other Four For the Fourth blog articles, one about a plea for silent firecrackers, one about the need for fixing our nation to save our freedoms, and one about needing more metal music on the TV specials dammit!

It's hard to celebrate Independence Day this 2022 when half this nation's population are now - thanks to a sadistic Christianist Supreme Court - Second Class citizens.

As much as Frederick Douglass called out the hypocrisy of the 4th of July - the promise of liberty while Blacks were still in chains - we are now at the point in American history where the liberty and rights of women to choose their own health and well-being has vanished, turning women into slaves themselves to the states holding bondage over their uterus.

This is not a sound policy for the mostly White, mostly Male, mostly Rich conservative leadership that brought us to this tragic reality. These anti-abortion laws - seeking to confine women to their homes 'barefoot and pregnant', forced to bear babies against their will, and likely killing them when those pregnancies turn lethal - will only enrage the women and remind them of the horrors their grandmothers had to endure decades before.

When our Founding Fathers crafted first the Declaration of Independence and then the federal Constitution, they never even considered the rights of women at all. When Abigail Adams, wife to Founder John Adams and a fervent believer in equal rights, wrote a letter to John to "remember the ladies," her own husband scoffed at her. Via Lisa A Mazzie at the Marquette University Law Center Faculty blog back in 2013:

John Adams responded, “I cannot but laugh . . . .” To Mr. Adams, this was the first he’d heard of women’s possible discontent with the status quo.  “[Y]our letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented.”  For whatever “power” that Mr. Adams suggested that women had, it clearly wasn’t enough, for the new Declaration of Independence and Constitution failed to give any express (or even implied) rights to women.

Mrs. Adams responded to her husband, “I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist on retaining an absolute power over wives...”

Mrs. Adams did not suffer hypocrites, even when it was her own husband.

Over the history of America, women's rights were undercut and ignored even as the rights of others were expanded. Full rights of citizenship like voting, for example, only belonged to property owners until the 1820s, when suffrage finally extended to all White men (and only Black freedmen in certain states). When the federal government needed to confirm voting rights for freed Blacks in the post-Civil War era, they passed the 15th Amendment but specifically excluded "sex/gender" from the equation. It took another 60 years of women constantly marching for suffrage before the 19th Amendment guaranteed at least that right.

And even then, full rights for women weren't a given. Every expectation in the workforce of less pay than men, getting denied opportunities in education or politics or business, forced into support roles in wartime, forced into gender roles as housewives and mothers, every dismissive treatment dumped on women throughout the 20th Century... If you were a girl, you had to work twice as hard and get told twice as often to "smile" through it all.

This was the mighty river of sexual discrimination women had to swim, every day of their lives, only barely reaching the calmer waters of the past 50 years when the civil rights movements of the 1960s opened up more opportunities. And they still had to... HAVE to cope against harassment and sexual assault to this very day.

I only learned this year a horrific fact, that until 1974 women couldn't sign up for their own credit cards: A man - either husband or father - had to co-sign with the bank on it. Women had no financial freedom at all until then. Some still don't.

And so with all this happening, as women face the darkness of 50 years ago returning to haunt them, do our American mothers and daughters and sisters and friends have any reason to celebrate Independence Day?

Because they're not independent today.

Goddamn us for taking that away from them.

We need to bring back the Equal Rights Amendment, get the states to go through approving it again, because it's not our women who need it, it's our nation that needs to break free of our fear and hypocrisy.

Four For the Fourth 2022: A Simple Plea

It's Independence Day, America, and on this day I'd like to put out four different articles as part of my "Four For the Fourth," eh?

I'd like to start off with a request to my fellow Americans.

We as Americans are inventive, crafty human beings. We create, we design, we patent like crazy every idea under the sun.

I'd like to ask our fellow Americans who are experts in the fields of chemistry/physics if you can, please FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, invent a fireworks cracker that is pretty and sparkly when it explodes but is also SILENT so that way we DO NOT 1) scare the doggies, 2) wake the neighbors at 2AM IN THE FUCKING MORNING, and 3) seriously that noise scares our puppies it's not fair to make our puppies suffer.

And no, I don't mean sparklers. We've been selling those for decades as a "safe" alternative to firecrackers, but alas too many of us have the urge to blow shit up for the holidays.

If there is such a firework out there, let me know, and we need to petition Congress to mandate those as the only fireworks to sell in the US.

Can we... can we just do that, America? We're smart, we invented a t-shirt gun that shoots only t-shirts, we ought to be able to invent the Silent Firecracker.

And that said, here are links to my other Fourth blog articles, one about women's rights to independence, one about the need for fixing our nation to save our freedoms, and one about needing more metal music on the TV specials dammit!

I'd wish for this to be a Happy 4th, but after the shooting in Highland Park this morning that would be hard for us all.

The Fuse Likely To Set It Off

My last post was openly considering whether we're one step away from a Second American Civil War, with the realization we're more likely in the opening stages of it akin to a Cold War buildup before the powderkeg goes off and the shit gets real.

I mean, c'mon, there's already a Wiki page about Civil War 2: the Trumpening (and don't knock Wikipedia. It may be open-source where anybody can show up to edit, but it has standards and citation requirements to make it a reliable reference. It's just high school and college students who get lazy tend to copy and paste whole entries into their schoolwork and pass off that plagiarism as their own work as though teachers don't check for that with their Grammarly or TurnItIn databases. My mom was a teacher, and in the years before she retired she cursed Wikipedia because even her IB students were pulling that stunt. Anyway, I digress). While it's all talking about the hypotheticals, that article lists a serious number of incidents - most of them increasing in number ever since trump seized the national spotlight - that set up a solid argument that we're in the early stages of honest-to-Dog insurrection.

This is akin to the buildup to the First Civil War, throughout the 1850s when the political partisanship of the time - the fight over the Fugitive Slave Acts, Bleeding Kansas, the Sumner Caning, John Brown's raid -  led up to the final act of Abraham Lincoln's victory for the Presidency in 1860 that triggered half of the southern slave states to secede.

You can feel it: We are one final step from the "Cannons Firing on Fort Sumter" point of no return. The battle lines are drawn over the January 6th Insurrection and the recent extremist Supreme Court rulings. All it's going to take is one more nudge from the goddamn wingnuts and we will be quoting Fred Thompson's "We will be lucky to live through it" line until the shooting stops, and either the United States remains intact but with the conservatives shattered for 100 years or with the nation broken under an authoritarian bootheel. 

So what will it be then, what will be the match that starts the inferno?

I'd bet good money - okay, 50 bucks, I'm a librarian I'm not rich - it's going to involve donald trump freaking out in some way, and most likely over criminal charges that would interfere with his plans to retake the White House in 2024. Thing is, there's a number of separate criminal charges he's still facing.

The investigation trump has to fear most is the one in Georgia involving his attempts to pressure that state's Sec of State to "find me enough votes" to negate Biden's win there. There's a grand jury interviewing not only Raffensperger but several others, and the jury may yet get testimony out of several trumpian lackeys before it's done. The legal experts argue that this matter - where trump is caught on audio interfering with election results - is a clear violation of state and federal election laws, and given its straight-forward situation should be ruled on by the grand jury relatively soon.

The Select House Committee looking into the January 6th Insurrection has already produced a number of actionable grounds to charge trump on various federal felonies, not just incitement to insurrection but also wire fraud for milking $250 million out of his followers on a fundraising scam. Thing is, the committee can't charge trump directly... but they can refer the charges to the Justice Department. Then it becomes a question if Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland decides to take it.

Either matter could take months if at all, but of the two the Georgia case threatens trump the most. It's a reason why rumors are coming out that trump wants to announce his 2024 campaign before August of this year, under the belief that prosecutors are reluctant to go after Presidential candidates out of fear of politicizing matters (trump would definitely scream that the criminal charges will interfere with the "people's right to vote for me").

Thing is, I doubt the Georgia DA will be intimidated by that. Given how much of trump's biggest criminal trespasses have been in the political arena, going after him on a political felony would be necessary. So I do expect the election interference/intimidation charges in Cobb County to go forward.

And that will be what triggers open war.

Even if trump doesn't stir up the shitstorm, the Far Right demagogues in the mainstream media and social media will. This will be, in their eyes, a blatant attempt by "them" - the evil libruls - to silence their Great Leader / Savior. 

I don't think it will drive Red state governors into secession mode, but it will send the gun-nut Proud Boys/Oathkeepers/Patriot Front/Brownshirt militias out into the streets to hit every easy target they can to express their rage. But then any attempt by Homeland Security or any law enforcement to shut the Far Right militias down will trigger Red state secession. 

This situation may seem avoidable if the prosecutors decide not to charge trump on any criminal matters. Problem with that is that everyone knows letting trump off the hook again - after all the other times he's been let go after every other bankrupting fraudulent act he's committed the past 50 years - will just embolden trump to pursue even darker criminal misdeeds. And the violence that follows in his wake will get worse anyway.

It's an unavoidable no-win either way. Better to hold trump accountable - at long last - and prepare for the storm that will hit us all.

Just be ready for it to be bad. Real bad. There has been 50-plus years of pent-up rage in the Far Right epistemic bubble: We've seen only bits of it here and there, at its worst with the Oklahoma City bombing and with all the gun violence just adding to the body count the last 20 years.

We will all be lucky to get through this. It's a slim hope, but it's all I have now.

Dreading The Oncoming Storm

Update: Thank you again Batocchio for linking this blog through Crooks & Liars Mike's Blog Round-Up! Good luck everybody... 

I've probably left enough clues on this blog by now that I live in Florida, have been ever since my family moved down here when I was seven. I've also left enough clues that I'm really hating the growing realization that this state leans too far conservative on political issues, and I'm stuck here surrounded by coal-rolling Bible-thumping MAGA morans.

But this past month in June - especially as the Far Right Roberts Court issued their extremist legal decisions on abortion, voting rights, prayer in school, and finishing up with gutting federal regulatory power - that constricting, painful feeling became overwhelming.

I've had conversations in-person with two different people this past week, both of them talking about fleeing for the safety of Blue states and which ones were the easiest to move to (I'm partial to Virginia, but I hope Youngkin is a goddamned aberration up that way and the residents learned they got hoodwinked).

One of my co-workers honestly asked me, "Are we going to have another civil war?"

I once blogged I believed another civil war in the United States was a bad idea, that it was coming from cranks and foreign "experts" who were shilling fantasies over reality. However, ever since trump bullied and lied his way into the White House, with the Far Right media gaslighting and calling for open insurrection, and with more than a third of our nation actually believing his Big Lie of stolen elections I've been reconsidering the insane partisan rift between Far Right and The Rest Of The Nation has become too violent to ever get repaired.

I'm not the only one worried about this. Stephen Marche at the Guardian sees the same divide and believes it's no longer an "If" it's now a question of "When and Where":

Accelerating political violence, like the attack in Buffalo, increasingly blurs the line between the mainstream political conservative movement and outright murderous insanity. The question is no longer whether there will be a civil conflict in the United States. The question is how the sides will divide, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses will determine the outcome.

The right wing has been imagining a civil war, publicly, since at least the Obama administration. Back in 2016, when it looked like Hillary Clinton would win the election, then Kentucky governor Matt Bevin described the possibility in apocalyptic terms: “The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants, to be sure. But who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren,” he told supporters at the Values Voter Summit...

The struggle over abortion has already revealed how the divide plays out. Anti-abortion factions control the pseudo-legitimate court system and the poorer states in the Union. Pro-choice factions have responded, first of all, with their superior financial resources. Oregon started the Oregon Reproductive Equity Fund with $15m. New York is establishing a fund to make the state a “safe haven”. California governor Gavin Newsom plans to add $57m to the state budget to deal with out-of-state patients...

Incipient civil conflict in the United States won’t be formal armies struggling for territory. The techniques of both sides are clarifying. Republican officials will use the supreme court, or whatever other political institutions they control, to push their agenda no matter how unpopular with the American people. Meanwhile, their calls for violence, while never direct, create a climate of rage that solidifies into regular physical assaults on their enemies. The technical term for this process is stochastic terrorism; the attack in Buffalo is a textbook example.

The leftwing resistance is more nascent but is also taking shape: if you’re rich and you want to stay living in a democracy, the time has come to pony up. If you’re an engineer, the time has come to organize. The conclusion is not at all determined. Neither side has an absolute advantage. Neither side can win easily. But one fact is clear. The battle has been joined, and it will be fought everywhere...

I've noted before, unlike the first Civil War where the geographic boundaries were distinct, this second Civil War will be more along demographic dividing lines within each state. The Far Right won't likely have states seceding, but will have their governors, their wingnut preachers and pundits, and other regional elected officials rallying their followers into terror attacks on liberal targets (they know they won't survive attacking military forces head on, they'll go after civilian targets like schools and nightclubs and stores like they've already been doing the last 25 years). The Progressives and Center-Left populations will likely take non-violent routes like street protests and calls for strikes, but will come to rely on whatever remains of a Democratic-led federal government responding to the insurrection as they are now (with arrests, court trials, and pleas to sanity).

The results of the coming midterm elections will determine the "where" and "who" this civil war will decide itself. 

If the Democratic Party retains control of both parts of Congress, the Far Right will scream "stolen votes" and declare all Dem results within Red States invalid, throwing elections to Republicans in spite of the voters. This could trigger outright secession efforts in battleground states like Texas, Georgia, or Florida.

If the Republicans flip control of Congress - or gain control of either the House or Senate - the Democrats will point to Republicans' extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression and denounce the unfairness of Republicans' minority rule. It's unlikely the Blue states will call for secession - as it would undermine President Biden's authority and go against the liberal viewpoint of federal powers exceeding the states - but more likely throw as much of the legal system into chaos nationwide as well as interfere with any Republican attempt to impose their wingnut laws on everyone.

How bad the fighting will get depends on which way the United States military intervenes in all this. While they're not supposed to fight in our own borders against technically our own people, if open secession and/or insurrection takes place, whoever is President can employ the Insurrection Act and call on the armed forces to act then. donald trump wanted to use that law to declare the 2020 election results illegal and the Blue states in rebellion, but the legal experts and military leaders told him no (It's believed if counter-protestors had gone to Capitol Hill to fight against trump's rioters, he could have justified it then. But when it was just his own people committing violence, he couldn't declare them in insurrection and so didn't do it). If Biden is forced by escalation of violence in the streets by the Far Right, he could invoke the Insurrection Act against them, but it will depend on which way the Joint Chiefs and the rest of the military will accept it (there is a possibility that a sizable percentage of personnel are Christianist extremists and could start undermining military effectiveness at the least).

Given the nature of the partisan division - that it's along party lines across every state, and that it's along educational and ethnic and income lines within every state - there really is no safe place in America when (not if) the extremism of the Far Right - either in denial of a Democratic midterm victory or in vindication of a Republican one - triggers a series of violent acts in soft target areas (The Far Left, for all the complaints from conservative pundits about the dangers of Antifa and Black Lives Matters, are not that violent).

There's a storm coming. Stirred up by decades of Far Right Culture War bullshit.

I keep saying this: None of this will end well until Republicans are completely out of power and their wingnut foot soldiers all in jail for the bloodshed they're about to inflict on the rest of us.

Gods help us.

Update 7/27/23: To the nine people following this blog, you probably know I submitted this article with several others to the FWA Royal Palm Literary Awards, and this morning I got word that "Oncoming Storm" reached the Semi-Finalist stage! 
 

Get The Damn Vote Out for Dems In 2022 Or Suffer Forever

So of course the week I decided I need a break from blogging was also the week this nation's ultraconservative Supreme Court decided to drop all the bombs on America.

In one ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to gut Separation of Church And State by making it legal for religious private schools to take public funds without restriction.

In another ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to gut our Miranda Rights, making it easier for cops to refuse to tell people they're dragging in for interrogation that they have rights to remain silent and have their lawyer present, and making it more likely the cops will force people to endure unwarranted interrogations until they confess to shit they didn't do.

In another ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court decided to overrule a New York firearm concealed-carry law, by arguing that the individual right to carry weapons is guaranteed in the Second Amendment (the overriding "Shall Not Be Infringed" phrase) and Fourteenth Amendment (which other legal experts are saying is a misreading of what the 14th stands for).

And of course, what we've all dreaded since someone leaked the first draft of Alito's Dobbs ruling, the Far Right-dominated Court today nuked abortion rights by overturning the Casey and Roe decisions.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans support Separation of Church And State, they support Miranda Rights against an aggressive police force, they support gun safety laws, and they support a woman's right to decide her own health and well-being in case they need an abortion.

Of course, with all of these decisions going AGAINST what a majority of Americans support, the public opinion against the Supreme Court is at an all-time low (dropping to 25 percent and looking to crater from there). 

But the Far Right Minority basically running our country doesn't give a fuck, does it? All they care about is their Culture War, their religious fervor to rule or ruin, and the willingness of an emboldened Far Right judiciary to dig even deeper into madness by going after our rights to marry, our rights to birth control, our rights to privacy, our rights to even vote...

I warned about the sins of Minority Party Rule years ago, before Senators like Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins and before demagogues like trump kicked our nation into the pits of Hell.

...When you look at the current leadership in DC, you'll see a Republican Party led by the likes of (then Speaker) Ryan, McConnell and trump who all know they do NOT need to answer to the majority - they need to placate their minority base - and so they govern as they please, even in the face of polling numbers that mark them as some of the most unpopular life forms in modern memory. All they have to do is stoke their base to turnout for the midterms, all they have to do is keep their deep-pocket funders rolling in their tax-free profits, and let gerrymandering and voter suppression do the rest.

The only thing holding a Minority Rule Party like that accountable is The Reality-Based World. Bad governance leads to mistakes, which leads to disasters, which leads to outrage and angry majority voters who finally get sick of it all and try their best to flip the bad actors out of power...

It would be pretty to think that all of those millions of American citizens (around 100 million last we checked) able to vote but had refused for some reason or another - apathy worse above all - will now realize what the hell is at stake here and turn up to register to vote now, and better yet show up in November in the midterms to vote heavily in favor of Democrats to throw every lying unethical crooked Republican out of power.

Right now, voter turnout is the only realistic plausible way to end Minority Party Rule, to end the death grip Republicans have on our nation's well-being, to counter every wingnut legal decision that this skewed Supreme Court is going to hit us with for the next 10-20 years until we can clear that bench and replace with jurists who recognize what our rights - our right to choose our health, our right to be free of religious domination by zealots, our right to be safe from a violent police state, our right to assemble freely in public without fear of gun nuts, our right to live - truly are.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, AMERICA, STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Save our nation, save our legal system, save each other.

Personal Matters as of June 2022

My moods are getting the better of me. I'm losing focus and unable to complete some tasks I need to finish.

I gotta unplug for awhile. I don't know when I'll be back to blog. Maybe when I get some of my projects finished.

 

History of a Third-Rate Burglary

On June 17, 1972 at 2:30 in the morning, a third-rate burglary took place.

Well, it didn't get very far. The team of burglars did a sloppy job of breaking into the offices they targeted, the guy with the walkie-talkie had turned down the volume so he couldn't hear the lookout warn them of any cops arriving, and when the cops caught them in the act the burglars had a lot of incriminating evidence on them pointing to other people being involved with the attempt.

It turned out the burglars had broken into those offices a month prior, and had gone back in to take more photos of sensitive documents and replant illegal listening devices (aka "bugs") they felt weren't working properly.

With all that, the cops took the burglars to jail, charged them on whatever crimes related to their break-in, and brought them before a judge for arraignment and bail.

That's when one of the burglars informed the judge he had worked for the CIA, one of the major spy/intelligence agencies in the United States government.

And that's when the third-rate burglary into the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate complex started to turn into a big story, one that the federal government couldn't silence, growing until it engulfed a Presidency and scarred the public trust for fifty years.

Today, Watergate is viewed as the greatest political scandal in American history. All the others that came before - Andrew Jackson's Spoils system, the graft of U.S. Grant's administration, Tammany Hall, Warren Harding's collective scandals topped by Teapot Dome - and after - Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, Bill Clinton's Whitewater - none of them can match the hubris, reach, and tragedy of Richard Nixon's self-inflicted political downfall. Any other scandal that comes along, one of the first things the media does is add the suffix -Gate to it. Even other nations picked up on it.

I've tried analyzing scandals throughout my years of blogging, wondering about how to measure out what was a legitimate scandal and what was a nothingburger. Over time, anything the Far Right screamed about turned into nothingburgers, while any scandals involving them - especially after con artist trump moved into the Oval Office - were ranking right up there between Watergate and Teapot Dome in terms of corruption, abuse of office, open acts of insurrection, and straight-up graft.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Watergate scandal, we're neck-deep into investigating the scandals brought about by trump's rage, idiocy, and greed. 

As I've said before: history is repeating, first as tragedy and second as farce.

I wonder if I'll be around in fifty years to honor the anniversary of Trumpgate.

Congress Catching Crooked trump Cashing Out his Own Base

The Select House Committee investigating trump's Insurrection is ongoing, but we need to take a moment to note how they revealed trump's con artist habits.

Basically, trump used the Big Lie of a "stolen election" to rip off his supporters for about $250 million. Via Amanda Marcotte at Salon.com: 

During the entire two and a half months between Election Day and Jan. 6, Trump was shaking down his gullible supporters for cash that he claimed would help fight "election fraud." Those funds, however, largely appeared to go into the pockets of Trump and his allies. 

"The big lie was also a big ripoff," declared Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., during her opening remarks on Monday. She argued that the campaign used "false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations were for the legal fight in the courts." In reality, however, most the money — which is estimated to be a cool $250 million — went into a super PAC. From there, it was redirected into the coffers of Trump himself and towards various friends and family members...

I've noted before that trump's entire political career was part of his ongoing criminal business empire, designed to line his own pockets to inflate his worth while leaving bankruptcies and damage in his wake. Given opportunities to rake in millions of campaign funds - even money he himself never raised, but took from the Republican coffers meant for other campaigns - trump would think only for himself, not for whatever cause he claimed it was for.

Thing is, what trump and his lackeys did that post-election cycle - solicit funds from people under false pretenses - opens him up to criminal charges for wire fraud. Via Lachlan Markay at Axois.com:

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Amanda Wick, the committee's chief investigative counsel, zeroed in on what the Trump campaign's fundraising emails described as its "Official Election Defense Fund."

Those emails were central to a Trump fundraising operation that brought in about $250 million after the 2020 election, in part by promising the money would fund legal challenges and other efforts to overturn the election.

In reality, the committee alleged, millions of dollars were funneled to vehicles like Save America — a leadership PAC set up by Trump after the election — and other political and advocacy groups with ties to top Trump aides...

"The select committee discovered no such fund existed," Wick revealed in a pre-recorded video, citing taped depositions with two Trump campaign staffers.

"Not only was there the 'Big Lie,' there was the Big Ripoff,'" Lofgren said.

"It's clear that [Trump] intentionally misled his donors, asked them to donate to a fund that didn't exist and used the money raised for something other than what he said," she added in comments after the hearing...

Legal experts say this line of inquiry is a clear effort to show that the Trump campaign and its allies may have used fraudulent tactics to raise money in the months after the 2020 election, when many top officials privately knew their claims of voter fraud were false.

"This is an allegation of textbook wire fraud," Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and white-collar crime professor at George Washington University, said of Lofgren's comments...

As Lawrence Tribe, professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, notes on his Twitter feed:

Today’s testimony opens a new possibility: charging Trump not only with seditious conspiracy (18 USC 2384), inciting insurrection (2383), defrauding the US (371) & obstructing a congressional proceeding (1505) but also wire fraud (18 USC 1343): fleecing ordinary citizens of $$$$$

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) June 13, 2022

The Big Lie of a stolen election becomes the motive behind millions of stolen dollars. Real crimes are taking place here.

Attorney General Garland better follow through on this, and charge trump for his crimes.

Justice must prevail.

Crazy Busy Week Ahead

Monday is going to be the start of one crazy week:

The House Committee investigating trump's Insurrection is going to present Day Two of their indictment, following up on a surprisingly strong opening night that pretty much accused trump of setting and staging the riot. Day Two is reportedly going to delve into how trump knew he lost the 2020 election but decided to undermine the electoral process and stage a coup. The television ratings by the way - 19 million viewers - put the audience around Sunday Night NFL numbers, which are pretty strong (Tucker Carlson's prime time show on Fox Not-News by comparison draws around 3 million)

Twitter is aflutter that this is the week the Supreme Court officially issues its rulings on abortion - specifically the case involving Mississippi's ban - that can effectively mean the end of Roe and abortion rights. Madness will surely follow.

Congress reportedly reached a "bipartisan" deal on gun regulations / safety laws that is supposedly Cloture-proof so it can pass the Senate and then arguably the House for ratification. It won't address the more serious needs - an assault weapons ban, universal background checks, et al - but it will address age requirements for purchases, more funding for mental health (no guarantee THAT will go where needed), and restrictions on domestic abusers having firearms in an attempt to reduce domestic gun deaths. It will be the first major gun safety legislation passed in 30 years (!) and while it won't be enough it will be interesting to see if the more positive elements - especially that domestic abuser restriction - can show success in saving lives.

Ukraine remains a war zone but there's signs that Russian attempts to secure the Donbas aren't working and that Ukrainians are mounting decent counterattacks. Granted, the experts were thinking Russian forces wouldn't last past May, but all of the momentum and global support remains with Ukraine. Russia is reportedly falling back on weapon supplies and equipment from the 1960s (!) which doesn't bode well for their long-term ability to wage war.

Oh, and the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team - yes, there's been ice hockey in Florida since 1992, people! - are going to their third straight (after winning back-to-back) Stanley Cup Finals (facing Colorado) looking to be the first NHL team since the 1980s New York Islanders to have three straight championships. It's a dynastic possibility, which would put this Bolts team atop the list of Greatest Hockey Teams of ALL TIME. And to Michael Wilbon who derisively mocks Tampa as "not real hockey town" and "SEC" - while ignoring A) the attendance records the Lightning set in the 1990s playing in a half-filled baseball dome, proving there's a fanbase for a Hockey Town and B) the SEC (Southeastern Conference) is a college conference that revels in national championships every year - all I gotta say is SUCK IT WILBON.

I may not even find time to blog about all of it. We're busy at the library with our Summer Reading programs. /sigh

Work is work.

Today: Going Public on Insurrection

After about a year of relatively cloistered investigation, aside from charging a number of Republicans refusing to testify with Obstruction - Hi, Peter Navarro! - The House Investigation Into donald trump's "Proud Boys Capitol Conniption Carnage" of January 6 2021 is going to air public presentations on what they've uncovered starting tonight after Jeopardy! finishes up.

So how should the average American tuning in to this program view it all? Let's steal entire content, uh link to Ben Jacobs at Vox for more:

The legal and political impacts the public hearings will have are uncertain. Even with all the attention they are sure to get, few expect findings will massively shake up public opinion or shift the political winds for Democrats, who currently face dismal poll numbers for midterms elections. There is no scenario in which the work of the select committee leads to Donald Trump being frog-marched out of Mar-a-Lago, or even with top Republicans publicly denouncing him in the same way they did in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

Instead, the test for many on the Hill is whether the hearings can, at the very least, produce sufficient momentum to ensure passage of reforms they hope would prevent efforts like the one taken after the 2020 election from happening again...

Well, I don't care what Jacobs says about the unlikelihood that trump will get arrested at the end of all this: The real hope out here is that the congressional hearings will provide enough spark to get Attorney General Merrick Garland OFF HIS TIMID ASS AND ARREST EVERY TRUMPIAN ASSHOLE - trump INCLUDED - WHO RIOTED IN OUR NATION'S CAPITOL! LINE 'EM UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERF--- Ahem, back to Jacobs:

Thursday’s primetime hearing will be the first installment in a series of hearings throughout this month and perhaps into the summer. It will begin at 8 pm ET and be carried live by the major broadcast networks, most cable networks and online (but not on Fox News)...

That's because Fox Not-News pundits have been warned by their legal counsel that anything they say in televised rebuttal can be used against them in a court of law. But I digress.

The committee’s goal over the course of the summer is to lay out the effort to overturn the 2020 election in detail, not just its culmination in the attack on the Capitol but the step-by-step effort by Trump to reverse his loss, including efforts to pressure local officials and plotting with figures like lawyer John Eastman and Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark to provide some sort of legal justification for his actions.

Democrat Elaine Luria of Virginia, a member of the committee, told Vox that the hearings will provide an “opportunity for people to have a comprehensive, chronological and thorough” accounting of the events leading up to January 6...

The real test is simply what revelations come from the hearings. The past 18 months have seen an endless trickle of news out about the events leading up into the attack on the Capitol. This hasn’t just happened in court documents filed by the committee or in leaks about its proceedings. There have been best-selling books on the topic that have broken new ground.

The question is whether what emerges from the hearing, either as a new discovery or as a viral moment of some kind, can break through. And, of course, even if it does, it’s unclear what impact it will have on public opinion...

In truth, the Far Right MAGA cultists won't believe any revelations will be criminal for them, because they genuinely believe they're the good guys in all this.

But this should help Democratic voters - and the Independent voters who are still rely on coherent thought - remind themselves of what's at stake in the upcoming midterms and the importance of turning up to vote to ensure the Republican wailing about "fake votes" is too overwhelming for them to lie about.

For myself, I'm hoping there's enough evidence already to indict trump's inner circle who ran the riot war rooms, and that by the end of the month we'll have handcuffs on not just Navarro but also Bannon, Stone, Eastman, and the rest of that clown car of chaos.

Get to it, Garland! ARREST THOSE MOFOS (rage rage rage)

(why YES, I am biased just a little against goddamned rioting seditionists)

It's D-Day 2022

Time to celebrate D-Day!

"WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?! HELL NO!"

...

wait, back up a minute...

 

The Aftermath of trumpian Scandals, Still Acted Out

One of the sadder thoughts I carry with me is how - looking back on it now - I had so much hope that the Mueller Report - into Russia's involvement in the 2016 Elections cycle and their involvement in trump's attacks on the American electoral process - would expose all of trump's sins and hold him accountable.

Alas.

Even with all that Mueller did find regarding the Russian end of the scandal - which produced real results, numerous arrests/plea deals/convictions, and exposed the facts of how foreign influence in our elections is an ongoing problem - the investigation closed - thanks to incoming Attorney General William Barr who rewrote and redacted the final report - before any direct links between trump's 2016 campaign and Russian operatives could be proved. At best, Mueller found evidence that trump obstructed the investigation, but he couldn't pursue an arrest and tried to get Congress to file impeachment (which they failed to do. The Democratic House decided to impeach over trump's misdeeds with Ukrainian military aid). 

That should have been, for better and worse, the end of that.

Except for trump's misbegotten narcissism, which casts himself as both Hero and Victim with every action taken against him.

Just as the Mueller investigation wound down, trump kept pushing the narrative that the FBI shouldn't have been investigating him for his ties to Russia in the first place. he insisted on a conspiracy theory that the "evidence" that started the Mueller probe was tainted: That it came from a hastily written and half-proved Steele Report that was started by Republican operatives trying to stop trump during the 2016 Primaries, instead of the FBI getting bits and pieces from other criminal investigations and clues well before the Steele Report was even started. trump argued, and kept screaming ever after, that he was the victim of an illegal spying campaign by both Obama and then Hillary Clinton using their ties to the FBI to embarrass the "ever-innocent donald trump."

So as Barr entered the scene to shut down Mueller's probe, Barr also fished around for a special prosecutor to follow up trump's claims of victimhood, and found one in US Attorney John Durham in Connecticut to handle that investigation.

Tasked with finding any malfeasance among the FBI investigators, and with any persons in Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaigns that may have done any illegal misdeeds, Durham has spent the last three years following any accusation that trump and his handlers insisted were real.

To summarize what Durham found during his witch hunt investigation into the FBI and Hillary's campaign: Not a lot.

If I can refer to Margaret Carlson at Washington Monthly about the uselessness of Durham's efforts:

Durham’s mission was impossible. Robert Mueller successfully convicted every bad actor he’d charged—more than three dozen—and stopped short of Trump because of a Justice Department memo saying a sitting president couldn’t be indicted. Mueller’s investigation was investigated and found to be predicated on sufficient, credible evidence by Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed. They had to, there’s so much out there...

Barr set the tone for the inquiry by taking Durham on a James Bond–like three-star hotel, four-star eating tour of Rome to interview a peculiar professor we would never hear about again. From there, the probe dragged on. In 2021, Durham eked out a guilty plea from the former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith that he altered an email, with information he believed was true, to quickly fill out a surveillance warrant on Page, who frequented Moscow. Durham wanted Clinesmith, the first in his family to go to college and with a wife expecting their first child, to be incarcerated for six months for behavior that showed “his strong political views and/or personal dislike of [Trump].” Manna to Trump, if he were paying attention. The judge gave Clinesmith one year of probation (Editor's note: not even much of a slap on the wrist)...

If you recall Mueller's work - and several other special counsel probes throughout the decades - one of the key tools is getting lower-rung persons involved in shenanigans to plead out and then flip the higher-ups they can prove were committing other illegal acts. You can see Durham was trying to get several people he caught in relatively minor lies into flipping. And yet, none did.

Because no matter how much trump - and trump's cultists - yell and scream about it, the most likely scenario about how the FBI did its job investigation trump and the Russians is that, well, the FBI did its job. The people in Hillary's and Obama's orbits had no reason to flip for Durham because there was nothing really there in the first place.

Leading up to Durham's biggest failure yet to turn a gaslit lie into fact (back to Carlson):

The question is urgent after a Washington, D.C., jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty in Durham’s biggest case to date, charging the lawyer Michael Sussman with making a false statement. It followed on a meeting Sussman had with the FBI general counsel, James Baker, to inform him about information he had been given about curious activity between the computer servers of Donald Trump’s campaign and the Alfa Bank of Russia. Baker told Durham that Sussman hadn’t revealed his firm’s connections to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, although he admitted that his memory on the point had evolved. 

That gave Durham a premise for charging Sussman with a false statement by omission. It gives the rest of us a premise for thinking Durham is a Justice Department careerist out of gas. After the (Not Guilty) verdict, the jury foreperson said that the government’s time “could have been spent more wisely” than on a “possible lie to the FBI.”

Whatever Sussman did (which is so meager an omission and so minor an issue), to the jury it didn't rise to the level of guilt that Durham (and trump) needed. The truth about Sussman's warning to Baker didn't even seem to be at issue. Durham just wanted to catch someone close to Hillary in a lie. No one else bought it.

Without that guilty verdict, Durham's next court trial - going after Russian Igor Danchenko, accused of lying to the FBI about the contents of the Steele Dossier - is looking more like a show trial beating a dead trumpian horse.

I'm not the person you need to read on all of the miscues and screwups of Durham's flawed probe. Emptywheel is a far more dedicated and informed resource, and this is just one of many things she found wrong in Durham's work:

This entire three year process was launched with no evidence that a crime was committed, and it seems likely that only the Kevin Clinesmith prosecution, which DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz handed Durham months after he was appointed as a fait accompli and which could easily have been prosecuted by the DC US Attorney’s Office, provided an excuse to convene a grand jury to start digging in the coffers of Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie.

There was no crime. Durham was never investigating a suspected crime and then, as statutes of limitation started expiring, he hung a conspiracy theory on a claimed false statement for which he had no solid proof. Eight months into Durham repeating those conspiracy theories at every turn — conspiracy theories that Durham admitted would not amount to a crime in any case! — a jury told Durham he had inadequate proof a crime was committed and that the entire thing had been a waste of time and resources...

Compare that to the Russian investigation, which was started to figure out which Trump associate had advance knowledge of Russia’s criminal hack-and-leak operation and whether they had any criminal exposure in it...

The answer, by the way, was that at least two Trump associates had advance knowledge, George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, and Stone shared his advance knowledge with Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump, among others. By all appearances, DOJ was still investigating whether Stone had criminal exposure tied to his advance knowledge when Barr interfered in that investigation in February 2020, a fact that Barr hid until the day before the 2020 election.

With the Russian investigation, there was a crime: a hack by a hostile nation-state of a Presidential candidate, along with evidence that her opponent at least knew about the related leak campaign in advance. With the Durham investigation, there were only Fox News conspiracy theories and the certainty that Donald Trump shouldn’t be held accountable for encouraging Russia to hack his opponent...

There should be some sense of relief from those of us on the sidelines watching this theater of the absurd play out to a diminished whimper. It would be nice if it did.

But trump will not let go of his fear and his rage and his victimhood. He kept screaming after the decision that the "legal system is CORRUPT" and isn't letting this damage to his ego go away.

For trump, the grievance is the only way he can convince everyone else he wasn't in cahoots with Putin to fuck up our elections. And he wants to clear a path to redo those dirty tricks when 2024 rolls around.

Gods help us. This train wreck isn't over yet.

Tiananmen Anniversary 2022

Another June 4th, another round of China squelching protestors out of fear (via AP News by way of NPR).

Heavy police force patrolled Hong Kong's Victoria Park on Saturday after authorities for a third consecutive year banned public commemoration of the anniversary of the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, with vigils overseas the only place marking the event.

For decades, Hong Kong and nearby Macao were the only places in China allowed to commemorate the violent suppression by army troops of student protesters demanding greater democracy in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed.

The ban is seen as part of a move to snuff out political dissent and a sign that Hong Kong is losing its freedoms as Beijing tightens its grip over the semi-autonomous Chinese city...

And it's not just been the Tiananmen freedom protests that China's government has cracked down on.  Eduardo Baptista at Reuters documented how the quarantine lockdown earlier this year drove up anger and protests across Shanghai and other provinces (paywalled so I can't provide any quotes).

Also a reminder that China is conducting an ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs population (via Zoya Wazir at US News & World Report): 

Multiple reports from human rights and civil society organizations have found that Uyghurs have been detained in prisons and internment camps since at least 2017, with other abuses starting even earlier.

While the Chinese government argues that these re-education camps are meant to provide Uyghurs with vocational training to combat poverty, separatism and Islamic extremism, Jewher Ilham – a Uyghur rights advocate with the Coalition to End Forced Labor in the Uyghur Region whose father, prominent Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, has been detained in Chinese prison since 2014 – says that the Chinese government’s definition of extremism is intentionally broad to allow for mass detentions...

Today, 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Muslims are estimated to be in internment camps in Xinjiang, according to the Associated Press.

(Kelley Currie, the former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and the U.S. representative at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women) adds that the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs hinges on ethnic discrimination and a discomfort with their assertion of their distinct ethnic identity...

Foreign policy experts keep telling us that China is one step removed from being a true global superpower. They keep forgetting China can't unleash its full might because it's tied down suppressing their own citizenry.

One day, China will be free. Their leadership's own corruption will consume itself sooner rather than later, and all we can hope for is that a lot of innocent people both in China and across the globe won't suffer from that selfl-immolation.

Blood On the Streets of Tulsa (w/ Updates)

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for linking me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up!)

Because the National Rifle Body Count Association wants its blood money (via Rina Torchinsky with NPR): 

Police in Tulsa, Okla., say the shooter's doctor was among those killed Wednesday during a mass shooting at a medical building. The shooter had complained multiple times about pain following back surgery and sought additional treatment in the days prior to the attack, police said.

The shooting on the campus of Saint Francis Health System left five people dead, including the gunman, according to police. Two doctors, Preston Phillips — who had treated the gunman — and Stephanie Husen, were killed as was Amanda Glenn, an employee, and William Love, a patient, according to The Associated Press...

The gunman apparently felt ongoing back pain that the treatment didn't correct, and became angry at the doctor and the office that treated him. Driven by that anger, the gunman did this:

At 2 p.m. Wednesday — hours before the shooting — the gunman purchased an AR-15-style rifle from a local gun shop, Franklin said. The shooter also purchased a semiautomatic handgun on May 29 from a pawn shop.

Do you understand? As soon as the angry guy got his AR-15 murderstick (it's not so funny how THAT weapon is the preferred assault rifle for these mass shootings), he went on his shooting spree killing "everyone who got in his way" on his path of vengeance. No sign of a background check done, no waiting period, no cool-down, no training period, no mental health check, nothing.

He got his assault rifle and immediately became a murderer. Killing doctors, killing a staffer, killing a patient who had nothing to do with his treatment. And then killing himself knowing he was fucked forever.

One of the frustrating realizations about all of these mass shootings criss-crossing our nation is the repeating patterns to them all. It's like there's a script to this:

Step One: A guy - and it's usually a guy, often White but sometimes Black/Latino/Asian/Arab - gets pissed off about a personal injustice or perceived slight. It may involve his job, it may involve a legal dispute, but nine times out of ten it'll involve women.

Step Two: The guy comes to believe he has no legal recourse to respond to the slight, or else believes the legal system is already conspiring against him. He also refuses to seek mental help support, because he's been raised to think that's for pussies.

Step Three: The guy, getting angrier, buys a gun or twelve. If he's REALLY angry or his anger is focusing on a large group of people, he will buy an ArmaLite Rifle aka the AR-15 (the Murderstick of CHAMPIONS). This is a major problem: Nearly every firearm used in the mass shootings we keep witnessing were purchased legally or acquired legally by an ally/friend/family member, oft-times within days of the shooting events.

Step Four: A moment will trigger the angry guy into picking up his weapons - and all the ammo clips he can carry - and heading out to a place that is either the source of his woes or a place where his preferred target "audience" can be found.

Step Five: Mass shooting gets reported on the major networks. More money for the NRA!

These ongoing acts of gun violence keep involving the same three things: The number of angry guys walking among us; The relative ease to purchase and employ firearms powerful enough to kill tens of people in mere seconds; And our nation's inability to push legal reforms or public aid to solve those first two problems.

If we're going to resolve the ongoing gun violence crisis in the United States, we're going to have to come to terms with this fact: Either we get rid of the Angry Guys threatening acts of violence against us, or we get rid of the Assault Rifles that make it too damned easy for them to kill.

It's honestly impossible to get rid of Angry Guys. That would involve passing laws mandating every hot-tempered person out there check in with a psychologist or health care worker to talk them down from their rage, and that would go against a lot of privacy laws (you'll definitely get a lot of lawsuits from guys angrily disbelieving they have anger issues in the first place).

Also, to you people who would argue "Oh let CHRIST'S LOVE into your hearts" as a cure for Angry Guy Syndrome, that's a load of shit. Half these mass shooters claim to be loving Christians already when they pick up their murder weapons to kill those they deem unworthy of God's grace (just look at the so-called Christians shooting up synagogues and grocery stores). Mandatory Religion is not the solution you want it to be.

And thanks to the Second Amendment and a Supreme Court skewing to an extreme Far Right agenda, it's gotten harder to get rid of the assault weapons. Even though we've had a history of banning the AR-15s and their copycats for ten years rather effectively until 2004.

The United States is a toxic brew of fear, hate, rage, and easy access to military-grade firepower.

The shootings will continue until morale improves, or until there's no one left as target practice for the NRA to profit from.

P.S. As I type this, there's reports of a mass shooting in Racine, Wisconsin. It's at a funeral service for a Black man who was shot and killed by cops. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.

P.S.S. Following the Racine shooting, there was a shooting at a church in Ames, IA. The killer turned out to be an Angry Guy ex-boyfriend of one of the two killed college women. For the LOVE OF ACTUAL GOD, PEOPLE...