Nothing More Useless Than Grandstanding House Republicans

In my many years, I have come to a conclusion that one Republican is a shame, two Republicans are a lobby firm, and three or more Republicans are a broken Congress!
-- paraphrasing John Adams from the 1776 musical

We started this year with a dysfunctional House of Representatives thanks to a clueless, inept, rage-driven Republican party. We're ending this year with one of the worst ever Congress sessions because that House GOP couldn't do a goddamn thing except shoot themselves in the collective foot. Some details from Li Zhou at Vox:

Just one week into 2023, House Republicans had already endured a humiliating leadership race full of infighting and chaos. And while that was a low point for them, things arguably went downhill from there.

Since then, the GOP followed up its first wave of speaker drama with another equally tumultuous contest, expulsion votes on one of its own members, failed attempts to get much of its policy agenda out the door, and floundering investigations of President Joe Biden.

Spending a year dealing with political and personnel problems left the party with little to show for itself policy-wise ahead of an election year in which Republicans hope to expand on their narrow House majority. And it has given Democrats plenty of ammunition to use in making the case the GOP shouldn’t be trusted to govern...

It should be noted most Far Right voters enjoy the fact that their own party can't govern, because it means the ineptitude prevents anything useful getting done (and they HATE useful governance).

According to the New York Times, this is the most unproductive the House has been in years, even compared to other instances of divided government. In 2023, the House passed just 27 bills that became law, a far lower figure than the 72 it passed in 2013 when Congress was similarly split.

They're barely showing up to do the work that legislatures are supposed to do. Instead they've been too busy hosting fund-raising rallies for their campaign managers' six-figure salaries, and showing up on Fox Not-News and other Far Right media outlets to accuse drag queens and Democrats of 'grooming'.

This isn't some new development, either. There's been a long history of reactionary Republican Congresses being nothing more than posturing forums letting the world burn while they perform their manufactured outrage.

Harry Truman famously described his GOP opponents as a "Do-Nothing Congress" and won over voters in 1948 who agreed with him. And THAT session of Congress actually passed 388 pieces of legislation.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - before he turned out to be a creep - kept reporting how lazy and useless the Republican-controlled Congress of the 2000s behaved (the articles are paywalled). Caught taking long weekends, failing at oversight regarding Bush the Lesser's reckless management of two battlefronts and refusing to rein in an illegal torture regime, and letting debt and deficits run amok while pushing for more tax cuts and deregulation: Even that congressional era was more productive than this era's Freedom-Caucus controlled House.

(The Democratic-controlled Senate by the by tried being more functional this year, but both ends of Congress have to pass legislation and with the House in its partisan gridlock there was little the Senate could do. Even then, wingnut hacks like Senator Tuberville delayed and held Senatorial functions over bullshit partisan agendas)

What's happened has been the gradual degrading of conservative ideology from actual thought - genuine ideas and attempts at reforms they believed would work - into preformatted talking (more like screaming) points obsessing over irrational and unfounded Culture War fears. The party leadership - as much as the ill-informed voting base still supporting them - could care less about actual law-making when they can fulfill their agenda just accusing their enemies of wrong-doing and getting re-elected on the gaslighting.

The modern Republican Party has honestly devolved into this... monster incapable of governance because actual work interferes with their grifting. Passing any kind of legislation - that has to get past vetoes and court challenges, and then has to function as part of the nation's legal and social structure - could put that grifting to risk.

Pretty much the only thing the House Republicans can do anymore is rail against the federal social safety net, rail against IRS reforms trying to get rich corporations to pay back taxes, rail against supporting NATO and Ukraine (to appease their culture war ally Putin), and rail against President Biden to weaken his re-election chances.

The House grandstanding efforts to impeach Biden is pretty much the only thing they did all year, and even then they screwed that up. Philip Bump over at the Washington Post tracked an entire calendar of House Republican follies (might be paywalled):

This is not how Comer’s first year running Oversight worked out. Instead of using his majority to methodically flesh out the existing allegations against the president, Comer and his allies — including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — found themselves offering up baseless or debunked allegations to a conservative media ravenous for them. Throughout 2023, Comer, Jordan and their allies made little progress toward Comer’s stated target — but did manage to significantly erode their credibility...

By March, Republicans were ready to begin releasing a slow trickle of information about the monetary interactions between Hunter Biden, James Biden and their business partners. In the middle of the month, Oversight released the first of several “bank memos” that detailed money received by the Bidens or their associates and some of those who received it. None of those recipients was the president.

The Post would later walk through many of the allegations — including claims of millions of dollars flowing to the Bidens and of numerous “shell companies” — and would reveal them to be overstated or false.

Immediately, though, it was hard to avoid comparing the business arrangements of Hunter and James Biden with those of Donald Trump’s family. The Oversight presentation of Biden’s culpability uniformly also applied to the Trumps — but the scale of the former president’s family’s interactions was far more substantial. Another difference was that the former president himself was an obvious beneficiary, even while in office.

It was also during March that the New York Times reported that Comer had spiked an ongoing investigation into Trump’s business arrangements...

May was a banner month for Comer.

Comer also partnered with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to claim that evidence existed of an “alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions,” as a letter sent to the Justice Department claimed. This evidence was in the form of an interview conducted with an informant who claimed to have been told about payoffs of $5 million to Joe and Hunter Biden.

Comer and Grassley spent most of May trying to get the FBI to release the interview; the Bureau declined, noting both that the allegation was unverified and that doing so would put the informant at risk. Instead, the FBI allowed legislators to view the document. Grassley eventually just shared the whole thing on social media, though he said he had no idea if the allegation was true. That the person making the allegation — Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma — had also told people that he never had any contact with Joe Biden was ignored. No evidence beyond the informant’s description of the claim ever emerged.

There was an additional bit of intrigue here, though. At one point, Comer appeared for an interview about his investigation on Fox News. (He’s appeared on Fox hundreds of times this year, which is not unimportant for understanding what’s at play — nor is the fact that Comer is relentlessly fundraising on his status as theoretical Biden-toppler.) Host Maria Bartiromo asked him a weird question: where was this informant?

“Unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer replied. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible...”

You might remember on this blog where I railed against Comer for not even having his witnesses secured and confirmed. How can the whistleblower - whom you've misquoted at best - be credible without the informant? You need your effing ducks in a row before you go public with this, ya moron! Anyway, back to Bump:

In July, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment targeting Luft, the director of a D.C.-area think tank. Given that Luft had offered to provide information about his interactions with Biden, the indictment was cited by House Republicans, including Oversight’s Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) as evidence of an attempt by the government to silence a potential anti-Biden witness.

But this was backward. Luft offered to present information about knowledge of Hunter Biden’s agreement with a Chinese energy company only after he’d been detained earlier this year. The indictment was unsealed in July but had been handed down last November. Luft was arrested in February and then skipped bail — which was why he was “missing” when Comer clumsily brought him up back in May.

Wait, was Luft the "informant"? This keeps getting ridiculous.

A similar pattern unfolded at the end of the month as Oversight prepared to interview Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s. Just before that testimony, Archer received an update on his previous conviction on fraud charges and subsequent efforts to appeal, which had ended a few weeks prior: he would need to begin the process of reporting for incarceration.

Comer and others howled that this was an effort to lock up Archer so that he couldn’t testify. It wasn’t, as the government made clear in a subsequent letter with almost-audible eye-rolling. Archer testified...

Archer’s closed-door deposition was made public in August. Comer and his allies insisted that Archer’s testimony was damaging: that he described numerous occasions on which Joe Biden had called Hunter only to be put on speakerphone during business meetings and because he told investigators about a call placed to D.C. by Hunter Biden and Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma, on whose board Hunter Biden and Archer sat.

This was cherry-picking. Archer did say those things, though he agreed that the calls from Biden were non-substantive. Archer also testified that Hunter Biden had emailed him contemporaneously to note that they lacked the ability to leverage Joe Biden on their behalf. He testified that Joe Biden was at no point involved in their business. He even debunked the idea that Hunter Biden had been working with a Russian that had paid Archer money for a real estate deal — one of the allegations that Comer had referenced in his December 2022 Post interview...

Earlier this month (December), Comer used newly obtained documents to announce that Hunter Biden’s law firm had made a direct payment to his father — an attempt to intertwine Joe Biden directly in his son’s work.

But this fell apart before the close of business on the day the allegation was made. The payments, amounting to less than $5,000, were in repayment of a loan Joe Biden had offered his son to buy a new pickup truck. There were pictures of Joe and Hunter at the car dealership.

Nor were such payments from the law firm account particularly unusual. Comer and his allies had repeatedly hyped how many Bidens had received “laundered money” from Hunter Biden, but that included things like money paid to Hunter Biden’s child...

When you've sunk down to the interfamily transactions of buying cars for each other - and it wasn't a Porsche it was a freaking pickup truck - you're just scrapping for anything to make your fearmongering stick to the wall.

This is what the Republican Party is today: A bunch of witch-hunters unable to find actual witches. They're not even good at the one thing they're trying to do. How incompetent can you get?

Angry Guy Violence at Christmastime

Just a quick observation or three about a tragedy that happened in Pinellas County on Christmas, where two brothers shot at each other arguing over which had the bigger Christmas and in the process killed their older sister (via Jack Prator at the Tampa Bay Times).

• This shooting happened because two people - young men with anger and envy driving them - had incredibly easy access to firearms, and had prodded each other to levels of rage that guaranteed someone was going to end up dead.
• None of this would have happened if either the family didn't make it so easy to access weapons, or if the young men involved had better opportunities to learn ways to avoid that anger, to avoid the rage that always leads to tragedy of some kind.
• You could wonder about the stress, anxiety, and emotional mix-ups that come about whenever Christmas rolls around, but I get the sense the filial feuding had been brewing for some time, and that anything else - a birthday, a family celebration, someone having a bad day - would have triggered the same response.

And you want to know the horrifying observation about this? There were multiple shootings across the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Much like there have been multiple shootings across the United States throughout all of 2023. We are now averaging two mass shootings per day, and nothing being done to reduce the easy access of guns to angry guys across nation.

Not the greatest way to celebrate what's supposed to be a day of peace and goodwill.

Gods help us.

What If: The Colorado Ruling Applies to ALL of 2024 Primaries?

So, let's just say the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that said trump should be barred from the presidential ballot because he engaged in insurrection regarding the January 6th riots goes to the US Supreme Court, and even the majority conservative bench of six Republican jurists rule against trump in some fashion.

It's not a given that the six will rule for trump outright. Doing so would go against their own Originalist opinions the Far Right justices had been arguing over the years. They would have to flush down the toilet the Colorado court's detailed opinions, some of which used a SCOTUS Justice's - Gorsuch - own arguments to make the decision that the states are obligated to defend the electoral process. In some respects, trump is asking the Supreme Court to ignore a constitutional amendment - or interpret it into utter uselessness - which bodes ill for any future rulings that could ignore other amendments to the Far Right's detriment. The justices may feel territorial about holding onto their powers of judicial review, after all.

There could still be some kind of ruling where Chief Justice Roberts can retain some integrity for the high court all the while giving trump what he wants - to stay on the ballot to avoid his criminal fate as much as possible - but that would be threading the smallest eye of a needle in legal history. 

This is as much a YES or NO legal decision as we will see: Either trump committed acts in violation of the 14th Amendment and should be barred from future elected office, or the 14th Amendment section insisting on blocking insurrectionists is unenforceable and trump stays on ballot (they shouldn't be able to argue if trump engaged in seditious/insurrectionist acts to begin with, because the lower court and state supreme court both found trump did, and that it violated the 14th's requirements. The lower court ruled that it didn't find trump was an "officer" as defined by the amendment, which the state court overruled).

So, let's say the Supreme Court rules 5-4 at the least that trump did violate the 14th Amendment, and that Colorado and other states could remove trump's name from the ballots for the 2024 Republican primaries.

Okay, after all the MAGA rioting settles down, what would actually happen?

The most likely thing is that the heavily Democratic-controlled (Blue) states will take trump's name off the ballots. The Republican Party and the media may scream that it denies the voters a choice; but this isn't about the voters this is about the constitution, and the constitution restricts choices all the time (after all, the Natural Born requirement for Presidents is why we don't have a President Schwarzenegger - who was popular nationally - after his stint as California's governor in the 2000s).

It's likely the heavily Republican-controlled (Red) states will ignore the legal efforts to block trump's name, even if the state courts follow through on any lawsuits filed over the matter (it would then be a matter if the state courts will hold Republican elections officials in contempt over this). The question mark will then be the battleground states where governments split between parties for legislatures, courts, and executive branches decide to bar trump as an insurrectionist from the ballots.

How would any of this affect the 2024 elections cycle.

If we look at the primaries themselves, trump can't afford to be blocked from too many state ballots. Based on the information at the Green Papers website tracking the primaries, the Republican nominating process requires a winning candidate lock up 1215 delegates.

Why is New Jersey, a state in the top 20 for population,
stuck with so few delegates?

So let's say the states that we know are solidly Democratic - California, New York, Illinois, about 16 others - and several battleground states that may agree that trump can be barred - New Hampshire, maybe Virginia, maybe Georgia considering all the local opposition from the governor and other state officials going on - take trump out of the primaries? How many delegates will that be? 

Given that the delegate total of blocked states is around 1093 (out of 2429), it looks like trump could still eke out a delegate victory with the remaining Red/pro-trump states and get his name on the Republican general ballot.

This all depends on which states actually follow through on removing trump from the ballot. Some of these states I added may not, and who knows one or three of the Red states may see it happen if their courts rule on it and can enforce those rulings. If enough states bar trump to where he can't reach 1215, he's screwed.

This also depends on if the US Supreme Court rules against trump outright, finding his actions on January 6th are punishable by disqualifying him from every state (or at least encourage all 50 states to do so).

This also depends on if the Republican national leadership doesn't change their own primary rules in case trump does get thrown off ALL the ballots. They could try pulling a last-minute rule change to negate primaries and just go with a convention floor vote in spite of the 14th Amendment's enforcement.

While the state primary ballots are at play now, if trump survives that he still has to deal with a general election where the states that barred him on the primaries can do so again with the November ballot. The Electoral College math is slightly different from the delegate math, and if enough battleground states deny him a spot on the ballot - and refuse all write-ins - he could once again lose enough Electors to face defeat (that he could be barred in nearly half the states will definitely lower his popular vote total across the nation).

This is all speculation, of course. We still have to see how the Supreme Court rules: If they abide by the judicial review process, if they agree with Colorado's ruling, if they find trump accountable under constitutional law. If Roberts' Court gives trump carte blanche, then partisanship wins out and the legal system is truly dead under trump's inevitable misrule.

The one thing we know for certain is that elections matter, that voter turnout matters, and the majority of the nation that dares not let trump back in the White House better fucking show up in 2024 to stop him. Get the damn vote out, Americans. Stop trump, save the world.

Update 12/28/23: I may have misspoke too soon, in that Colorado has not fully removed trump's name from the ballot, as they're awaiting the Supreme Court decision and the Secretary of State won't be doing it for the primary vote.

Michigan's Supreme Court agreed with a lower court to allow trump to remain on their ballot, although I've read elsewhere - need to find that link - that the state would revisit the matter if trump is convicted in the federal case regarding his involvement in the January 6th riots.

In the meantime, Maine's Secretary of State held her own hearing on the matter and determined trump violated the 14th Amendment, so she IS removing his name from the ballot. This will clearly go to the courts as well.

Just a reminder kids that this isn't about the voters' choice, this is about the rules etched into the Constitution itself.

trump's Language of Hate Is Getting More Violent

If there is a blogger I quote often, it's Rude Pundit (not entirely sure the real name, just that he's from Louisiana or hails from there). And what he wrote today is worth your time (go visit and come back), of which these are the highlights: 

To be a loyal redcap stormtrooper, you gotta go along with Trump no matter which way his insistent madness drives his rhetoric. And, truly, you don't disagree with him when says, "They’re coming from all over the world. People all over the world, we have no idea. They could be healthy. They could be very unhealthy. They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country, but they do bring in crime, but they have them coming from all over the world and they're destroying the blood of our country." But what you're agreeing with is Nazi shit. It's flat out Nazi shit. Trump can say, as he told Hewitt, that it's not the same as what Hitler said, but it is the same as what Hitler said, except Hitler was talking about Jews and Trump's talking about undocumented migrants. And Trump wants to round them up and put them in camps before deporting them by the millions. And he wants laws passed that would allow authorities to check the papers of anyone they "suspect" of not being American. It's absolute insanity that would fundamentally alter the fabric of the country. It will cause upheaval and violence and economic ruin. But Nazis don't give a shit about that kind of thing because purity matters above all. The rest will take care of itself once the blood is purified. Or, you know, un-poisoned...

Sure, sure, some Trump supporters, desperately hoping to rationalize away the stink of Nazi, will try to say that they know the "rhetoric" Trump uses is over the top and even problematic, but they just think what he did for the country was so awesome that they have to support him and, hey, he can't do all those bad things. You know what you call someone who tries to justify what a Nazi says? You call them a "Nazi..."

So, yeah, I'll call these sick motherfuckers "Nazis." If you're gonna follow someone whose language lines up with Hitler, who has praised dictators and who wants to bring their methods to the United States, who promises to round up millions of people just trying to live their lives, who threatens to attack our neighbors and break our alliances, who sees non-white people as invaders or criminals who must be dealt with harshly, who wants to "cleanse" the country of people who don't believe the same shit he does, fuck, yeah, you're a Nazi. I don't wanna wait around until gas chambers are built to finally sound an alarm.

Nothing Rude Pundit notes is in the wrong. trump is now openly threatening - after what I feared he's do when he was previously in office - to quit NATO. trump is threatening to attack our border allies Canada and Mexico, and not just with more tariff wars. trump is threatening at home to "weaponize" the Department of Justice to attack everyone who's been involved in his ongoing civil and criminal trials. As part of his revenge tour, he's also threatening to fire most of the federal civil service so he can refill all the jobs with people directly loyal to himself.

trump is bragging he will be a dictator on Day One, and although he couches that by saying "it'll be for one day only" that one day is all he needs to become Dictator For Life.

trump has been spending this third round of campaigning going further into extremist and violent rhetoric as though he's got nothing left to lose.

Because in all respects he's got everything to lose.

trump is facing up to four different criminal trials, any one of which could find him in a jail cell halfway through the 2024 campaign cycle. Granted, trump and his lawyers are doing everything they can to delay every trial until 2025, with the hope that he will "win" (most likely steal through another broken Electoral College) re-election and have legal immunity as President, during which he'll wreak havoc on the legal system both federal and state to ensure he never dies in prison. However, most of the trials are already set in the calendar, with the likelihood that if he delays one trial - say, the Mar-A-Lago documents trial set for May getting moved back to 2025 - the prosecutors in the other trials could move up to fill that vacuum. The Georgia conspiracy trial, for example, doesn't have a date set yet but DA Willis claims she can have it going within 30 days, and there's every sign the judges will let her.

And that's just the trials. If the Colorado ballot disqualification holds up in the Supreme Court, there is every likelihood the 34 other states considering that matter will use the 14th Amendment clause - to ban insurrectionists from elective office - to keep trump from either the primary ballot (denying him the Republican ticket) or the general ballot in November (denying him Electoral votes). trump may be blocked from Presidential immunity altogether.

So trump is going for broke. he is going to the most extreme, most reprehensible language he can use to rile up a Far Right voting base that's hungry for the hatred and fear that trump feeds them. It's already stirring them up to attack the Colorado judges and plotting to attack any other state officials down the road.

This is all trump knows: Angering up his base to get them to do the dirty work of scaring the rest of America into letting him get his way. Even at the expense of constitutional norms (and literal constitutional law).

A lot of this depends on what the courts will do to rein in trump's increasingly desperate violence towards everything America should stand for. If they delay his trials, they risk the possibility of trump stealing away the Electoral College by hook and crook. If they ignore the 14th Amendment, they risk the reality that trump will happily trash the rest of the Constitution when he regains the Presidency and fulfills his vow of dictatorship.

If they hold trump accountable - either by sticking to the trials he's likely to lose, or sticking to the 14th Amendment that denies him any chance of being on the ballot - they like the rest of the nation runs the risk of trump's violent rhetoric turning into MAGA's violent actions.

But that risk of violence is unavoidable. One way or another, trump will have blood shed and lives lost.

Better to hold trump accountable to the law, in spite of his bullying words. Let justice be done.

Insurrections Have Consequences. Colorado Can Block trump From the 2024 Ballot

This is breaking news:

 

BREAKING NEW: WE WON! The Colorado Supreme Court just ruled Donald Trump is disqualified from the ballot and from holding office under the 14th Amendment!

Much more coming soon.

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) December 19, 2023

Let me find a more detailed news report. Ah here, NPR has it... no wait it's the Colorado regional version of NPR, Bente Birkeland reporting in:

In a landmark decision, the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former president Donald Trump is disqualified from appearing on the state’s primary ballot next year.

The Justices’ 4-3 ruling concludes that Trump engaged in an insurrection with his words and actions around the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and therefore cannot hold the nation’s highest office again. 

“We are also cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory,” wrote Colorado’s Supreme Court in its unsigned 213-page decision.

This is the first time a state’s high court has concluded the 14th Amendment’s Civil War-era Disqualification Clause applies to both the office of the presidency and the actions of the former president. Supreme Courts in Minnesota and Michigan dismissed similar complaints.

“We do not reach these conclusions lightly,” wrote the Justices. “We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach...”

The ruling overturns the finding of a district court judge that the Disqualification Clause does not cover the office of the presidency. It also reaffirms that, under Colorado law, the court has jurisdiction to bar disqualified candidates from the Republican Party’s primary ballot. They also concluded that the judicial branch is empowered to apply the clause...

Earlier this year - as the January 6th rioters found themselves charged and convicted for their role in disrupting Congress' duty to confirm the 2020 Electoral votes - there were calls from various Constitutional legal experts that trump - now facing his own federal charges for his role in that insurrection - could and should be blocked from having his name on the primary (and general) election ballot. As I quoted experts like J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe earlier:

Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point. The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation. The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.

The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause...

What happened in the Colorado matter was that the lower court judge ruled that trump did engage in an act of insurrection, but failed to accept that the Amendment's definition of "officer" did not apply to Presidents. The state's Supreme Court overruled that view, determining trump was an officer under the Constitution and thus can be barred. 

Either way, the courts are finding that trump's behavior that January 6th - and the months leading up to it - fit the definition of insurrection. This is something every state dealing with these filings - I need to find out how many more states have ballot challenges - because if enough of them do block trump from even the GOP primaries, we're talking massive chaos in the 2024 election cycle.

Consider the situation if trump's name stays on in various Red states, but those tend to be the smaller states with fewer primary delegates at play. Considering the nature of the courts in Texas and Florida I doubt they will kick trump off the ballots, but big states like California, Illinois, and New York could. We could be talking about a delegate split between trump and whomever is left standing next year - it's looking like Nikki Haley, with half everybody else dropped out save for Christie, Ramsaway, and DeSantis (although he's so doomed he might not even stay in before New Hampshire) - to where neither have enough to outright win the first ballot. Chaos would be an understatement.

Consider also the wrath trump and his handlers will invoke if he's officially blocked off enough primary ballots to doom his re-election efforts to avoid criminal trials starting next year. The MAGA crowd are already primed for violence. If trump is convinced he can't regain the safety of high office through election, don't be surprised if he tries to avoid his legal woes by inciting secession or getting his congressional allies to stage some coup (even more than the failing impeachment scheme they're trying to inflict on Biden).

These are unprecedented days. All of it due to a rabid Far Right voting base that chose a crooked con artist to lead them, while the rest of the nation tries to get the legal system to establish some form of sanity and accountability to the Constitution our elected officials and officers of the law are sworn to uphold.

Hold onto your hats. The crazy train is speeding up as we head into 2024.

DeSantis Spite Making Florida Less Livable

It gets frustrating living in a hell hole where the political leadership WANTS to keep the state a hell hole out of partisan spite.

Evidence: The recent report out of the Tampa Bay Times about how the Florida Republicans rejected federal funding to fight automobile emissions and create cleaner air for the state residents (via Jack Prator and Max Chesnes).

Congress in 2021 provided $6.4 billion to states to curb tailpipe emissions and reduce the effects of climate change.

Florida was set to receive $320 million, the third most of any state.

The state Department of Transportation began drafting a plan to add trucker parking at rest stops, which staff said could fix the statewide shortage that kept drivers on the road longer, polluting more, as they searched for a place to stop.

The plan also suggested spending the money on things like electric buses and roundabouts, which reduce the amount of time idling cars sputter out climate-warming emissions at traffic lights.

But last month, the department secretary, Jared Perdue, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation declining participation in the federal program.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.

Perdue said in the letter that the program was an example of government overreach that was “the continued politicization of our roadways,” echoing statements made by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has said that climate change is “politicization of the weather.”

To my knowledge, the federal funding didn't include any requirements for state Republican officials to make acts of public fealty to our Democratic overlords. The only ones making this a partisan politicized controversy are DeSantis and his GOP lackeys!

Florida now stands alone as the only state to say it would turn down the money, federal officials told the Tampa Bay Times. Any mention of the plan was wiped from the state’s website...

Even Texas, whose governor often tries to outshine DeSantis on conservative credentials, plans to take its share of $641 million, officials there told the Times...

Do you see that, DeSantis? Even your fellow Red State governors are taking the federal money, you know why? 'CAUSE IT'S MONEY YOU FOOL, ALREADY PAID FOR BY TAXPAYERS, AND THEY NEED IT TO BALANCE THEIR STATE BUDGETS!

The stupid, it's choking us...

This isn't happening in other GOP-controlled states because those states are not led by an overly ambitious trump-wannabe moron campaigning for the 2024 Presidential nomination. But this is all happening as DeSantis' own campaign is falling apart with more advisors fleeing a sinking ship of a shoddy effort (via Tom Boggioni at Raw Story):

Strategist Jeff Roe walked away on Saturday night, dealing yet another blow to the DeSantis campaign that has been plagued by firings and layoffs as the Florida governor's attempt to displace Donald Trump as the face of the Republican party went nowhere with conservative voters.

According to a report from Politico, the Washington Post report on backbiting and finger-pointing in the PAC led Roe to call it quits, issuing a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, where he claimed that he, "cannot in good conscience stay affiliated with Never Back Down given the statements in the Washington Post today. They are not true and an unwanted distraction at a critical time for Governor DeSantis.”

The implication being that yeah it's probably even worse behind closed doors.

It's not helping DeSantis any better that the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) - a relatively toothless oversight committee - is filing an investigation over complaints that DeSantis is improperly coordinating with what are supposed to be independent PAC groups.

All this wasted effort, and yet DeSantis still has to preen and pose and pander to the Far Right - anti-government, anti-regulatory, anti-community - by pulling these self-spiting stunts denying much-needed funding for eco-friendly efforts that could well improve the quality of life for Florida residents.

This reminds me of the time Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott as Florida Governor refused federal funding for high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando - something that would have eased the insane traffic woes of I-4, and improved tourism between Disney World and the beaches - out of partisan anti-Obama spite - even as state Republicans were begging for the money going to their constituents - and then turning around like an idiot asking the feds if he could have the money instead for "more highways" (NO, the money was meant for rail you moron!)

The Republican leadership of Florida would rather let the environment turn toxic on their own voting residents than let the Democratic-controlled federal government send one penny for saving our health and livelihoods.

We are one Category 5 super-hurricane away from Mother Nature washing the Sunshine State into the Gulf of Mexico, but DeSantis and his wingnut handlers wouldn't give a rat's ass if that happened.

Gods help us.

You Signed Up For This, Rudy, Time to Pay Up

If there's anything that gets you back into the rhythm of political blogging, it's a tasty uber-sized serving of schadenfreude. For example, watching one of donald trump's most loyal lapdogs in Rudy Giuliani get brutalized in a civil court case for defaming Georgia election officials over trump's "stolen votes" gaslighting (via Miles Park at NPR):

Former Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay a staggering $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he spread lies about following the 2020 election.

The decision on Friday comes at the end of a week-long federal civil trial in Washington, D.C., where an eight-person jury heard from the workers — Wandrea "Shaye" Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman — about how 2020 election conspiracies spread by Giuliani and former President Donald Trump turned their lives upside down.

"I was afraid for my life," Moss said during her testimony on Tuesday. "I literally felt that someone would attempt to hang me and there was nothing anyone could do about it."

Jurors heard numerous violent and racist voicemails the women received, after Giuliani used his massive platform as a campaign attorney for Trump to spread lies about their actions as election workers in Georgia.

In the time after voting ended in 2020, Giuliani shared video from an absentee ballot counting facility in Fulton County, which he falsely claimed showed the two women cheating and scanning ballots multiple times to benefit Joe Biden.

A hand-count audit in Georgia found votes to have been tallied correctly in the 2020 election, and a years-long investigation by the Georgia secretary of state's office found the accusations against Moss and Freeman to be "false and unsubstantiated..."

In August, district Judge Beryl Howell found Giuliani liable for defamation, due to his lack of cooperation in the case, and Giuliani conceded as part of the proceedings that his statements about Moss and Freeman were false.

So the trial this week was only held to determine the damages Moss and Freeman were owed...

The penalties broke down to roughly $16 million per woman, and then an additional $20 million each for emotional damages, added to $75 million in punitive damages because Rudy was that huge a jerkass about all this.

Rumor has it Giuliani doesn't have that kind of personal wealth to pay out those damages. Granted, the lengthy appeal process will likely see the punitive damages reduced (and perhaps some of the emotional damages) but the appellate courts are loathe to overturn jury rulings, meaning at some point down the road he owes these women he victimized a shit-ton of money he doesn't have.

In most respects none of us should have any sympathy for Rudy. He intentionally went out of his way to attack these women - and wouldn't you notice how it's women he attacked, not the men who worked as elections officials in Georgia - as part of a massive scheme to overturn a legal election result not just in Georgia but across the United States.

(Remember kids, Giuliani was grandstanding in front of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia when the state of Pennsylvania confirmed the win for Joe Biden, effectively killing trump's gaslighting about "stolen votes" and subjecting Giuliani to public humiliation)

For all of Rudy's bluster during this trial in front of the cameras, he wasn't able to present honest evidence in the courtroom - or in ANY courtroom - that his (and trump's) lies about the elections results were real. For all the times Rudy said he was going to prove himself, that he was going to prove these women were part of a massive conspiracy, he never presented a shred of proof. And when he promised he was going to go on the stand and testify to his own defense, well of course he chickened out at the last minute and let the matter go to the jury, because even as a bad lawyer he knew the risks of being under oath and cross-examination.

Again, no sympathy for Rudy, because this sonofabitch signed up to be trump's bitch, and this is how everyone who lies and grandstands for that con artist ends up: Broke, facing jail time, and wondering how the hell their lives ended like this.

Giuliani volunteered for this, everyone. He happily went to work for donald trump knowing he was a bad boss with a long history of throwing lackeys under the bus to save his own orange hide. He willingly played the role of trump's Roy Cohn successor, the legal attack dog doing trump's bidding while trump plotted to subvert constitutional norms and overturn legal elections.

And what did it get Rudy? Failures in courtroom after courtroom trying to overturn election results without evidence to prove it. Getting tied up in fake electors schemes that currently has Giuliani facing thirteen racketeering charges in Fulton County Georgia.

That case, by the by, is likely why Rudy refused to testify in his own defense at the defamation trial: Anything he says under oath is admissible elsewhere. And according to reports, DA Fani Willis is not offering Giuliani - a major player in the conspiracy charges - a plea deal. Willis is also telling the state court that her office can take their case to trial within 30 days, depending at least on where things fit in trump's busy criminal trial calendar (this link is updated frequently, so save it to favorites, kiddos) for 2024.

So not only is Giuliani facing financial ruin over whatever years he has remaining, he's facing the reality that he's going to watch all of his wealth taken away from behind prison bars.

No sympathy for Rudy, though. He willingly signed up to work for a liar and a con artist. He willingly chose the path that Roy Cohn took, unloved and broken to the grave.

And he's still a freaking perv because of what we saw in that Borat movie. Gods.

Suffer, Rudy. You honestly earned this fate.

Quick Apology: December 2023 Edition

I did quiet down on my blogging this November in order to focus on my NaNo writing - which I got to 50,000 words but it's a mess - but I was also working on getting a new collection of short stories published so I am still a bit distracted by that even though most of the work is done.

Cover by M.A. Rehman at Fiverr

Details to follow once the paperback is officially on market.

Update: As of this afternoon, the paperback and ebook are available on Amazon.

It's a collection of stories since my college (1990s) days in Gainesville, and from my time in South Florida, and my time in the Tampa Bay area as I moved from workplace to workplace. I've written in various genres - fantasy, science fiction, horror, coming of age, thriller, mystery - but one of the running elements has been - hopefully - a sense of humor throughout. Growing up to Douglas Adams, Catch-22, and Doonesbury comic strips didn't help. 

In putting this book together, I decided to focus on the more humor-oriented stories and following a theme - for the most part - around locations. Given my Florida background, obviously a lot of these stories are based in the Sunshine State, but I've added stories based in Las Vegas, New York City, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Even a couple of places I've been to personally. Heh.

Wish me luck. I hope I find a readership.

I'll get back to blogging soon.

It's Saturnalia Time 2023 Edition!

Ah yes, the Roman winter festival where people drink wine, wear funny hats, deck the halls with greenery, exchange presents, and talk in Latin!

...which kind of describes a Christmas pot luck gathering at the nearby Catholic Church. Hmm.

This year in particular feels a lot like Saturnalia, thanks to all the current social media buzz about how American males think daily about The Glory That Was Rome. There's even a decent Saturday Night Live clip dedicated to it now:

So now I want my Saturnalia musical, you mongrel sons of Visigoths!

...

Gods, my Latin's so rusty, how do you say "mongrel sons of Visigoths" in Latin?

Every Culture War Warrior a Hypocrite

I am no longer surprised by the sexual or violent hypocrisy of the Republican Party - especially here in the Sunshine State - I am only saddened by the lives broken by their misdeeds. That the Florida GOP chair is under criminal investigation for sexual battery shouldn't surprise anyone (via Emily L. Mahoney at the Tampa Bay Times): 

The Sarasota Police Department is investigating an allegation of sexual battery made against Christian Ziegler, the chairperson of the Republican Party of Florida.

In response to a request for a complaint filed against Ziegler, the Sarasota police provided the Tampa Bay Times with a heavily redacted report from early October that only revealed a few words, including “raped” and “sexually battered...”

That it took until the end of November to get this story out is troubling. The follow-up details - via Max Greenwood also with Tampa Bay Times - get messier:

A search warrant affidavit and 911 audio released to news outlets on Friday shed light on a recently surfaced allegation that Florida GOP chairperson Christian Ziegler sexually assaulted a woman with whom he and his wife had had a previous sexual encounter.

The affidavit, obtained by the Orlando Sentinel and ABC Action News in Tampa, offered the most detailed public account yet of the incident, which has roiled Florida GOP leadership and led to calls for Ziegler to resign...

That the state Republicans - who usually circle the wagons to defend their own - are already calling for their chairman to resign should be a huge red flag that what they already know (or suspect) is going to get much worse. Back to Greenwood:

The woman, a longtime friend of Ziegler’s, told Sarasota police she “was sexually involved one time over a year ago” with Ziegler and his wife, and had agreed to have a second sexual encounter with the couple on Oct. 2, according to an excerpt of the affidavit posted online by ABC Action News. But when Bridget Ziegler was unable to make it, the woman told investigators she canceled the plans, texting Christian Ziegler that she was “mostly in it for” his wife.

Minutes later, when the woman opened her front door to walk her dog, Christian Ziegler was standing in the hallway outside of her apartment, according to ABC Action News’ reporting on the affidavit. He then proceeded to enter her apartment, where he allegedly raped her.

According to both reports on the affidavit, the woman said Ziegler did not use a condom during the encounter and told the victim, “I’m leaving the same way I came in.”

By this allegation, we can determine that Ziegler held expectations that HE was to get sexually pleasured, it was all for himself and his ego and his power, and to hell whatever the woman or his wife wanted. Christ, what an asshole.

ABC Action News reported that, after the alleged assault, the victim called her sister and went to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where a sexual assault kit was performed.

The alleged assault was reported to police two days after the encounter, on Oct. 4. Audio of a 911 call from that day reveals that a friend of the victim had asked law enforcement to perform a wellness check on the woman after she reportedly failed to show up to work for two days...

There is a lot of physical and eyewitness testimony here, enough to underscore that something happened to the woman and it traumatized her.

For all the tragedy that this alleged rape is, this is also high drama considering who Ziegler's wife Bridget is. Bridget Ziegler just happens to be a co-founder of a Far Right censorship group calling themselves Moms for Liberty, who are not about liberty they are going after books and literature they claim are "woke" and "sexually deviant" in our public schools and libraries. Not only the positive LGBTQ+ books but books about racism and our nation's history with slavery.

Bridget is someone who openly railed against transgender people as well as gays and lesbians, yet here she is enjoying a ménage with another woman with the implications they were both into each other (which must have gnawed at Christian's ego). As Zac Anderson at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune quotes ex-Republican pundit Ron Filipkowski, "The hypocrisy is off the charts:"

Filipkowski has known both Zieglers for years. He remembers when Christian Ziegler was a young party activist just starting to make appearances at Sarasota GOP meetings...

Bridget Ziegler had joined the Sarasota County School Board in 2014 and occasionally waded into polarizing issues in the years leading up to the pandemic, including a hot button debate about transgender bathroom use in Sarasota schools.

The pandemic led to a wave of conservative activism around schools, and both Zieglers – who have young children they often highlight in debates about education policies – became leading advocates for the education culture war agenda championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which attracted the most national attention with a bill limiting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.

Bridget Ziegler stood behind DeSantis as he signed the legislation, derided by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill – a nickname that still irks its supporters. The governor later appointed her to a board overseeing the special district that governs Disney’s properties in Central Florida. Disney has been battling with DeSantis over the company’s opposition to the measure, now in state law.

Along the way, the Zieglers often clashed with Democrats, LGBTQ activists and other critics of their agenda. Those critics have been quick to bash the Zieglers in the wake of the latest allegations, often pointing to alleged hypocrisy...

What we're seeing with the Zieglers is what Frank Wilhoit observed about conservatism: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. The Zieglers are clearly behaving as the In Group, a part of the state Republican power structure now running things since the 2000s, and eager to enforce a culture war against sexual-identity minorities - gays, lesbians, trans, poly, the Out Groups - to maintain their power status. 

Bridget is more than happy to kick one trans kid off a sports team (if not out of school altogether), more than happy to ban any talk of gay/lesbian relationships (with an eye towards banning such relationships for real), all the while penciling in on her calendar a sexual tryst that violates the religious sanctity of "family values" she and her husband publicly trumpet.

Whether she and the rape victim originally consented to an affair with the husband is not at issue here. What are at issue is Christian's violence towards that woman in the trio, and the hypocrisy of both Christian and Bridget pushing a Family Values agenda they themselves did not respect.

But that hypocrisy is what drives the Far Right in the first place. Their Culture War isn't about what consenting adults - or young adults growing into who they feel they are - are doing. The Culture War is about the power, of maintaining a status quo where only the elites can indulge themselves and everyone else will get punished for "deviancy".

It's not just the Zieglers. The more you look at the holier-than-thou Far Right, you see far too many "religious leaders" and "youth pastors" getting charged as sex offenders towards children, you see far too many elected officials bragging and showing off about their conquests, and you see far too many other elected officials refusing to do what needs doing to protect rape and assault victims or to reform a legal system that doesn't handle rape cases seriously.

Hypocrites everywhere among the Far Right. Any sane nation would express their outrage by voting every last one of those wingnut hypocrites out of office.

The Bare Minimum of Congressional Standards

So, having completed NaNoWriMo for 2023, and trying to get back into the swing of political blogging again, is there anything out there this Friday I could comment about?

...

Oh, right. This happened (via Eric McDaniel at NPR): 

Members of the House of Representatives voted 311-114 Friday morning to expel New York Republican George Santos from Congress. Santos is the sixth House member ever to be expelled from Congress.

Santos is accused by prosecutors of a number of financial misdeeds, including reimbursing himself for loans to his congressional campaign that he appears to have never actually made — in essence, stealing money from campaign donors.

Almost all Democrats and more than 100 Republicans voted to expel Santos, who will now be replaced in a special election...

You know, I'm still not convinced George Santos is his real name.

This is someone who got caught committing some very shaky con games who still bluffed and bought his way into elected office before anyone even cared to follow up on a background check.

It slowly turned out Santos violated a number of campaign finance laws: Getting his helpers to fake signatures, shake people down for credit card numbers, and spend tens of thousands on personal perks instead of actual campaign work. If there was any positive in this story, it's that Santos set records for fastest criminal indictments issued against a freshman congresscritter.

There had been a vote to expel Santos on November 1, but it fizzled due to it happening before an official report from the in-house Ethics Committee - an otherwise toothless entity - was released. As soon as THAT came out - documenting all the sins Santos committed not only towards his constituents but also towards his fellow elected officials - this second vote came up and this time the two-thirds supermajority needed to expel him was pretty much confirmed.

Granted, Santos hasn't even been convicted yet in a court of law, something the previous Congressmen expelled for their sins had to incur (that or getting expelled for joining the Confederacy). Expulsion doesn't require convictions however, merely the disapproval of Congress members betrayed by their own. Stealing from the voters was one thing, but grifting fellow Republican congresscritters (and their mothers)? Unforgivable. 

This was all happening as the House Republicans are struggling to stay on-message - attack Hunter Biden so they can justify impeaching Joe Biden - with half the party voting to keep Santos among their ranks due to their majority control being the slimmest in American legislative history. The GOP were holding roughly a five-seat majority, which is now down to four seats and even harder to maintain a unified front. With reports that several other House Republicans - especially ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, still bitter about his downfall - are looking to retire before 2024 even shows up on the calendar, Speaker Johnson - more vulnerable than ever for his own Motion To Vacate doom - tried to pressure his caucus to keep Santos to shore up the vote. That he and the rest of the GOP leadership failed - losing 105 Republican votes - speaks to the lack of power they truly hold.

In the meantime, the House will muddle through more continuing resolutions and fights over financial aid to Ukraine and Israel while a special election takes place in 90 days to temporarily fill that seat (the regular 2024 election will still happen). Given how Biden won that district in spite of Santos' "win" in 2022, there is a good chance the Democrats can flip that seat. Until then, inertia and corruption are still in play.

The members of the House may well pat themselves on the back for performing the bare minimum towards upholding some standards, but they have yet to do anything to prevent any future Santoses from joining their little club. There needs to be a massive overhaul of the electoral process: Greater transparency in tracking the campaign money and enforcing against misuse; public background checks to ensure the candidates are even who they say they are; even serious efforts to reduce the expenses and reduce the temptations of all that money bouncing back and forth.

Until then, we're going to see more con artists like Santos play their games in getting elected by hook and by crook into Congress, where the real money is. Gods help us.

No Nice Thing to Say: Kissinger Dead

It's a good thing I'm wrapping up my NaNo project because now I have time to go back to blogging just as this news alert broke tonight:

Henry Kissinger is (finally) dead.

The NPR report from Tom Gjelten is mostly hagiography - in that he describes Kissinger's public persona as a foreign policy giant - and it's not until halfway through the article that Kissinger's hard-line - bordering on war crimes - policies regarding Cambodia and Latin America are even mentioned.

This was what I wrote back in May when he turned 100:

There's a reason why whenever a beloved celebrity like Tina Turner passes away, the immediate social media reaction is "Why the fuck is Kissinger still alive?"

Kissinger still lives because he converted political connections into personal power, and because the United States refuses to hand him over for war crimes or any other crimes against humanity he clearly caused across his career (and the bloody legacy he left in his wake).

Kissinger defends himself to this day by arguing the global struggle against Communism required a "realpolitik" response: That is, to be as brutal and undermining as the Stalin-backed insurgencies had been in the 1950s across Eastern Europe and then the Third World. In this, Kissinger describes himself as a Machiavellian, in that "the ends justified the means" in ensuring American economic and political influence on the world stage.

If Kissinger truly is a Machiavellian, he overlooked one of the key teachings: In Machiavelli's question "whether it is better to be Loved or Feared," Machiavelli answered his own question by pointing out "It is more important to avoid being Hated" because in that moment you lose the Respect a Prince - or any leader - needs to keep himself in power.

In Kissinger's wake were dozens of nations broken, bloodied, left to suffer under dictatorial regimes backed by American muscle. The citizenry of those nations did not, will not forget that the United States - selling ourselves as a beacon of liberty and justice - became hypocritical monsters turning a blind eye to the suffering of those who begged for liberty and justice for their own.

Erik Loomis over at Lawyers Guns & Money shows less mercy:

One of the most vile individuals to ever befoul the United States, Henry Kissinger is dead. A man responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world and yet the most respected man within the American foreign policy community for decades, Kissinger’s sheer existence exposed the moral vacuity of Cold War foreign policy and the empty platitudes and chummy gladhandling of the Beltway elite class that deserves our utter contempt...

When Richard Nixon became the Republican nominee in 1968, Kissinger immediately made a close connection with him. In fact, they had a lovely thing to bond over: committing treason in defense of Nixon’s presidential ambitions. After Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for reelection, he hoped to end the Vietnam War. Nixon feared doing this would undermine his chances to win that fall, especially after LBJ announced the moratorium on bombing Hanoi. Luckily for Nixon, Kissinger agreed. Kissinger was serving Johnson as his advisor on the Vietnam peace talks. He let Nixon know that a peace treaty was imminent. This allowed Nixon to use his own connections in the Thieu government in Saigon to tell them he would recommit the U.S. to the war and thus they should refuse to agree to peace. This worked. Thieu boycotted the peace talks and nothing happened. Saving millions of Vietnamese lives and tens thousands of American lives had little meaning compared to the noble goal of getting Nixon elected to the presidency. Nixon repaid him by naming him National Security Advisor. Between 1968 and Kissinger’s “peace at hand” statements shortly before the 1972 elections, 20,000 American soldiers died. Thanks Hank and Dick...

But let’s not overstate the positives of Kissinger. The man was an absolute monster. Kissinger was the architect of Nixon’s policy of bombing Cambodia and the 1970 invasion that led to the biggest protests against the war and the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State University. The bombings of Cambodia killed up to 150,000 people between 1969 and 1973 and destabilized that already struggling nation, helping to usher in the Khmer Rouge, while also not doing anything at all to win the war in Vietnam that we should not have been fighting in to begin with. Kissinger told his assistant Al Haig that Nixon “wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” And Kissinger and Haig made sure that happened. Kissinger then went on to be supportive of the Khmer Rouge! He saw Pol Pot as a counterweight against the real enemy: North Vietnam. He asked Thailand’s foreign minister to tell the Khmer Rouge, “we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” Luckily, the Vietnamese themselves finally put an end to the genocide in Cambodia, with no thanks to Henry Kissinger or the United States...

Kissinger committed massive crimes against humanity, even if you only consider his actions in Chile. First, Kissinger neither knew anything about Latin America nor cared. He thought the region utterly irrelevant. He once rejected the offer of a childhood friend who became an official at the Inter-American Development Bank to provide information about the region by responding, “If I need any information on Latin America, I’ll look it up in the Almanac.” He later stated, “Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”

In this worldview, Latin America only existed to serve U.S. interests. Salvador Allende’s socialist and democratic government was outraged Nixon and Kissinger. That Allende was elected democratically despite massive CIA interference in 1970 to defeat him only outraged them more. So they sought to undermine him at every opportunity...

When General Augusto Pinochet rose to prominence and eventually overthrew Allende in a violent coup, Kissinger was behind him every step of the way. The CIA and Kissinger knew of the coup head of time and had ongoing relationships with people such as Pinochet, not to mention had previously supported an attempt for a coup in 1970. The horrifying aftermath, with torture and killing abounding, hardly quieted Kissinger’s ardor for Pinochet. By 1976, Kissinger was Ford’s Secretary of State. When Pinochet ordered the assassination of dissenter and former U.S. ambassador Orlando Letelier on U.S. soil, blowing up his car in Washington, Kissinger was totally fine with it...

He took a similar role in Argentina as he did in Chile, supporting the 1976 coup that overthrew the elected government of Isabel Perón by a right-wing military regime that then disappeared its opponents through such lovely methods as throwing them into the ocean from airplanes. Kissinger was completely fine with all of this. He told them about murdering leftists, “the quicker you succeed, the better.” His primary admonition to the Argentine junta was to warn them that Congress might consider sanctions if they continued with these things and so advised them maybe to stop such obvious tactics...

On top of all of this, there is Pakistan. Kissinger completely supported the military junta in Karachi using extreme genocidal force to force East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to stay in that nation. In 1971, the Pakistani military invaded its restive eastern province. The death toll was shocking. The CIA estimate is 200,000. The Bangladeshi government estimates the deaths at 5 million. The number is almost certainly closer to the Bangladeshi estimate. Ten million refugees fled into India. Kissinger and Nixon basically agreed to stand aside. They issued a couple of broad admonitions not to fire on civilians, but threatened no pulling of aid and used no leverage at all to ensure that Pakistan did not massacre people. Even after the massacres were known, Kissinger and Nixon threatened no sanctions, no loss of aid, no consequences at all...

All of these war crimes made Kissinger persona non grata, right? Of course not! Very little speaks more to the festering wound that is “respectable” Beltway culture than the bipartisan adoration to the monster that is Kissinger in his retirement. For decades, he appeared on Charlie Rose whenever he wanted. Hillary Clinton’s embrace of Kissinger during her campaign was utterly grotesque. In 1977, Kissinger was given an endowed chair at Columbia University, despite significant students protests against making the monster a home there. He taught at Georgetown for several years in the late 70s and early 80s as well. He served on the board of directors for a raftload of companies, all of whom use his endless connections to promote their business interests...

Kissinger’s late life continued to be a deep dive into supporting the scummiest leaders of the world. That included Vladimir Putin. Kissinger found the need to intervene in Putin’s imperialist war in Ukraine in 2022 to support the idea that the West should bully Zelensky into giving up a bunch of territory to the Russians. He used his typical language of realpolitik to do so and as usual, it demonstrated a complete indifference to justice and death in favor of playing up to one of the most violent leaders in the world...

That Kissinger remained feted and "respectable" among the Beltway Media speaks to the indifference - if not outright sadism - of those in the journalism profession who traded away any integrity and morals for "access" to the powerful, even when those "powerful" were utter monsters.

For everything Kissinger approved of, the juntas and dictators he supported eventually fell, their sins exposed, the damage done. For all his obsessions with defeating or containing Communism as a global threat during the Cold War, in the end it wasn't Kissinger's policies it was Soviet Russia's internal rot and Communist China's turn towards authoritarian capitalism. Millions of people died and suffered for nothing. And Kissinger openly supported the authoritarian powers - especially Putin - that rose to fill the void of the Post-Cold War world.

There is nothing nice to say about Henry Kissinger. His "successes" at foreign policy were failures of human dignity and common goddamn decency. If there is any hope for America and the world after all this, it's that every policy idea Kissinger ever promoted should be dumped into the scrap pile of history and every acolyte who still obeys his twisted agenda barred from any civil role at all.

Goddamn Kissinger forever.

WKRP Turkey Drop Remembrance 2023

"Sir, not a lot of turkeys survive Thanksgiving!"
-- Jennifer, WKRP receptionist 

Today is Turkey Sacrifice Day. Please, as you bake the sweet potatoes and dice the stuffing, say a silent prayer for those brave turkeys who fell - literally - back in 1978.

"WE FLY OR WE DIE!!"
-- battlecry of the WKRP Turkey Drop survivors

This punchline will never get old.

Gone Too Soon, Zandar

Interrupting my NaNoWriMo writing project to note that a fellow political blogger passed away this weekend.

Zandar over at his own blog Zandar Vs. The Stupid had been a serious and dedicated Left-leaning blogger who shredded on the idiots - often Far Right Republicans - who deserved it. He was a regular at Crooks & Liars' daily roundups. Balloon Juice and other major blogsites quoted him. I have him on my Links page, but to my shame I never quoted or linked to him (I should have, his snark was far superior to mine).

And then John Cole tweeted yesterday that he hadn't seen anything recent from Zandar - who publishes at least once a day - and then word got out through the blog's Comments section from Zandar's dad that he had passed away.

Eventually, ZandarDad found the login to the official site and posted this notice:

Good morning. This is Zandar's Dad. I am sorry to tell you that he passed away over the weekend, peacefully in his sleep. Fortunately, his computer was on and open to this page but I don't know if I will be able to post again. This blog was Jon's passion. He was an ardent advocate for justice and for our Democracy. He was brilliant. He was funny. He never stopped believing in our country but he never stopped fighting the "stupid" and there was plenty of it for him to fight. He was thrilled with KY reelecting a Democratic governor, and he posted up until Friday, but he was feeling sick over the weekend and when he went to bed Saturday night, he thought that he would feel better when he woke up, but he never did. 

I posted a few replies to his recent posts, hoping to get the word out, before I located this page. As I said, this blog is his pride and joy. In many ways, it is his legacy. He greatly appreciated all of you who read the blog, who posted, and who supported ZandarVTS financially. If you are inclined to make a financial donation in his memory, the chosen organization is the American Heart Association, but the BEST thing you can do to honor Jon's memory is to VOTE like your life and your Democracy depend on it, because they do. 

It is horrifying how fragile and brief a human life - any life - can be on this world. Going to bed and not waking up... it's just... shocking.

And this just happens everywhere: Across war zones like Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan and Syria and dozens of other places; Across places of natural disasters like the earthquakes in Turkey and the hurricanes in Mexico; Across homes throughout the world where somewhere, sometime, some little tragedy will take place.

It makes you wonder if anything we do on a daily basis - not just the blogging but our work, our play, our quiet moments - really has an impact on life as a whole.

Will we remember Zandar, his wit and his exasperation aimed at the folly of the twisted and the cruel? Will we look back at him, his works?

I've wondered once or twice before if the blogs we create stay up after we die. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Jon Swift (the one who inspired Batocchio's annual memorial), so many others have had their blogs shut down apparently by choice by the surviving families. I'm not sure what the blogsite providers' - this one is Blogger - policies are regarding inactive blogs, if they time out after a few months or years.

It'd be nice if there was an archive of sorts, something to convert all the pages of postings and shuffle them into a recovery backup folder on a server, to ensure the words we bloggers put out there - our rants, our reviews, our attempts at humor and poetry - don't disappear into the ether. 

Zandar's legacy would be for the rest of us to Vote, and vote against the stupid which is the current Far Right Republican efforts. But his memory now resides in the words on a blog that may well fade into time... 

A Book On Isms

 I warned you this was coming: My National Novel Writing Month project this year is going to be a non-fiction work examining American -Isms.

I've already done the introductory chapter, and starting into the first -ism I want to examine: Liberalism (you may remember when I bashed Conservatism on this blog awhile ago that I argued Liberalism was the primary ideology of our nation, and that Conservatism a reaction against that).

So I will not be blogging extensively this month. I need to focus on this project (and get one DONE for once!). I do have two other book projects on hand to finish up as well: I need cover artists, dammit!

If I do blog here this November, it will have to be in response to a major breaking news item like oh donald trump pleading GUILTY on one of his 91 criminal indictments.

Good luck on your writing projects, y'all. NOW GET TO TYPING!!!

The Devil We Know Now in the House GOP

Again, I'm not so good with the prediction stuff.

I figured the House Republicans would flail at finding a replacement Speaker for whatever was left of this year - well into 2024 - out of the belief that the Freedom Caucus extremists knew it would force an inevitable shutdown. Apparently, there was an agenda by those extremists to eventually confirm a "consensus" candidate as soon as they found someone the Rational factions could accept without openly vomiting on the floor.

Jim "Scandals Aplenty" Jordan was clearly not the consensus choice: He angered up too many people on a personal level, and he reeked of both incompetency and guilt. The GOP couldn't accept the "moderate" - although that word no longer holds meaning for their ranks - choices of Scalise or Emmert, but they could accept a virtual unknown at the high chair in someone named Mike Johnson out of Lousiana.

Just because nobody ever noticed Johnson before now doesn't mean he's a safe choice. It means he kept himself out of the limelight long enough for people to not notice the extremist world-view he brings with him. Amanda Marcotte over at Salon has taken a closer look and has recoiled:

Ahead of his sudden ascension to House speaker late last week, the media had little time to vet Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., thoroughly. And because he sucks in so many ways, it's been hard for his critics to settle on one of his many evil inclinations to focus on. He's a Christian nationalist. He's an election denier. He wants to destroy Medicare and Social Security. He's a fan of neo-Nazi conspiracy theories. As Brian Beutler of Off Message writes, "typecasting an opposition leader" may be tedious, but it's politically necessary. Democrats have benefited from the fact that the most famous Republican villains have one standout trait that defines their personality: Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is a pugnacious bully. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is a loudmouthed Karen. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California is a spineless suck-up.

...What stands out to me about Johnson — and I suspect will be compelling to most people — is what a sinister little creep he is. The man gives off strong incel energy, and his elevation really showcases how much the politics of bitter sexual obsession have come to dominate the Republican Party.

I don't know if I ever covered the term "incel" at this blog, so a refresher is in order. "Incel" means "Involuntary Celibate," referring to heterosexual men who are frustrated that they are either socially unacceptable to women, or unable to find women who are submissive enough to their needs. Rather than blame their own behaviors - their own failures as men to adapt and improve themselves to behave better towards women - incels prefer to blame "feminists and queers" who have "disrupted the natural order of the patriarchy" that would have otherwise gotten these assholes laid by now.

In other words: Incels believe women are trophies, they are possessions, they are chattel meant only to serve the pleasure of men. And if that sounds a lot like how the Far Right religious Republicans sound when it comes to punishing women over abortion rights, divorce rights, the basic human right to think for themselves then you get where Marcotte is getting that vibe from Johnson.

In true incel fashion, Johnson is haunted by all the erotic adventures he imagines the straight ladies of America are having when he's not in the room. When New York's Irin Carmon interviewed him in 2015, he blamed legal abortion for school shootings, saying, "When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.” Nor was that a one-off. In 2016, he gave a speech in which he blamed feminism, liberal divorce laws, and the "sexual revolution" for mass shootings.

In this view, Johnson agrees with mass shooters, who claim they were driven to it because of women's sexual freedom. In the year before Johnson blamed male violence on women's sexuality, the incel-identified killer Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree in California, claiming he was forced to do it to "punish" the "sluts" who had sex with other men while he remained a virgin. Since then, there's been a rash of violent incidents, some quite deadly, conducted by men who employ the same logic: Female sexual autonomy offends them, and must be punished with pain and death...

It is not exaggeration on Marcotte's part to paint Johnson as a dangerous radical, because he is. Not only with his fervent public stance that America is a "Christian nation," - in opposition to the Constitutional facts of "No Religious Test" and "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" - but also his open disdain towards women as human beings with their own beliefs, their own minds, their own rights.

Johnson has similar views. He wants to lock women down into unhappy marriages with abortion bans. And, in a twist that incels will love, he wants to throw away the key. He's long been outspoken against "no-fault" divorce, which allows someone to leave simply because they no longer want to be married. These laws don't just benefit those in garden-variety unhappy marriages. By lifting the burden to "prove" their suffering in court, abused women have an easier time escaping. That's why liberalized divorce laws led to a 20% decline in female suicides...

We saw it recently in Florida where the GOP-controlled legislature and DeSantis signed off on laws weakening women's ability to get divorces as well as proper alimony that could let them live outside of the control of the men they're trying to flee from. The Religious Right don't like divorce - not that it disrupts society like they claim, but because it guts the controls men would have over "their" women - and would prefer increasing the likelihood of domestic violence that bad marriages compel.

There are still many in the punditry who are confused about why Christian conservatives like Johnson glommed onto Trump, a thrice-married chronic adulterer who touches the Bible like it will burn him. But, of course, it was never really about Jesus. What Trump and the men who worship him share is anger that any woman would have the right to say no: To a date, to a marriage, to having your baby. It's why Trump has a long history of sexual assault. And it's why men like Johnson embrace a "religion" that is hyper-focused on caging women like they're farm animals. And why they resent gay people for their perceived sexual adventures. It's a coalition of men who fear, often for very good reason, that their repulsive personalities exclude them from a world where sexual expression requires consent. Johnson's now the most powerful Republican in Congress. The incel-ization of the GOP is complete...

Where the Republican-controlled House is likely going to get a lot of attention drawn to the inevitable government shutdown that the Freedom Caucus desires, don't be at all surprised that this Johnson-led House decides to go nuclear by passing a federal-level abortion ban - that thankfully won't get past the Democratic Senate or Biden's desk - and stage more assaults on women's rights than ever before (even as the polling experts are screaming at Republicans that strict anti-abortion stances are destroying their numbers).

Johnson is no Man of God. He's just another Republican huckster shilling faith as campaign slogans, hiding his misogyny behind fake platitudes and hypocrisy. And he's the one the House GOP settled on to lead them into the 2024 election cycle.

Gods, truly help us.

Blood on the Streets of Lewiston Maine

It's been a while since I'd written about a mass shooting, even though there's been over 500 mass shootings in America this year - and the year's not even finished.

The media hasn't fully paid attention to the gun violence unless the body count is in double digits anymore. Goddamn us, but that's where we're at this week as another angry gun with a military-grade assault rifle attacked multiple places in a small Maine city (via David Sharp, Robert Bumsted, Holly Ramer, and Michael Balsamo at AP News):

Authorities searched forests, waterways and small towns Thursday for a U.S. Army reservist who they say killed 18 people and wounded 13 in a mass shooting at a bowling alley and a bar that sent panicked patrons scrambling under tables and behind bowling pins and gripped the entire state of Maine in fear.

Schools, doctor’s offices and grocery stores closed and people stayed behind locked doors in cities as far away as 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the scenes of Wednesday night’s shootings in Lewiston...

The gunman apparently planned out an elaborate escape route that involved fleeing by boat using nearby rivers, which expanded the range of the search and the need to lock down nearby communities out of fear he was still well-armed and willing to kill again.

We don't know exactly what triggered the angry guy, but he had been placed under medical observation months earlier by reservist officers who noticed troubling behavior out of him and ordered him to a mental treatment facility.

That he was still able to gain access to an assault rifle with his mental issues speaks more to a nation dominated by fringe gun-worshipping sociopaths who scream "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" as a mantra. The United States is being held hostage by a National Rifle Body Count Association that profits from every massacre and propagates an ad campaign of fear and rage, convincing their fellow gun worshippers that the Second Amendment isn't about regulating militias it's a license to shoot anybody they want.

The gun nuts "right" to own firearms that most militaries think are too dangerous has overwhelmed our First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. We can't go to schools anymore without gun violence. We can't go to movie theaters or music concerts without gun violence. We can't go to grocery stores or churches anymore without gun violence. We can't go to our own homes without fearing gun violence by our own relatives or by some angry ex-husband unwilling to let a bad relationship go.

There's blood on the streets everywhere. I've been yelling and screaming and crying over that for the last 25 years. 

GODDAMMIT, WHEN ARE WE GOING TO TELL THE GUN NUTS THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO KILL US, AND DO SOMETHING TO STOP THIS ONGOING CYCLE OF VIOLENCE.

Rats, Sinking Ship, SS Trumptanic

This morning we got word that Jenna Ellis, a lawyer on donald trump's payroll since 2019, made a plea agreement with the Fulton County DA's office. Via Gringlas at NPR: 

Ellis is the fourth defendant to plead guilty in the broad racketeering case focused on efforts to keep then-President Donald Trump in office after his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

Lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell entered guilty pleas last week just before their trial was set to begin. Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, pleaded guilty in September.

In exchange for truthful testimony at future trials, Ellis pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. She had been charged with two counts, including racketeering...

Ellis' charge stems from a Dec. 3, 2020, subcommittee hearing of Georgia's Senate Judiciary Committee where Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Ray Smith made a litany of baseless claims of widespread election fraud.

Guliani and Smith, both co-defendants in the Georgia case, asserted that tens of thousands of minors, felons and dead people voted in Georgia's 2020 election. Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding this testimony, which prosecutors say was intended to convince the legislature to disregard Biden's victory in Georgia.

"The false statements were made with reckless disregard for the truth," prosecutor Daysha Young said at Tuesday's plea hearing.

DA Willis hadn't charged too much on Ellis, so there wasn't much for Ellis to plead out. She's still getting a sweetheart deal because - as any fan of Law & Order franchise will tell you - the ones who flip the earliest in a criminal conspiracy case are the ones who get the best deals.

What all these early plea deals do is put pressure on the remaining defendants - 15 to go - to make plea deals of their own before one of the others sets them up as the scapegoat. There are tiers to this racketeering case - the ones who made the plans, the ones who carried out the illegal acts, the ones who covered for the others - and it's clear prosecutors want the major players, giving the lesser members - the ones with more to lose - more incentive to flip now instead of later.

Ellis' plea deal is a serious blow to Ray Smith and Rudy Giuliani, so the expectation is that they might flip next. Smith could, since he's a state-level lawyer whose career - and life outside of prison - is at stake. But Giuliani might not: His reputation and livelihood are now so directly tied to trump's fortunes that he can't make a clean break. 

And trump of course - because his whole self-worth and ongoing grift is tied into the Big Lie of "stollen elections" - will never plead out. he will enter the court trial and try to bully and gaslight his way out of it.

Much like he's trying to bully and gaslight his way out of the January 6th indictments he's facing in Washington DC, except for the revelation tonight that Mark Meadows - trump's acting Chief of Staff during his final days in the White House - gave hours' worth of testimony to Jack Smith's grand jury and received full immunity as part of the deal. Via the Guardian: 

The testimony that Meadows provided to prosecutors included evidence that he repeatedly told Trump in the immediate aftermath of the election that the allegations about fraud were unsubstantiated, ABC reported.

Exactly when Meadows was granted immunity and when he testified before the grand jury in Washington remains unclear but he appeared at least three times, ABC reported. Trump was indicted in August for conspiring to defraud the United States among other charges stemming from the investigation.

The cooperation of Meadows in the criminal case against Trump would be a victory for the special counsel, Jack Smith, because Meadows was among the closest advisers to Trump in the post-2020 election period and had direct knowledge of virtually every aspect of the charges...

Meadows was literally in the room when it happened (yes, quoting from the Hamilton musical is unavoidable). There are multiple eyewitness accounts from other parties - Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows' aide, already testified what Meadows knew and did to the Congressional hearings last year - that made it impossible for Meadows to testify otherwise. There'd been reports for months - especially when he wasn't named in the indictments Smith's grand jury issued against trump this past August - that Meadows had an immunity deal, but we're getting confirmation now.

That the Special Counsel team is willing to let this information out there hints to the likelihood they are ready to act on Meadows' testimony, increasing the likelihood that additional indictments over January 6th - and maybe even more indictments in the classified documents case - not only for trump but the other insurrection plotters are coming very soon.

Thing is for Meadows, while this deal grants immunity at the federal level, it doesn't cover state like the conspiracy charges he's facing in Georgia. Seeing how he's already made a deal with Smith, NOW would be the perfect time for Meadows to make a deal with Willis.

If donald trump's empire was a ship (not a luxury liner, but a garbage scow), it's already hit the iceberg, and the rats better get off it quick before they sink.

Quick Little Update on the Florida Writers Association's Royal Palm Awards Thingee

Got back late from Altamonte Springs - Yes, I-4 traffic between Winter Park to Davenport is a nightmare - but some of you who follow me on Twitter - DAMN YOU ELON MUSK - probably already saw this:

 

"Wait! I haven't told you how World War II ended! (long pause) WE WON!"

More pictures at my librarian/writing blog. Hopefully the digital award icon will get emailed to me shortly.

Ah, here it is!