Tom wrote about Trump confessing to his crimes on last night’s Bret Baier interview earlier. It really was a doozy. I just wanted to add a few more of his comments that are unrelated to the Mar-a-Lago case. Like this hilarious story where he supposedly scared Vladimir Putin into not invading Ukraine, which he was apparently asking Trump’s permission to do: Right. Sure. That happened. And this will happen too: He’s not the first to run with this sort of macho preening. The sainted john McCain famously used to say that he’d get the Shia and Sunni in a room together and crack some heads. But at least he knew they existed which I’m sure Trump does not. And he didn’t take one side over the other as Trump clearly does. It’s insulting that America ever dreamed of putting a man like this in the White House. It’s tragic that we are even contemplating doing it again.
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If there’s no personal gain in it, fuck it The people who ran against Democrats over “defund the police” (never a Democratic Party policy) now want to dismantle the F.B.I., make the Department of Justice a political enforcement tool of a future Republican presidency, dismantle the civil service and more. Consider it an extension of the profit motive to our entire experiment in popular sovereignty, from regulatory capture to full repurposing the government to serve personal aggrandizement. If there’s no personal gain in it, fuck it. Now under federal indictment under a Joe Biden administration D.O.J., Donald Trump promised in a speech last week that if elected he would appoint a “real” special prosecutor to investigate the current president and his entire family. Being held to the rule of law is for Republicans an abomination. Holding your enemies to it is delicious. Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman write in the New York Times: But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr.
Slavers hid news of slavery’s end A Juneteenth tale from CNN: Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry. The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed. She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations.
Last week I wrote about the misinformation being distributed by Republicans in comparing the Trump documents case to Hillary Clinton’s “but her emails” scandal in 2016. It’s taken as a given on the right that she broke the law and was granted special dispensation despite the fact that there were five different investigations that found otherwise. Unfortunately, that isn’t the only fake scandal they’re flogging these days to try to cover for Trump’s corruption and criminality. They’re back on the Burisma beat. I wrote about this pseudo-scandal back in 2020 when it was making one of its periodic rounds in the right wing media, mostly so they could have a excuse to circulate embarrassing photos from Hunter Biden’s laptop (which is a whole other story for another day.) I distilled the story into this succinct description: The “scandal” itself is actually nothing more than an example of the very common (and admittedly skeevy) business practice of hiring the family members of important people for the purpose of obtaining favors, gaining access or simply being viewed in a favorable light.
America’s second independence day I thought this was a nice thought for this holiday: There are little joys to be found in overheard conversations, like this recent gem on an Acela train. A couple of young professional dude-bros sat behind me and were discussing why they couldn’t reschedule something for the 19th of June. “Because it’s Juneteenth — we get it off this year,” one said. And after a beat or two too long, the other replied, “Oh yeah. What’s it for anyways? Like, I know for Black people but …” The first gave a pitying chuckle and returned with, “It’s when America freed the slaves” — followed by an incredulous, “C’mon man.” I mean, well, yes. Juneteenth commemorates the day when — more than two months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant and more than two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation — a Union army finally reached South Texas with news of emancipation. But I was far less interested in historical accuracy than I was in the fact that these two guys were having a casual Juneteenth civics conversation.
From law professor Xiao Wang in the LA Times: Looking for a federal law to be declared unconstitutional? Religion may well be your best bet — and that’s true regardless of how “real” your religious beliefs are. That’s part of the thinking behind one case the Supreme Court heard this session and will resolve soon. In 303 Creative vs. Elenis, the court is considering the constitutionality of a Colorado statute prohibiting most businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ+ customers. Lori Smith, a Christian webpage designer, had wanted to expand into the wedding website business — but only for opposite-sex couples, a plan that would have violated the Colorado law at issue. Her lawyers made the case on free speech grounds, but given Smith’s religious beliefs, “religious freedom” represents an undeniable backdrop to the suit. The 303 Creative case is no outlier. Religion-based claims have proliferated in recent years, and plaintiffs have often won because courts have almost invariably found their religious beliefs to be sincerely held.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he’s a national security risk I know, I know. Duh, right? But still, it helps to have more Republicans saying this even if the rank and file are all lining up to take more kool-aid: Esper, who served in Trump’s Cabinet, said: “People have described him as a hoarder when it comes to these type of documents. But clearly, it was unauthorized, illegal and dangerous.” […] “Imagine if a foreign agent, another country were to discover documents that outline America’s vulnerabilities or the weaknesses of the United States military,” he said. “Think about how that could be exploited, how that could be used against us in a conflict, how an enemy could develop countermeasures, things like that. Or in the case of the most significant piece that was raised in the allegation about U.S. plans to attack Iran, think about how that affects our readiness, our ability to prosecute an attack.” Tapper asked Esper if he thought that Trump, if elected president in 2024, could ever be trusted with the nation’s secrets again.
They always have a supposedly reasonable rationale but the truth is they assume that the people receiving these people will be horrified because of course they are just as racist as they are. But they’re horrified because of the cruelty inflicted on those who are being used a pawns in their ugly game. This is sick, ugly stuff. But they can’t seem to help themselves, apparently convinced that most of the country thinks these stunts are hilarious and/or justified. It’s not. This Reuters poll from last fall found: Following a highly-publicized drive by Republican governors to bus or fly thousands of migrants to Democratic areas in recent months, 53% of Republican respondents in the poll said they supported the practice. Twenty-nine percent opposed it. Sixteen percent of Democrats supported the practice and 55% were opposed. Overall, 29% of Americans supported the practice and 40% opposed. Forty-five percent of respondents in the Reuters/Ipsos poll – including 63% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans – said state leaders transporting migrants were committing illegal migrant trafficking.
If those words mean absolutely nothing to you, please buy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy now. If your local bookshop is too many planetary systems away, you can buy it from local outlet of the one of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor at https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Boxset/dp/1529044197/ or https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-Douglas-Adams-ebook/dp/B000XUBC2C/. Read at least the first volume … Continue reading "I am Zaphod Beeblebrox"
QAnon seemed mostly harmless too QAnon appeared to be just a loose network of conspiracy crackpots until a bare-chested guy wearing horns and face paint stood on U.S. Senate’s dais on Jan. 6. Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, has worked to draw attention to another loose network of believers with political designs on the country: The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). This network of nondenominational churches aligned with Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA has aspirations for replacing our “demon-infested bastions of ungodly government,” he Clarkson writes. Clarkson provides an overview at Salon: The NAR seeks to consolidate those Christians it recognizes as “the Church” in what it believes to be the End Times. Although many NAR leaders have been closely aligned with Donald Trump, they insist that they aim for a utopian biblical kingdom where only God’s laws are enforced. Most therefore hold to a vision of Christian dominion over what they call the “seven mountains“: religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and business.