Our Constitutional Republic faces a clear and present danger more deadly than that of the Civil War. The danger is the Republican Party, a "political party" that has sold out to white supremacy, autocracy, misogyny, and hatred of everything our Nation stands for. Republicans dismiss any sense of a common American narrative. The "Republican Party" is an outlier in our history – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of social and economic policies that have sustained us for a century; unwilling to compromise; dismissive of evidence, fact, and science; dismissive of the legitimacy of any viewpoint except their own. America needs to face the simple, frightening fact that the Republican Party is a clear and present danger to our Constitutional Republic.
Trump is sparing no expense for his rallies. This video made during the rally tells us just how pitiful and worthless Trump really is.
No expense is spared to secure the finest venues for Trump rallies. pic.twitter.com/zSVu9TU8En
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) October 9, 2022
The “Master Race” my ass. They look like your garden variety male pattern baldness dumbasses trying to convince the rest of us they are really somebody.
When the anti-democracy Supreme Court stuck its big fat thumb on the scales and gifted the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, the left did not like the decision. But they accepted that SCOTUS was playing by a set of rules. They accepted that the Court‘s justification for the decision was legitimately extrapolated from the Constitution. Even if there was a sense that a majority of the justices were squinting at the document sideways.
But now, as the Court starts a new term. most Americans think SCOTUS has come unmoored from legal reason and is just making things up to advance an extreme right-wing and overtly conservative Christian agenda.
After the Bush decision, 50% of Americans had a high degree of confidence in how the Court handled its responsibilities. Today — and this number is from a poll taken before the Dobbs decision was inflicted on American women — only 25% of American think the same.
What is remarkable is that, if you consider that 35% of voters are solid MAGAs, even some of them must not approve of what this illegitimate Court is up to. I say illegitimate because by the Constitution and custom Obama should have selected a Justice to replace Scalia. And if McConnell stuck to his rules, Biden would have picked a Justice to replace Ginsburg.
So today, SCOTUS is a nakedly political creation populated by a majority of justices who have no interest in the Constitution but are solely motivated to stamp their reactionary beliefs on the country regardless of what the people think.
Purists will argue that SCOTUS should give popular opinion no weight. But while the law may be an abstraction to unelected, usually Ivy League, quasi-intellectuals, their decisions affect the lives of real people. For most of its history, the Court, left or right, has borne that in mind even as they handed down decisions that necessarily angered some percentage of the population.
Not anymore. It is not as if these smug, self-declared originalists have stuck their fingers in their ears and stopped listening to anyone. No. They have instead narrowed their attention to only the most extreme right of the political spectrum. And it is to those incipient fascists and temple-wreckers that they pay attention.
The Court lacks even the minor decency to bind itself to the ethics rules that guide the rest of the federal Judiciary. A Justice can share pillow talk with a spouse crazed with election conspiracies. And so insane she texted Mark Meadows, the couch-surfing, ex-WH Chief of Staff, that the
“Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”
Does Ginni Thomas not know there are cells in Guantanamo? And why has there been no confirmation of a round-up of these bad apples?
Despite the evident, fantastical extremism of his wife, Clarence Thomas refuses to recuse himself from cases arising from the seditious and violent response to a legitimate election. When Trump sued to block the J6 committee from obtaining presidential records, Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenter in the Court’s 8 — 1 decision telling the 2020 loser to go and sit down.
Ginni said his act was nothing to do with her. She claimed Clarence and she have their “own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too.” And “Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”
Bullshit. Besides, it does not matter. Even if what she says is true, the appearance of a conflict of interest is a death blow to the Court’s legitimacy. Most married people act in a way their spouse approves of, even if they do not think they are doing so. As the old and sexist trope has it, “Happy wife. Happy life.”
Furthering the Court’s slide into the sewer is the fact that
Chief Justice John Roberts thinks the public’s scorn is misplaced. That SCOTUS is held in low regard because many do not agree with its decisions. As this head-in-the-sand thinker said to a gathering of Judges in Colorado on the verge of the Court’s new term,
“You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is. And you don’t want public opinion to be the guide of what the appropriate decision is. Yes, all of our opinions are open to criticism. In fact, our members do a great job of criticizing some opinions from time to time. But simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court.”
This is balderdash. Whatever a Court decides will be objectionable to some. What Americans think is dirty pool is the process by which the conservative “umpires” get on the bench.
The reactionary Justices are often picked by Presidents who received a minority of the vote. And are confirmed by Senators representing fewer Americans than Senators who object to this partisan court packing.
As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in a talk at the Northwestern School of Law,
“When courts become extensions of the political process, when people see them as extensions of the political process, when people see them as trying just to impose personal preferences on a society irrespective of the law, that’s when there’s a problem — and that’s when there ought to be a problem.”
The Supreme Court has become a bought and paid-for branch of the Republican Party. It has repeatedly backed anti-democracy measures. It has allowed corporations and shadowy anonymous groups to flood politics with money. And it has signed off on right-wing gerrymandering and vote suppression.
It is patently apparent that the umpires are now working for the bookmakers.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a typical rightwinger, constantly referring to Jesus and to her Christian faith.
She lies. It’s all a sham to suck in the Georgia goobers who vote for her.
Green’s husband has filed for divorce. In the divorce filing we learn:
What would Jesus say?
On Wednesday, The Daily Beast reported that Perry Greene, the husband of far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), has filed for divorce.
“The petition stated that the Greenes’ 27-year marriage was ‘irretrievably broken’ and indicated that the couple, who wed in college, had been separated for some time,” reported A.J. McDougall. “Perry Greene motioned to have the divorce filed under seal, arguing ‘that the record will contain sensitive personal and financial information, the public disclosure of which would negatively impact the parties’ privacy interests.'”
The congresswoman provided a statement on the matter to The Daily Beast, which declined to reveal any further details of the divorce other than that to suggest the marriage was ending amicably.
“Marriage is a wonderful thing and I’m a firm believer in it,” said the statement. “Our society is formed by a husband and wife creating a family to nurture and protect. Together, Perry and I formed our family and raised three great kids. He gave me the best job title you can ever earn: Mom. I’ll always be grateful for how great of a dad he is to our children. This is a private and personal matter and I ask that the media respect our privacy at this time.”
COMMENT: You want privacy? Privacy? Okay, bitch, we will give you the same privacy you gave school shooting victims — that is, we will follow you everywhere you go and shout at you:
— we will go on TV and mock you.
Donald Trump mistook a racially mixed group of Democratic staffers for domestic aides and asked them to serve the hors d’oeuvres, according to a new book.
The recently sworn-in president turned to the staffers for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and others during a January 2017 meeting and asked them to get the canapes, according to excerpts from a forthcoming book from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman published by Rolling Stone.
“Why don’t you get” the food, Trump told the staffers, and then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus rushed to correct him, but he made another bigoted comment in the same meeting by claiming Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote in 2016 due to ballots cast by “illegals.”
“I don’t believe so, Mr. President,” Pelosi said.
Trump periodically told visitors that his White House workspace had a “secret bathroom,” and explained that he’d completely renovated the restroom after taking over for Barack Obama, but staffers would correct him and explain that only the toilet seats had been changed, which is customary during presidential transitions.
”You understand what I’m talking about,” Trump said to one visitor, according to Haberman. “I don’t want to use the same bathroom as my predecessor (Obama).”
COMMENT: Trump did not want to use the same bathroom as his Black predecessor.
The “Wittman” on the campaign sign is Representative Rob Wittman from Virginia’s First District. This scene is across the road from Mathews Elementary School, Mathews County, VA.
U.S. technology companies founded by 1st and 2nd generation immigrants:
Apple
Google
Amazon
Facebook
Oracle
IBM
Uber
Airbnb
Yahoo
Intel
EMC
eBay
SpaceX
VMWare
AT&T
Tesla
NVIDIA
Qualcomm
Paypal
ADP
Reddit
Slack
WeWork
Stripe
Cognizant
Intuit
3M
Zoom
43% of Fortune 500 companies.
And before this is over, she may not be the last of Trump’s fourth-rate lawyer claiming “Who? Me? I don’t know anything!! I did not do anything!!! Why am I going to jail???”
Christina Bobb — who was leading Trump’s legal team following the search warrant executed at Mar-A-Lago — now claims she was never his lawyer relating to the search. This is despite the fact she was in court on his behalf in the search warrant case and made multiple tv appearances as his lawyer on the case. Christina Bobb is now a news reporter for a radical right wing media channel that exclusively covers Trump rallies and serves as his propaganda arm.
Let’s review how we arrived at this point.
Before Trump left the White House, the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) was working with his staff to ensure that all Presidential documents were turned over to them in accordance with the Presidential Records Act. NARA officials began to suspect Trump was hiding some documents.
As time went on, and negotiations between Trump, his people and the NARA got nowhere, NARA was finally told BY CHRISTINA BOBB that, yes, Trump did have a small number of documents. NARA officials spent time at Mar-A-Lago, resulting in 15 boxes of documents being returned WITH BOBB ACTING AS TRUMP’S ATTORNEY.
Bobb then signed an affidavit that no more documents were at Mar-A-Lago.
NARA and the FBI were told by various sources (sources who wer identified in the search warrant application; most of them Trump staffers and employees) that there still were boxes of documents at Mar-A-Lago.
The FBI obtained a search warrant, searched Mar-A-Lago and found a pile of boxes containing documents, some of them very highly classified. BOBB WAS PRESENT AT THAT SEARCH, REPRESENTING TRUMP.
She lies. And now, she finds herself in danger of losing her law license and in danger of being charged with several crimes. EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES DIES.
