Trump v. United States - what an appropriate case name!

The US Supreme Court has just abrogated the Constitution of the United States, at the request of disgraced felon Donald Trump.

 If America can ever restore the principles of the Constitution, including the central principle that no one is above the law and the co-equality of the three branches of government, among many others, Trump v. United States will come to be viewed as the single worst decision ever rendered by this disgraceful Court. At last, Plessy v. Ferguson and the Dred Scott decision, not to omit the legally fanciful abuse of Bush v. Gore, will no longer occupy the bottom rung of American jurisprudence.

Wake up, America! The coup d'etat that started long ago is almost finished, almost without firing a shot. While its most visible manifestation was January 6, Trump's criminal attempt to overturn the clear result of the 2020 election, with the connivance of nearly all of the Republican Party, is part of their decades-long effort to put fascist reichwing rule beyond the remedy of democracy.

They're almost finished. Can we stop them? Don't count on it.

To War with the Pundits We Have

National political pundits rarely have much useful to say. In the heyday of blogging twenty years ago, it seemed to me that blogger amateurs were statistically more likely to be accurate than Cokie Roberts or Ruth Marcus or Tom Friedman or.... Or maybe I just chose well from the frothy, overflowing, mad-dog blogosphere.

Now that corporate mass media has retaken political punditry, it's even more true that the paid pundits are terrible at presenting the least tiny insight. Sure, they know that Joe Biden is old, and it's an easy column to write about that again and again and again. To be sure, Biden gives them plenty of chances to observe his age -- a news hook!

Because Trump floods the zone with Steve Bannon style bullshit, the national punditry hasn't settled on his epithet. May I suggest the Mafia Don of MAGA? Use that in every piece about him like "but he's 81" or "but her emails".

At present, the same punditry that touted Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley a month ago as alternatives to Trump wants to push Haley out of the Republican Primary race with the Mafia Don of MAGA. As ever, pundits fail to understand why anyone besides the Don of MAGA is still in the race. James Pindell of the Boston Globe continues his lame attempts to analyze this political race from any other perspective than a seventh grader's.

All along, the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary has been very simple: DeSantis and Haley have wanted and planned from the very beginning of their well-funded but poorly-voted campaigns to be there to pick up the pieces when the Mafia Don's Teflon finally starts sticking to every bit of ketchup he can fling at a wall.

Campaigns are almost never a sure thing. Shit happens during the campaign, turning obvious winners into unlucky losers or obvious losers into lucky winners. Trump won his first campaign, despite his obvious loserdom. Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere and won. Hillary Clinton lost because of Trump's free media and James Comey's October surprise (as well as a huge dollop of misogyny). John Kerry lost because he was so bad at politics he failed to respond to the dishonest attacks of the Bush/Cheney campaign.

In the immortal words of Risky Business, sometimes you just gotta say what the f*ck. That's what DeSantis and Haley have obviously been doing. Mafia Don is a chaos agent, and sometimes chaos agents face-plant, even when the Republican base is immune to reason and to its own gag reflex.

It might've worked, if only Merrick Garland had appointed Jack Smith in the spring of 2021.

Killing the golden goose

Democrats have gotten pretty good at raising small dollar contributions via email. This will not last because they are drowning their supporters in spam.

Especially at the end of every reporting period, I get scores of emails from people I'd like to contribute to - and a few from Democrats I won't contribute to, such as John Tierney, unless he found himself in the unlikely position of being vote 218 for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. Then, I suppose I could hold my nose. Till it bled.

Tierney's emailing me daily, as if I were an ardent supporter whose absence from his list of contributors must be an oversight - or I'm a slacker who needs a reminder to change my underwear. When did it become permissible to spread email addresses to everyone?

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was emailing me on multiple addresses, demanding to know why I haven't renewed my "membership." The day I got five separate emails on each address, I started unsubscribing, and I let them know in no uncertain terms why:

I'm tired of the insulting and manipulative spam. You're destroying a potent Democratic advantage by promiscuously sharing my addresses. Stop it! I get 50 emails per day, and the ones that cast me as a deadbeat piss me the hell off.

The DCCC took me mostly off their list. But I suddenly found myself subscribed to the Democratic Majority PAC's list. It's not as frequent, but I'm not mollified.

Because of this abuse, more and more contributors who can't give to everyone (e.g. me), are going to opt out.

Maybe they're trying to cull their lists. As if.

Really, I think their email contractors are abusing the lists because that's where their incentives lie. If so, Democrats need to learn to write better contracts - or pull their operations back in house.

The alternative: Republicans will still have the Koch brothers and a long line of oligarchs. What will the Dems still have?

You'll always have a choice

Click image for full Tim Eagan/Press Democrat cartoon.

Humorless freakout

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: President Barack Obama from President Barack Obama

Why do Republicans and other wingnuts hate President Obama's viral Funny or Die video with Zach Galifianakis? I mean, other than their simple hatred of the President...

This video is reaching young people, and scaring them into not signing up for Obamacare is one way the health-free and die crowd now hope to kill universal health insurance.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass

The President needs to maintain his exceptional dignity while telling Teapublican assholes like Pete Sessions to hit the road and not come back.  They won't respect anything less.

Feature, not a bug

Rachel Maddow shows exactly why the Teapublicans were never, ever, ever going to back down from shutting down the government.

There's no reason whatsoever to think they'll change their minds (such as they have).

There's also no reason for confidence that they will shrink back from default when we soon bump up against the debt ceiling.

Conserfatives

Timothy Egan nails the head-snapping misrepresentation of poor whites by their Teapublican overlords:

Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half. 

You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010. 

Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.

Instead of voting for their pocketbooks, poor whites have succumbed to a frankly tribal and bigoted appeal that finds fear and threats in blacks, immigrants, and anyone who's different. It's not an accident that the heart of this appeal to the basest of American traditions springs from the South, where it seeks to recapitulate Jim Crow. Never mind what the majority wants, suppress enough votes to keep the aristocracy in power.

The GOP can do this because they've changed the postwar social norm. After WWII, we all knew from the battlefield that we were one nation, all in this great cause of freedom and prosperity together. This made very threatening times for the lords of the manor. They might prosper even more under Democrats than under Republicans (look it up), but they needed greater income inequality to feel better about themselves.

So they took their financial resources and put them to work changing the social norm. Now, we have an entire right-wing media apparatus built for the purpose of convincing their racist teabagger serfs of a thousand things opposite the truth.

But the main new social norm for the conserfatives is the ardent faith that the government and organized labor are the source of their problems, when in fact they are the only counterbalance that exists to the plutocracy that has gluttonously gobbled up all the economic gains of the past thirty-five years and still cannot be sated short of neo-feudalism.

What’s at work here is the poison of ideology. Underlying the food assistance fight is the idea that the poor are lazy, and deserve their fate — the Ayn Rand philosophy. You don’t see this same reasoning applied to those Red State agricultural-industrialists living high off farm subsidies, and that’s why Republicans have separated the two major recipient groups of federal food aid. Subsidized cotton growers cannot possibly be equated with someone trying to stretch macaroni into three meals.

The saddest part: Those people in Owsley County who are made hungry by Republican fealty to the wealthy will continue to blame the government and the United Mine Workers. In a way, the fucking morons deserve to live in a company town. They've failed to live up to their self-image as self-reliant, independent yeoman Scotch-Irish sonsabitches. But the rest of us don't deserve that company town. And their children don't either.

By their fruits

Or, in this case, by their fruitcake ideas.

I'm not even sure all these wingnut Republicans really truly believe global warming is natural.  Oh, sure, Michele Bachmann is vacuous enough to believe it, and so do many of the others, especially the idiots who've gone to fundie schools and have not even a passing acquaintance with science, at least not as anything other than a source of evil-ution and a punching bag for bullshit fundamentalist denial.

But surely some of these deniers are intelligent enough to understand the data.  Those are worse than the sincere deniers.  They are simply hypocrites who know what they have to say to be viable Teapublicans.

The fact that success in one of the two main American political parties requires a declaration of one's own stupidity - because so many of its base voters have chosen denial as their core epistemic principle - is truly frightening and a far greater existential threat than terrorism could ever be.

No way to change the climate

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There is simply no answer the teabaggers, denialists, oil tycoons, and wingnuts will ever accept.

They did nothing

"Fiddled while Rome burned" would be too referential.

Messaging Matters gives this précis of Teapublican accomplishment:

“They Did Nothing.” It’s that simple. The Republicans on the economy? “They did nothing.” On jobs? “They did nothing.” Rebuilding America’s crumbling roads and bridges to help businesses move their products? “They did nothing.” Immigration? “They did nothing.” Climate change? “They did nothing.” Bringing American jobs back home instead of shipping them overseas? “They did nothing.” Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and the mentally ill? “They did nothing.”* The list goes on and on. And to be clear, the Democrats must articulate their positive agenda. In fact, President Obama has taken to the road to do just that. Saying the Republicans did nothing only makes sense if Democrats clearly explain what solutions they stand for and on which the Republicans should work, with some compromise and cooperation by both sides.

Sorry, I slipped. MM tells me to say "extreme Republicans."

(H/t DailyKos)

Loyal opposition would care about facts

The Republicans are interested only in their own power. Yet another faux scandal, this time the IRS's so-called targeting of teabaggers, has crumbled:

Terms including "Israel," ''Progressive" and "Occupy" were used by agency workers to help pick groups for closer examination, according to an internal IRS document obtained by The Associated Press.

It was obvious from the beginning that the IRS personnel in Cincinnati were using search terms - the way anyone facing a large backlog of work would - to screen for high-priority work. If you don't do this, you're not getting the right work done. You're treating every task as equal in priority and equally likely to pay off. In short, you're an idiot piece-worker.

Republicans should have known this before going after scalps. Instead, they contrived exposure of only the part of the story that fit their apocalyptic victimology. I have no evidence whether they knew and deceived us or whether they simply didn't ask. Those are the two options, and either is unforgivable for the House Oversight Committee and its chair, Darrell Issa (R-police record).

It's long past time we acknowledged that their opposition to Barack Obama goes well beyond honorable, time-honored loyal opposition. They are not loyal to Americans, only to their extremist supporters.

Alas poor Yobama

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Executioner's song and dance

Click image for full Paul Fell/Artizans Syndicate cartoon.

Virtue of self-delusion

Drastically at odds with the Christian Bible, yet the Republican Party claims to be based on both. Debased, more like it.

A self-described Christian who holds at the same time the morality of Jesus and the contradictory "virtuous" selfishness of Ayn Rand must believe, among other absurdities, that every charism from god to human must stop there and not be shared with any other human.

The Christian conservatives I know don't actually believe Rand's philosophy. They are often altruistic within their own circles, and their churches are often valuable social welfare providers. Why is it that they adopt her anti-altruism extremism in regard to every economic issue?

Selling soap

The conservative movement is founded on twin implausible literary pillars.

One is Ayn Rand's fictional philosophy, epitomized by the execrable and ridiculous Atlas Shrugged. Calling it literary immediately demands an episode from Leonard Pinth-Garnell.

The other is an ossified literal reading of a notoriously dated translation into English of the bible. At least it has true literary merit, but anyone who labels it the inerrant word of god is either whoppingly ironic or resolutely opposed to learning. The King James translation was done a millennium and a half after the New Testament was written, written often by authors who lied about who they were and whose works have been canonized more theologically and politically than historically.

It's no surprise then that conservative Republicans in the House today spin tales they can't substantiate to outraged true believers.

Congressional investigators have not produced evidence to link the harassment of conservative groups to the White House or to higher-ups in the Obama administration. But the lack of evidence that any political appointee was involved hasn’t stopped the lawmakers from assuming that it simply must be true. And so, they are going to hold hearings until they confirm their conclusions.

Americans love soap operas. Who cares that these daytime dramas are at best semi-plausible half-truths!

They have refused their Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good

Click image for full Bruce Plante/Tulsa World cartoon.

Coors lights their way

Click image for full Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times Free Press cartoon.

Bonus joke:  Why is Coors Light like sex in a canoe?  Punchline in comments...

A bit hazi on a sense of proportion

If you think Benghazi is a scandal, rather than a fiasco, you're a person who's completely unable to hold your people to the standard you hold President Obama to.

David Vitter watch, day 2137, give or take

Today is a great day in the annals (two Ns, so shut up!) of Republican lying adulterers. Mark Sanford (R-only a sin to be a Democrat) will never again be seriously challenged by a Democratic candidate.

According to those exit polls, Mr. Sanford held a three-to-one lead among voters who described themselves as liars, cheaters, or sleazebags.

Once again, the majority of a conservative electorate has proven more committed to ideology than to the personal virtue they bullshit about whenever Ted Kennedy is the topic of conversation.

No big loss, really. Colbert Busch was never going to hold that seat past 2014. Now the Republicans are stuck with Sanford.

Maybe he, Vitter, and their role model, Newt Gingrich, should rent a limo with the up-suspension package and triple date. Oh, the stories they could tell to entertain their dates!