Month: July 2022

Manly Josh, Jan 6, Secret Service Secrets, Biden COVID, Big Lie, Gaetz

Continue reading “Manly Josh, Jan 6, Secret Service Secrets, Biden COVID, Big Lie, Gaetz”

See Hawley Run, Jan 6, GOP, Tucker, Secret Service Secrets, Abortion


Oh puhleeeze watch this for 12 seconds:

  • In Letters from an American, noted historian Heather Cox Richardson provides an overview, then a detailed account, of Thursday’s hearing. Trump’s deliberate inaction, and his fumbling resentments flowing even beyond the day of violence show a deliberate fanning of the flames. While Trump does not come off well, Senator Josh Hawley(Republican from here in Missouri) comes off worse: a tough talking bully who quickly gets frightened right down to his running shoes.
     
    She quotes journalist Adam Serwer:
    Hawley riling up the mob and then fleeing in terror is an incredible political metaphor.
     
  • Tough talk, raised fist supporting insurrectionists, instructing Americans that they are no longer masculine enough, explaining how to man up. In Hackwhackers, Senator Hawley runs in panic from the same lynch mob he had cheered on. The video has gone viral.
     
    He is up for re-election in 2024. I wonder if he will be, you know, running.
     
  • Frances Langum brings us Capitol Officer Michael Fanone, with some choice words for poor frightened Josh.
     
  • The Palmer Report believes the January 6 Committee has finally discovered the shared hidden weakness of Misters Trump and Hawley.
     
    The Achilles heel of Washington heels.
     
  • Former Trump aide Garrett Ziegler testifies as ordered before the January 6 Committee, but doesn’t like it at all. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors relays a couple of phrases from the resulting diatribe.
     
    In Garrett’s view female witnesses are garden utensils come on, you know what I’m saying. He also applies a term I had to look up. Hip young misogynists use it to describe women they consider too sexually active.
     
    Damn, I’m old!
     
    I am a little more familiar with Ben Shapiro, a virulent conservative who considers any Jew who voted against Trump as a bad Jew, a JINO – Jewish In Name Only.
     
    Apparently Mr. Ziegler explodes against fellow rightist Ben because he is Jewish.
     
    Ted McLaughlin helpfully offers Garrett a bit of useful career advice.
     
  • It seems Garrett Ziegler is not the only right-wing activist who hates fellow right-wing activists if they are Jewish. M. Bouffant at Web of Evil shows us the evidence as the right-wingers of the right wing revert to earlier roots.
     
  • Dave Dubya suggests the Zieglar rant is dangerously iconic: a view of future possibilities.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson does not seem enthused about the current crop of Wisconsin Republican candidates:

  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life talks about the story being told by the Committee from a different point of analysis: why a story is important to understanding.
     
    Best line:
    Lucky for us all the pointy heads over in the psychology ivory tower looking down on all us peons trying to infect us with their communist socialist feminist hatred of America for our freedoms have come up with narrative psychology.

Continue reading “See Hawley Run, Jan 6, GOP, Tucker, Secret Service Secrets, Abortion”

Jan 6 Planned, Self Doc Crime, Secret Service Served, Abortion

  • In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson considers new and developing evidence that the conspiracy to overthrow the peaceful transition was earlier, more explicit, more widespread, and involved people you would have expected to insulate themselves from grimy, incriminating details.
     
  • John Eastman is the lawyer who provided the legal sounding mumbo jumbo that served as the background for Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the results of the election.
     
    The Department of Justice wants to know the details of the plot. They got a warrant and took his cell phone.
     
    The Palmer Report tells us about Mr. Eastman’s court filing to keep them from peeking at the evidence.
     
    Spoiler alert: He lost and DOJ will be looking.
     
  • How often do criminals video tape their detailed plans for robbing a neighborhood bank? Here’s a moral equivalent.
     
    Frances Langum joins us with an amazed Rachel Maddow, watching Trumper extremists planning the Jan 6 insurrection, including their plans for Pence. On! VIDEO!
     
  • In Hackwhackers we find yet another video made a few days before the 2020 election. This one has close Trump associate Steve Bannon preview the plan.
     
    So yes, there was a detailed plan. And yes, it is captured on video. The plan:
     
    If Trump is losing on election night, he will declare victory anyway and claim election fraud.
     
  • The Jan 6 Committee wants communication records from the Secret Service. The records will help determine which of several contradictory accounts of the insurrection are true. Somebody may be lying and the records can show who can be trusted. The Committee goes through channels and gets a runaround. It’s one delay after another.
     
    Finally, the Secret Service runs out of road blocks. So they will comply. But first, they must conduct a device upgrade. We do want communication technology to be up-to-date, right?
     
    And a good portion of the requested records accidentally gets erased.
     
    Oops.
     
    Tommy Christopher says the matter is not closed. The oopsing of the now missing records is now the subject of its own section of the investigation. And maybe, just maybe, the records can be recovered from deletion.
     
    Oops.
     
  • Had to happen, I suppose: A 72 page conservative report of the 2020 election, including an analysis of conspiracy theories.
     
    At The Moderate Voice, retired U.S. Air Force Officer Dorian de Wind reads through the report. Eight prominent conservatives; retired judges, former Senators, legal experts, other officials; look into 187 allegations of fraud and other irregularities. They determine that each and every one is false. The 2020 election was lost, not stolen. The conspiracy theories are bogus.
     
    How about that!
     
  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has the numbers. A growing majority of Americans are swayed by the Jan 6 hearings. Trump done it!!
     
  • Max’s Dad reviews a few of the things we have learned about witness tampering, Dick Nixon, Bannon, Uvalde, GOP intelligence, Musk v Trump, and a MAGA world in which the rape of a 10 year old girl is not really rape.
     
  • We have already reviewed the Supreme Court decision on who decides whether a woman will get an abortion.
     
    The Supreme Court says the 9th Amendment, the one that protects rights not mentioned in the Constitution, no longer means what it says.
     
    M. Bouffant at Web of Evil reviews the new conservative reality. When a 10 year old is raped, it is intolerable to force her to keep the pregnancy until she gives birth to the rapist’s baby. So, when it does happen, define the absurdity away with a more humane absurdity. In that singular case, an abortion is not an abortion.
     
  • Julian Sanchez reflects on the rape of a 10 year old and how political exploitation will affect the future:

  • Iron Knee at Political Irony brings a real incident illustrating the legal absurdity of declaring a fetus to be a person.
     
    I suppose, with the same logic, we can order a chicken dinner from the menu and find ourselves paying full price for a hardboiled egg.
     
  • In Happiness Between Tails, da-AL encounters folks who simply don’t care either way about abortion rights because it does not involve them. In introducing an excellent personal account by legal expert Pam Lazos, da-AL wonders how “people justify take, take, taking, and never lifting a finger”.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit listens as a prominent Republican teaches us that demonic possession is a sexually transmitted disease.

Continue reading “Jan 6 Planned, Self Doc Crime, Secret Service Served, Abortion”

Shootings, Orphans, Roe Rampage, Alleys, Sex, Sin, Jan 6, Boris

  • Hackwhackers reports via tweets on a tragedy within a tragedy as Highland Park produces a two-year-old orphan. A Republican provides a stunning party reaction.
     
  • In two sentences, M. Bouffant at Web of Evil manages to explain how a trip to the library has changed.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life looks at the research. Experts go back more than a quarter century, to every mass shooting on record, and interview everyone who can be interviewed. They come up with a four ingredient recipe for making mass shooters.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice traces the abortion ruling to a deeply ingrained religious tradition that regards sex other than for procreation to be sinful.
     
  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz says America is about to find out what happens when a small minority weaponizes the very systems designed to protect its citizenry, and that people of faith need to take stock and respond.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged suggests the self-righteousness of the self-described pro-life movement turns out to be all about self and not much about life.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen rages at Republicans over the end of Roe, but suggests we not be too eager to praise Democrats.
     
  • A protest outside a restaurant is aimed at Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The right of a SCOTUS member to eat peacefully is defended by the restaurant, indignant supporters, and a mainstream online news publication.
     
    Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez has an opinion:

  • Tommy Christopher does have to search hard to find reactions as Justice Kavanaugh is denied a peaceful restaurant dinner. Reports are he exits through the back into an alley.
     
    I agree that it is wrong to deny him, or anyone, a right to privacy. Forcing people to exercise their basic rights in back alleys is simply wrong.
     
    Infidel753 provokes an additional observation. We have seen a similar ethic during Vietnam war protests during my younger years, and examples of greater violence in more recent anti-abortion activism.

    The idea is that wrongful actions are justified because they are in opposition to a much greater evil. This is a moral self contradiction. A more minor wrong is still wrong.

    It is a tactic that lacks even the virtue of effectiveness. It alienates potential allies, and damages the cause it is intended to support. That makes it both wrong and self-indulgent.
     

  • Nojo goes to a founding document to suggest that our government has lost its legitimacy.
     
  • In the face of serious rollbacks of American rights, with more likely to come, Infidel753 urges a sense of perspective. Past problems, those we experience in history books, were more serious at the time than any we face now. Current loss, serious as it is, does not obviate the progress that remains, or the work which is still to be done.

Continue reading “Shootings, Orphans, Roe Rampage, Alleys, Sex, Sin, Jan 6, Boris”

Women’s Rights, Cassidy Sings & Stings, Tamper, Tantrum, Lynch Lunge

  • For a while, we have been told by prominent Republicans that the American public is simply not interested in anything the Jan 6 panel has to present. News Corpse has the numbers, and it turns out the latest ratings are shattering records.
     
  • In Letters from an American, noted historian Heather Cox Richardson examines the explosive, what-in-hell, earthshaking testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson the young intern that Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows included in pretty much every meeting everywhere he went in the White House.
     
    And Boy Howdy! He went a lot of places!
     
  • driftglass gets down to the one singularly critical fact in Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony.
     
  • The Propaganda Professor listens to testimony about the Jan 6 lynch mob insurrection and sees a vast coverup unravel on our screens.
     
  • Heroic young intern Cassidy Hutchinson testifies under oath that someone told her about Donald Trump throwing a tantrum when denied the chance to personally lead the lynch mob storming the Capitol. The story includes him lunging toward the steering wheel. Others confirm that was the gossip floating through and around the White House at the time. So she pretty much had to be telling the truth.
     
    It is a side detail to the critical point that the then-President of the United States was hell bent on committing treason.
     
    Tommy Christopher picks it up from there, as a couple of Secret Service agents are said to be ready to eventually testify that Trump never actually grabbed the wheel.
     
    Which means the intern was lying.
    Okay, it doesn’t mean that at all, but why let the truth interfere with a good story?
     
    And now: Oh Lordy there’s video!
    Of the Presidential vehicle with some commotion going on inside.
     
    Well-l-l…
    It’s blurry and seems ambiguous to me. At least at first glance.
     
    Is it authentic? Was it taken during the right time frame? Is it even Trump inside?
     
    For all I know it could be a Stormy Daniels fill-in performing all the frantic motion.
     
    Technology and sharper eyes might resolve things. Or some clumsy Trump denial might inadvertently confirm the gossip that Cassidy Hutchinson heard.
     
    Meanwhile, there is always the old story Bill Buckley used to tell. When accused of killing three men and a dog, the accused triumphantly produce the dog alive.
     
  • Frances Langum reacts to the newest defense of Mr. Trump. Ms. Hutchinson must be lying about what was told to her by others. The then President could not have tried to grab the steering wheel of the Presidential limo. Couldn’t have happened.
     
    Why? Because he’s too damn fat!
     
    THAT is their story and they’re sticking to it.
     
  • Andy Borowitz reports as former President Trump denies ever knowing ketchup.
     
    I especially like this fictitious quote:
    “Using ketchup is a disgrace, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country,” the former President said.
     
  • Dave Columbo channels the Secret Service denying whatever today’s revelation is about Mr. Trump:
    @davecolumbo About time we got some clarification! #democrat #politicaltiktok #democratsoftiktok #political #january6 #politicalhumor #foryou #fy #fyp ♬ original sound – Dave Columbo


     

  • Now that the dust is settling, and the important points of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony are confirmed, the Palmer Report comes across additional reports on the Secret Service. Far from contradicting her, agents are confirming what she was told: that Mr. Trump, during a raging temper tantrum, really did lunge at the steering wheel of the limousine in which he was being driven. He was screaming orders to allow him to lead the lynch mob to hang Mike Pence.

Continue reading “Women’s Rights, Cassidy Sings & Stings, Tamper, Tantrum, Lynch Lunge”