We've Slipped Into the Stupid Reigns Supreme Timeline
That's why everything feels wrong.
Post-Debate Biden Haters, This Is Exactly What You Sound Like
Can't Wait Until They Teach This!
And It's Only Tuesday
VOTE BLUE TO END THIS MADNESS!
Buckle-Up, Rough Road Ahead
From Mock Paper Scissors:
I know I have more than a bit of a Pollyanna reputation (I can hear you guys), and I suppose I should be as sardonic as the next blogger and post some cynical nice knowing ya, democracy post given our corrupt and illegitimate Supreme Court essentially torpedo'ing the Rule of Law. (5 of the 6 Republican Justices were put in place by Republican Presidents who did not actually win: all of 'em except for Thomas, and boy-howdy, Eiron really outdid herself there!)
But I'm not going to do that.
We've been in tough times before, we will be in tough times again:
If you're about my age or older… you're familiar with this uncanny sensation of living through a moment when history turns. It's happened every few months or years since Bush v. Gore: First, Bush v. Gore itself. Then 9/11. The Bush torture regime. The collapse of the false case for the war in Iraq. The global financial crisis. The election of Barack Obama. Then of Donald Trump, with control of the Supreme Court again on the line. COVID-19. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Dobbs. And now this: The Supreme Court's whole-cloth fabrication of criminal immunity for presidents, just as the incumbent's path to re-election is closing, and his challenger flaunts dictatorial ambition undisguised.
I don't want to sound like Captain Kirk not believing in the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario, but I do see the world as an engineer and so set-backs are problems that need to be solved. I look at times to my Civics education and have a basic understanding of how government stuff works, and of course, our American history.
The simple truth is that we legislate laws. Laws change all the time. We amend the Constitution, and we even have repealed a Constitutional Amendment. What I am getting at is that the Supreme Court is not the last word, we the people are the last word. We have the superpower to make any change we want, but we MUST vote and hold our representatives accountable. As I have said elsewhere, it is a heavy lift, but not an impossible one.
Everything we are facing is a problem with a solution, and the solution begins with us; no one is going to rescue us other than ourselves. As we've said here so many times, there is no cavalry coming, there is only us.
We vote the bastards out, up and down the ticket, and then the real work begins. IF we can get the Trifecta (House, Senate, Presidency),then there is nothing we cannot do, including remaking the Supreme Court. As the corrupt Roberts court has blown up the tradition of stare decisis, we can toss out and over rule their obviously corrupt and un-American rulings. Our history is littered with Supreme Court decisions along the roadside of progress.
So buckle-up, it's a rough 4 months ahead, and we need to be unified and get shit done. As Ben Franklin said,
We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
Courage.
Fuck Everything, Especially Those Guys
From Gregfallis.com:
Yeah, I'm talking about those Nazgûl motherfuckers on SCOTUS. Like almost everybody I know, I spent yesterday vacillating between 1) feeling depressed and helpless and 2) wanting to set fire to the entire combustible world. The decision yesterday that POTUS (and Trump in particular) is essentially above the law was appalling and frightening, but the fact that it was delivered in smug terms by the most conspicuously corrupt and openly partisan SCOTUS in history was insulting. It's like they're standing there, grinning in their black robes, saying "Fuck yeah, we're corrupt. And ain't nothing you plebs can do about it."
Justice Sotomayor, in her properly raging dissent, wrote, "in every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law." And she's right. That whole notion that nobody is above the law has gone straight down the porcelain facility. This is an unprecedented fuckwankery. This is deep fuckwankery; fuckwankery down at the cellular level. I mean, the spouses of two of the Justices (Alito and Thomas) openly supported the insurrection/insurrectionists, and yet those two tainted pricks didn't have the fundamental sense of decency to recuse themselves from the case.
What makes this even more galling is the fact that those arrogant motherfuckers on SCOTUS were put on the bench by partisan politicians who represent a minority of US citizens. A combination of partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the absurdity of the Electoral College means that the US is largely ruled by the minority. And in recent years, that minority cheated, lied, and wriggled around enough to install three partisan hacks onto the SCOTUS bench.
Every single one of the Justices sitting on this SCOTUS testified under oath that they respected stare decisis, the legal concept that courts should follow precedent. At least six of them lied about that. This Court has largely shat all over precedent. For almost half a century, Roe guaranteed a woman's right to choose. That's gone. The Bakke decision on race-conscious admissions in higher education was the law of the land for almost as long. Not any more. For 40 years, Chevron — Jesus suffering fuck, people, there have been 70 SCOTUS and some 17,000 or so lower court cases based on Chevron, which states courts need to defer to the experts in various regulatory agencies when deciding how to interpret a law. A judge probably doesn't know enough to decide what level of exposure to a certain chemical or substance would be harmful to a child. A judge probably doesn't have a fucking clue about the long term effects of effluent run-off from a hog containment farm into a local river upstream from a small town. Experts need to decide this shit, not judges. But nope, this SCOTUS has turned that power over to elected or appointed judges.
Wait…I forgot bribery. Last week, this SCOTUS (and I am NOT MAKING THIS UP) made the bizarre decision that while it's illegal for a public official (like, say, a mayor or a member of Congress, or possibly a judge) to accept a bribe, it's perfectly for fine for them to accept a gratuity. A bribe is the offer of money (or something of value) from a person/entity beforethe public official makes a decision affecting that person or entity. A gratuity is accepting the same fucking thing after the decision is made. Seriously, the Court says bribes are bad but gratuities are okay. This decision was written by the Justice whose massive credit card debt was mysteriously paid off before he was nominated. You know who I'm talking about–the guy reliably accused of sexual assault. That guy. (Okay, Kavanaugh.)
If you're reading this hoping that at the end I'll suggest some way to make you feel better about the situation…sorry. If you're hoping I'll cobble together ideas for a way forward, or maybe offer some practical advice on how to minimize the damage…nope. Maybe tomorrow or at some point in the future. For now, all I have to say is let yourself be angry or depressed for a while. Maybe just be numb for a while.
But pretty soon we'll need to get over it and resist. Resist in any way we can. Resist in every way we can. But today it's literally raining here in the heartland, and for today that's fine.
365 Days of UNF: July 2nd
Fiddling While Rome Burns
We all need our escapes from the seemingly never ending existential dread that surrounds us these days, and Anubis knows I have mine. I've never escaped via illicit drugs or alcohol (no, really!), but as you've surmised if you've followed me here for any length of time, you know I do have my…obsessions.
Today I did a thing. I brought my 1984 Yamaha amplifier into the 21st century by swapping out the existing speaker binding posts with the newer style 5-way binding posts that accept so-called "banana plugs." These also don't balk at the thicker, 14-gauge wire I currently have running to my speakers.
It really wasn't something I'd previously considered because the amount of work involved in swapping these posts out individually was well beyond what I ever wanted to do on my own. But one day I stumbled upon a link in an audio discussion forum to a guy who builds plug-n-play assemblies that simply replace the existing part. Done and done.
It took me the better part of an hour to swap out the part—mainly because I have the soldering skills of a 6-year old and the eyes of a 66-year old—but once I got everything put back together I was pleasantly surprised how easy it really was…and I was even more surprised that I did it without blowing anything up!
Does it make the amp sound any different? No, of course not. But I like the look and the future ease of using those banana plug connectors.
Corporations on July 1st
Ya Think?
Some Positivity
After Today's Ruling, At The Very LEAST…
And The Madness Continues
VOTE BLUE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT. BECAUSE IT DOES!
I'm Starting to Understand What Cassandra Must've Felt Like
The Germans in the 1930s had no idea what was coming. WE DO! History affords us that knowledge and we can stop this madness in its tracks, yet all the major media outlets are still treating this election like it's some innocuous horse race, not the difference between remaining a free (if imperfect) United States and a full-blown, nuclear-armed fascist dictatorship led by a narcissistic, delusional madmen. The country's smoke detector is going off and it seems everyone is ignoring it!
WTF is wrong with people?!?
VOTE BLUE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT. BECAUSE IT DOES!
To Those Who Celebrate…
I Think The Internet as a Whole Needs to Ask Themselves One Simple Question When they See a Video
Why was the camera filming?
There are so many videos that seem real, but when you realize the camera was already filming with a great angle, you can see that it's all staged.
Yes, there are dash cams, security footage, people accidentally filming real things happening. But so many are just staged!! And no one in the notes takes the camera preparation into consideration!
This is 2024, you need to know how to spot bots lying to you, but also humans lying to you.
Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
The court has ruled on presidential immunity. "A former president is entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his "conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority," the ruling says. "There is no immunity for unofficial acts."
So, a president is not fully immune. Personal acts aren't immune, presidential acts MIGHT be immune, but there is some presumption of immunity for official acts.
Obviously this presumption of immunity is nowhere in the Constitution. The originalists are definitely being original, and boy are we eff'ed; so much for Republican arguments that judges shouldn't legislate from the bench. The argument now is going to be about what is or is not "an official act."
I wish that the SCOTUS made it clear what is an official duty (you know, like duties as defined in The Constitution) versus everything else, but they didn't, and so here we are.
There is no way the DC trial gets underway before the election.
The decision is here. I'm reading the dissenting opinion first, and oof. Sotomayor writes that the majority's grant of immunity "reshapes the institution of the presidency" and "makes a mockery of the principle" that "no man is above the law."
We are totally eff'ed in the dark.
Justice Jackson:
The majority of my colleagues seems to have put their trust in our Court's ability to prevent Presidents from becoming Kings through case-by-case application of the indeterminate standards of their new Presidential accountability paradigm. I fear that they are wrong. But, for all our sakes, I hope that they are right.
In the meantime, because the risks (and power) the Court has now assumed are intolerable, unwarranted, and plainly antithetical to bedrock constitutional norms, I dissent.
UPDATE 1:
"You can hear the echoes of Richard Nixon saying, 'If the president does it, it is not illegal.'" — MSNBC's Katy Tur
VOTE BLUE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT…BECAUSE IT DOES!
An Open Letter to America
Dear America,
Don't do it. Don't.
You know what I'm talking about, don't give up on Joe Biden because of one bad night, one awful night. He stumbled, he mumbled, his voice was hoarse, so is that the reason to give up on him and just had the presidency to a convicted felon, sexual predator and con artist?
I say No, and you should say it, too.
Think on some things … the 81-year-old Catholic is fighting for women to have the right to make their own health care decisions, while the 78-year-old felon appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who … overturned Roe v Wade—for which The Felon said, out loud, "I did that"—… who decided that bribing government officials is really just a gratuity but being homeless is a crime … who voted to allow judges, not scientists or environmental experts decide about climate change and polluting our air and water … who can decide on drug safety … banking regulations … aviation safety …. and if you're an LGBTQ+ American and think that the right won't come for equality and marriage, think again.
Do you really want Clarence Thomas, well, actually his wife, and Sam Alito making those choices for you?
Do you want to elect a guy who has said, out loud, that he would be a dictator on Day One; who has said all he really wants to do is punish his enemies; who has told big Oil he will give them tax breaks if they support him. Does that sound like a man who cares about We The People?
I'll stand with the old guy who took on a pandemic and saw us through it; who gave America its lowest unemployment rate in fifty years … who lowered inflation more than any other country in the G7 and added more than 16 million jobs. He's working for us, and he may be a bit tired and old, but he isn't doing the job alone; a vote for Joe is a vote for his administration that will see to it that his efforts go on.
I will vote for that man and his team.
I will not vote for the man who promised to build a wall at the southern border and have Mexico pay for it, and then didn't. I will not vote for a man who promised to overturn Obamacare and give us all the greatest healthcare system ever, and then didn't; I will not vote for the man who touted his fabulous infrastructure bill and then did nothing. I will not vote for the man who claimed he won the election in 2020, and filed nearly 70 lawsuits to overturn that election, and lost every single time; I will not vote for the man who claimed that he, and not former President Barack Obama, had passed the Veterans Choice Act; I will not vote for the man who swore and that he and his campaign did not collude or cooperate with Russia, even though Robert Mueller found cooperation and explained that he did not investigate "collusion", only "conspiracy" and "coordination".
I will not vote for a rapist; I will not vote for a racist who called Nazis in Charlottesville "good people." I will not vote for a man who sexually abused and then defamed E. Jean Carroll; I will not vote for a man who p[aid off a porn start for a sexual encounter in order to win an election. I will not vote for a con artist who stole money from people at a university he named after himself.
I will not vote for the man who told us to drink bleach during COVID; who didn't tell us a flashlight could kill the virus; who told us it would be over by Spring, but by Spring we were piling up dead American bodies in refrigerator trucks outside hospitals.
I will vote for Joe Biden, a decent human being who has worked harder than any president, given the mess he inherited from The Felon, to make life better for all of us. I will vote for the man who lowered prescription drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices; who signed gun safety legislation into law ; who oversaw more Americans getting healthcare. I will vote for the man who passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that helped us fund basic necessities like rent and groceries during the pandemic; I will vote for the man who also extended a $300 a week federal unemployment benefit for some 9.7 million people out of work during the pandemic; a man who temporarily expanded the child tax credit program, who allotted $7.25 billion for small business loans and $128 billion in grants for state educational agencies.
I will vote for the man who teamed up with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention —with scientists and doctors not GOP political hacks—to administer and track COVID-19 vaccinations across the country. I will vote for the man who passed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill into law to repair the nation's roads, bridges and railways, bring high-speed internet to rural communities and more.
I will vote for the man who passed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 and allocated $53 billion in federal funding to manufacture semiconductor chips in the U.S. instead of relying on China to produce them.
I will vote for the man who passed the Build Back Better Act, a massive social spending bill that included major health care reform, universal pre-kindergarten and paid family leave, $550 billion dedicated to combatting climate change and more, paid for in part by increased taxes for corporations and the uber rich; not from the taxes on We The people, but from the wealthiest of Americas and corporations who, under that lest president, received massive tax breaks.
I will vote for the man whose Inflation Reduction Act tackled inflation by reducing the federal deficit, promoting production of certain goods and limiting the cost of some prescription drugs; the package also included $369 billion for a climate initiative to reduce greenhouse emissions and promote lean energy technologies; $300 billion in new revenue through a corporate tax increase; $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service to hire new agents, modernize its technology, audit the wealthy and more.
I will vote for the man who has stood up for Ukraine in its quest to be free from Russian autocracy while the GOP and the former president stand by bloodthirsty Vladimir Putin.
I will vote for the old guy who had a bad night at a debate, but who spoke from the heart and promised to keep fighting for us. And if that old guy decides he wants to step aside, I will still support him and the party that wants to work for us and not for The Felon.
And I hope America will follow suit.
[Source]
365 Days of UNF: July 1st
July 1st
No Lie Detected.