I Can't Take Any More Historical Events

 And I can't take another four years of being horrified by some new offense from President Trump every week.

Since the last time I posted (warning you all), Donald Trump got shot at, J.D. Vance became his running mate, Joe Biden caught COVID, and now today Joe Biden has dropped out of the race and endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris to take over.

deep breath

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH

Okay. Okay okay okay okay okay. OKAY.

First thing first: this is not the nail in the coffin that guarantees Trump's victory. Political parties run their own nomination process, for the most part, and Joe Biden was still the presumptive nominee, not the official nominee. Which means it is not against the law to replace him. Which will not stop the GOP from mounting legal challenges across all 50 states to kick the new nominee off enough ballots to secure victory. With a slate of judges and a Supreme Court that are all in Trump's pocket.

We will also have a drumbeat of the GOP saying Biden must resign his office immediately. To that I say: good fucking luck. If Biden has any guts he'll forgive every student loan he can and use every executive action possible to benefit the country. The Supreme Court says it is all okay, after all.

Second: there will be a DNC convention. Someone, probably Kamala Harris, will take over as the nominee and run for President. It is possible, as Aaron Sorkin calls for Mitt Romney to be the nominee and Joe Manchin considers rejoining the party to contest for the slot, that the convention will deteriorate into a complete shitshow.

Hopefully... hopefully not.

Even if Kamala Harris isn't the strongest pick (and I would ask which Democrat is actually better), she's the natural choice in the minds of the country, being the current Vice President and Biden's chosen running mate. Not picking her would be questionable at best, especially with no clear replacement waiting in the wings.

The convention could, conceivably, knife her in the back even as she takes the nomination, It would not be the first time (ref. Jimmy Carter). Again... hopefully not.

This is what I would ask:

Whoever the nominee is, the focus of this election needs to be voting against Donald Trump.

I have given my reasons. Trump has not gotten better. We can handle four years of a poor Democratic presidency (and there's no evidence right now it would be poor). We can't handle another four years of Trump.

Vote Blue 2024

-Dave

If we kick Joe Biden out of the race we will all be damned.

 July 10th, 2024, under a severe thunderstorm warning:

I wrote recently about how Donald Trump is a monster and a fascist who cannot be allowed to take office again.

Now we've got this shit floating around:

To sum up, Joe Biden got up on a debate stage and was low energy and not on point. At the same time Donald Trump was ranting about the hordes of immigrants coming to conquer America and lying his ass off. And since then the press has ignored the fact that Donald Trump is an evil, delusional narcissist and instead focused on pressuring Joe Biden out of the race.

I repeat, the press is trying to force the goddamn sitting President of the United States to drop out of his race for re-election, while Donald Trump has shown up 69 times on the court documents about Epstein's pedophile playplace.

And because Democrats are a loose coalition of diverse opinions that rarely agree about anything, it seems to be fucking working.

Let me spell out the basic problems with this idea, from the position of a man cursed with an interest in politics after he woke up in his dorm room to news of a terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001:

1. The primary season is basically over and Joe Biden has been nominated as the Democratic Party's candidate already. In same cases he won the nomination in states he did not campaign in, on a write-in vote.

2. There is not a recognized mechanism for a party dropping their chosen nominee at this point in the race. Because of that, Republicans will use every dirty trick in their book to skewer anyone who could conceivably replace Biden on the ticket and keep them off the ballot in key states.

3. Republicans control the Supreme Court 6-3, so anything they do to kick a new candidate off the ballot will be upheld.

4. The only well-known potential replacement for Biden is Kamala Harris, his VP. If she replaces him then she will be accused of some nebulous cover-up of Biden's infirmity (which again, doesn't actually seem to fucking exist).

5. Joe Biden is the sitting President of the United States, and has been carrying out that duty for nearly four years now without any indication that he is mentally unfit for office.

6. And as a reminder, no one is calling for his opponent to drop out even though he's been convicted of 34 felonies and held liable for sexual assault and faces credible accusations of raping children and supports dictators over US allies and already fucked up a pandemic.

And yet! Multiple goddamn Democratic Senators and Representatives are saying Biden should step down! Not a lot, but you'd be hard pressed to tell when the press is slotting them in between quotes from Rob Reiner, Stephen King and George Clooney also attacking Biden! And then you've got Ezra Klein on a podcast saying there are Democrats who have told him "Hey, Trump won't be so bad!"

LIE BACK AND THINK OF NAZI GERMANY I GUESS

(Why am I writing this? I shouldn't be writing this. It's destroying my sanity and isn't good for my reputation in any sense... but I've donated and I'm going to vote in November, what else is left to me?)

Joe Biden was already tarred by backing Israel in their current horror show. He went into this election being less than perfect. But you have to be sick in the fucking head to call yourself a Democrat and think Trump winning is an acceptable outcome, or to think you can force sitting President off the ticket and replace him less than four months out from the election.

If Biden were genuinely ill - I mean victim of a stroke, God forbid - I could understand the instinct. This isn't that. This is sharks seeing a slip and going into a feeding frenzy on behalf of a fucking nightmare who promises nothing but more blood.

We Must All Oppose Tyranny

Today is Independence Day. It commemorates the ratification of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, and the founding of the United States of America.

Per the National Archives, after listing the grievances the former colonies held against King George III, the Declaration states:

"A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

This year, 248 years after the Declaration, we the citizens of the United States will choose to continue having a President or elect a Tyrant.

Donald Trump is manifestly unfit for office. He is a convicted felon on 34 counts. Two more federal cases against him are ongoing. He has been found liable for sexual assault, and accused of multiple rapes and other disgusting acts. He is currently being sued for child rape. He possesses an absurd amount of financial conflicts of interest, and massive debts that make it simple for any foreign power to bribe him.

Far more importantly, he has already served a term in office and proven himself disastrous for the country. He packed the Supreme Court and federal benches with right-wing ideological judges clearly unfit for their positions. He ignored a pandemic and then actively spoke out against basic protective measures like masking and vaccinations, leading to a death toll of hundreds of thousands. His foreign policy involved withdrawing from numerous long-standing international agreements, covering everything from mutual defense, nuclear limitations and climate action, weakening America's influence worldwide and increasing the influence of dictatorial governments in our place. And his administration ended with a mob descending on the Capitol under a delusion that the election Trump lost had somehow been stolen from him, a view Trump has repeatedly encouraged, and attempting to overturn the election. Trump remains on trial for his role in those events.

This year, 248 years after our country was founded, we the citizens of the United States will choose remaining a Democracy or becoming a Dictatorship.

Trump is running on a platform of unapologetic fascism. He repeatedly called for violence against protesters, reporters, and immigrants during his first term, and has been vowing revenge on his political enemies since his felony convictions. He is campaigning on a platform of mass deportations, potentially deploying the National Guard or the military to execute them, and continuing the cruel detention camps of his first term. Most of the people coming to the border are asylum seekers, but Trump denigrates them as animals. His campaign is also talking openly about pulling back support for NATO and throwing Ukraine to Russia.

Many things Trump wants to do would in theory face resistance, or are in fact illegal. But this week the Supreme Court ruled that the President is immune from prosecution for "official acts", and provided a very broad range for that immunity. At the same time, Trump's supporters are pushing Project 2025, an agenda for Trump's first days in office that includes:

- Loyalty (to Trump) tests for government employees, mass firing of government employees under Schedule F and retraining along Christian conservative values

- Ending gay marriage and protections against discrimination for gay people

- Classifying transgender people as "predatory" and a threat to children

- Classifying transgender literature as pornography and registering educators and librarians as sex offenders for distributing it

- Reversing protections and reforms covering diversity, affirmative action, and accessibility

- Redirecting education funds away from public schools to private Christian schools

- Cut the Department of Education entirely

- Reverse Biden's student loan forgiveness and crack down on loan enforcement

- Criminalize asylum seekers and immigrants, round them up in mass camps, and execute mass deportations to countries in active conflict

- Reverse deterrence-only policy for missile and space defense

- Defund foreign aid groups not aligned with Christian values

- Reverse policies and defund programs aimed at protecting the environment

- Use the military to enforce domestic border security

- Remove federal funding for public broadcasting (too left-leaning) and make them pay regulatory fees

- Remove safety rules for food, animals, and large-scale farming

And so on and so forth. The point of all this, and the terrifying thing about it, is that Project 2025 involves mass replacement of long-standing, non-partisan government officials with Trump loyalists at every level of government. At the same time, the intent is to carry this out solely through Trump's authority as President, an authority that a Supreme Court packed with Trump loyalists is ready to rubber-stamp, having already proclaimed that Trump cannot be held criminally liable for any of these actions, no matter how many of them (i.e. the use of military force against civilians) are clearly illegal.

This year, 248 years after the birth of the United States of America, we its people must choose to support Liberty and reject Tyranny.

Every election is important! Every election is important. Every election is important and this one is very important.

Donald Trump is a monster. He is a fascist. He is a malignant narcissist on a revenge trip who spent his first term "joking" about being President for Life. He is not fit to deal with the challenges America is facing today or in the next four years. He has no interest or actively opposes dealing with the long term problems our children will face as the planet cooks.

What he is prepared to do, is to create a country that is no longer a democracy in any functional sense. A country where policy is dictated in favor of loyalists to the Republican party and against everyone else. Where all the money goes to the already-wealthy and everyone else gets bled dry. And most importantly, Trump's postured to end any ability for the public to peacefully vote against, speak out against, or resist these policies.

We are already far too close to falling into a failed democracy. Our two main political parties are so divided that Congress needs a supermajority to take any substantial legislative action. Executive actions are subject to court challenges that are ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, currently 6-3 in favor of the Republican Party with all of its members appointed for life. On top of that, the Electoral College heavily favors the Republican Party, so elections already need a heavy wave in favor of Democrats to give them a better than even chance of winning. A Republican win in 2024 will tilt the field even more heavily in their favor.

We need to vote against this, and then we need to do more. Biden winning the election is necessary but not sufficient. We need to vote in a Democratic Congress, both the House and the Senate. And then we need to vote in Democrats at local elections. Sheriffs. School board members. Governors. Local legislatures and judges.

And then we need to do more. The Democratic Party has already downplayed the threats we face for too many years. We need to write letters to our officials and demand pro-democracy reforms. We need to demand an end to the Electoral College. We need to demand an expansion of the Supreme Court back to a fair body. We need to demand climate action, police reform, immigration reform. We need to demand that the wealthy pay fair taxes, support unions, oppose mega corporations. If our officials won't listen, we need to vote in primary elections and make our desires known.

What we cannot do is hand the Republican Party more power. The two party system isn't bad when it operates in a fair democracy and representatives fairly represent their constituents. That isn't what the Republican Party wants. They do not view Democrats as legitimate. They do not view opposition to the Party as legitimate. They want one-party rule, and they have been increasingly open that they're willing to use violence to get it.

The Republican Party as it stands now cannot be permitted to control the government. Certainly not under Trump, who has made himself the focus of a fascist cult of personality.

This year, we can make it clear that another Trump presidency is not acceptable or tolerable to the American people. We must make that clear, because the alternative is four years of a government that does not and will not respect our democracy or the values our country was built on.

David Earle

July 4^th, 2024

The Doom Coming To Trumpland

So shit happened today, as it does every day since the election of 2016. But this shit may be significant. It may mark the End Times in Trumpland, the time when the red moon plunges from the sky and the ground trembles with the fearful shaking of the dreaming MAGAts. A rent has been torn in the throne of the Fool's Gold God, and the tweeting of a thousand thousand pundits drowns the air as the blue-winged flock takes flight...

Fuck. Sorry. Let me begin again.

(Black Library, would you like a haunted house story?)

Today Donald Trump tweeted this:

In essence: Donald Trump admitted the meeting his son had with a Russian attorney during the campaign was to get dirt on his opponent, Hillary Clinton; claimed the whole thing was legal and went nowhere; and denies knowing anything about it.

Take a moment to let the idiocy of denying knowing about a "totally legal" meeting sink in. Took me all day. Good? Okay, let's move on.

Donald Trump is admitting that his son met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with close ties to the Russian government, to get information on Hillary Clinton. This is, to my knowledge, the first time he's acknowledged that, although it's been known for months that the original stated purpose of the meeting was false. (Said purpose being to discuss adoption in Russia, a story apparently concocted personally by Donald Trump on behalf of his son.)

This alone is problematic, since it's illegal for a campaign to accept "anything of value" from a foreign national. The Trumps claim nothing of value came from this meeting, which might be believable except for a few things:

1. the Democratic National Committee's servers were hacked,

2. those servers contained damaging material in email that was subsequently released to the public, influencing the election,

3. those servers also contained election analytics data, which was not released to the public, but which the Trump campaign appears to have acted on during the election,

4. Donald Trump has subsequently done everything feasible to end any investigation into these points, and

5. Donald Trump has lied to the American people around 4,500 times just since he took office.

So it's possible Trump's tweet is an admission that his campaign was seeking information of value from a foreign national. Collusion is not a technical crime, but that is collusion. It is also a crime, if anything of value was provided.

And Trumpland continues to shake, because what sparked Trump's admission were rumors that he was concerned his son, Donald Jr., is in legal jeopardy. Because Donald Trump Jr. testified to Congress, under oath, that his father had no knowledge of this meeting. Which, to be clear, took place in Trump Tower, which Donald Trump was in at the time.

So the statement was already hard to believe, but now it appears that Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, is ready to state that Donald Trump was aware of the meeting in advance and approved it. Which means Donald Trump Jr. may have lied under oath to Congress. Which is a felony. That also means Donald Trump was fully aware his campaign was reaching out to a foreign national for information of value.

And now the doom becomes clear: Trump may have committed a felony during his campaign by colluding with a Russian national.* If so, his defense hinges of denying any knowledge of it. But that defense hinges on 1. Michael Cohen not having any evidence to the contrary, and 2. every other party with knowledge of the meeting backing Trump.

One of those parties is Trump Jr., but he may have committed a felony of his own in lying to Congress, if Trump did have knowledge of the meeting. And so the Trumps find themselves under a pile of horrors:

1. If Trump Jr. is found to have lied under oath, he faces felony charges.

2. If Trump Jr. is prosecuted, Trump can pardon him - but accepting the pardon means Trump Jr. must admit guilt, which means he has to state affirmatively that his father had advance knowledge of the meeting in Trump Tower.

Which puts Donald Trump in the position of potentially having to convince his own son to go to prison for a felony in order to save his own skin.

And this is one of the better scenarios Trump is facing. If Michael Cohen produces evidence, or evidence is obtained elsewhere, that Trump knew about the meeting, he ends up in significantly greater legal jeopardy, and his son still faces prosecution for lying plus whatever charges Trump gets hit with.

This is not necessarily the end game for Trump, mind. He's unlikely to be prosecuted in office, and a compliant GOP Congress might be willing to accept a President who's committed felony election fraud. But it might be less likely to let that same President pardon his son for the same crime.

*I'm ignoring the potential felony payoffs of multiple sex workers. And the potential host of felonies laundering Russian money. And the potential violations of the emoluments clause. And the child rape accusation. And the spousal rape accusation. Just like the Republican Party.

Image courtesy of BoingBoing.

Excuse Me While I Rage The Fuck Out

I'm angry this morning, ladies and gentlemen, and I'm angry because after two of his White House staff were forced to resign their positions for beating their wives, Donald Trump, who is President of the United States, posted this:

Ignore Assange's bullshit please.

If you don't know why I'm pissed let me recap real quick:

- Donald Trump's first wife testified under oath that he raped her.

- Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault by over a dozen women.

- Multiple witnesses confirm Donald Trump made a habit of walking in on underage girls in their changing rooms when he ran beauty pageants.

- A woman sued Donald Trump for raping her at the age of 13. And this lawsuit was brought during Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

It's bad enough that Donald Trump is taking the side of men who abused their wives, one of which there is photographic evidence of. But for this festering orange shitgibbon to complain about due process and ruined careers after he's not only avoided any culpability for his own crimes, but managed to get elected to the highest office in the land, makes me so Goddamn mad that I don't have the words to process it.

And to anyone who voted for him: don't pretend you didn't know. Everyone knew this fucker is a sexual predator. And you decided you were okay with that as long as he got rid of the immigrants and pissed off the Democrats. So fuck you.

The Insanity of Donald Trump's 500 Businesses

I read some horrifying information today about just how bad Donald Trump's conflicts of interest are. You're welcome to take a look yourself: here's a Twitter thread on Trump's business organization, and here's a Newsweek article on his conflicts of interest.

To sum up:

Donald Trump does not run a company. Donald Trump runs about 500 companies, all set up as either sole proprietorships or closely held partnerships. This means that all of them go on his personal tax return, not a business tax return. This lets him take advantage of massive tax breaks, and explains why his son claims his tax return runs to 10,000 pages.

Additionally, most of those businesses carry massive loads of debt from different banks. So he cannot afford to disentangle himself from his businesses. Even if the banks allowed him to sell, he can't afford the tax payments that would result. So no matter what he says, Donald Trump will never be able to divest himself of his businesses, and the conflicts of interest involved will remain a problem.

To date, those conflicts include:

Being $364M in debt to Deutsche Bank, which is currently fighting a $14B settlement being leveraged by the Justice Department for securities fraud in 2008.

Trump Tower, currently being built in the Philippines, which the Trump children stand to make millions of dollars from during Trump's presidency. That assumes the good graces of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, who has since rising to power massacred 4,500 Filipinos using vigilante death squads.

A Trump complex in Turkey, which was built in partnership with the local Dogan group and is providing Trump's children with, again, millions of dollars. President Erdogan of Turkey recently detained a senior executive of the group, sending its stock price plummeting, and has since Trump's election strenuously called for the extradition from the U.S. of Fethullah Gülen, a 77-year-old Muslim spiritual leader who has lived in Pennsylvania’s Poconos region for many years and was accused by Erdogan of inspiring the recent Turkish coup attempt. It's hard not to imagine a quid pro quo arrangement to trade Gülen for the Dogan group's welfare. In other words, blackmail of a U.S. President.

Roll on 2017. Either Congress impeaches Trump on his first day in office or we're all fucked.