Ashli Babbitt got what she deserved

She-Nazi Ashli Babbitt was shot while part of a violent mob trying to get to members of Congress in the U.S. Capitol, which they’d broken into, on January 6, 2021, because they wanted to reverse the results of the November 2020 presidential election via domestic terrorism, yes the likes of former “President” Pussygrabber and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene maintain that Babbitt, whose removal from the gene pool was a great thing, was “murdered.”

I shouldn’t even have to fucking write these words, as it’s so glaringly fucking obvious, but in the dystopia that the treasonous Repugnican-fascists have hurtled us into since the advent of Der Führer Pussygrabber, I have to:

Ashli Babbitt was no fucking martyr. She was part of a treasonous mob of would-be overthrowers of the United States government — pissed off that their favored candidate had lost the presidential election — that had to be stopped, and her shooting death was her own fucking fault.

My thoughts on this have not changed since January 2021, when, on January 8, 2021, I wrote:

… The Karen-like supporter of “President” Pussygrabber very apparently was shot by a Capitol cop while committing federal felonies (treason/sedition and criminal trespass upon federal property, that I can think of right off of the top of my head). Far from being a “peaceful” “protester,” this woman very apparently was one of a violent mob trying to get into the House chamber — but was stopped by a cop whose job it is to protect our elected representatives (and others who are in the building legitimately and legally) against this type of terrorist threat.

See video of Karen’s justified (and rather satisfying…) shooting here.

Before you piss and moan, reflect upon the fucking fact that Karen would have been fine, A-OK, had the cops shot a black person during the commission of a federal felony, but she very apparently believed that her whiteness, her right-wingedness and indeed, her Karen-ness, made her bulletproof. She was, um, dead wrong…

At the time I wrote that, Babbitt’s name had not been announced, apparently, but she was, indeed, a Karen.

And since I wrote that, I found out that the cop who shot Babbitt is black — not that the race of the heroic cop matters, because it doesn’t, except that I’m sure that it has further incensed the Repugnican-fascists that one of their little would-be stormtroopers was felled by a black man; after all, it’s only supposed to be white cops killing black people.

The cop who rightfully killed Babbitt — who, again, in the end, killed herself via her incredibly stupid, seriously criminal actions — rightfully was cleared of wrongdoing; the United States Capitol Police released a statement in August 2021 declaring that:

After interviewing multiple witnesses and reviewing all the available evidence, including video and radio calls, the United States Capitol Police has completed the internal investigation into the fatal shooting of Ms. Ashli Babbitt, which occurred in the Speaker’s Lobby on January 6.

USCP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) determined the officer’s conduct was lawful and within Department policy, which says an officer may use deadly force only when the officer reasonably believes that action is in the defense of human life, including the officer’s own life, or in the defense of any person in immediate danger of serious physical injury.

The officer in this case, who is not being identified for the officer’s safety, will not be facing internal discipline.

This officer and the officer’s family have been the subject of numerous credible and specific threats for actions that were taken as part of the job of all our officers: defending the Congress, Members, staff and the democratic process.

The actions of the officer in this case potentially saved Members and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large crowd of rioters who forced their way into the U.S. Capitol and to the House Chamber where Members and staff were steps away. USCP Officers had barricaded the Speaker’s Lobby with furniture before a rioter shattered the glass door. If the doors were breached, the rioters would have immediate access to the House Chambers. The officer’s actions were consistent with the officer’s training and USCP policies and procedures.

On April 14, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia announced it would not pursue criminal charges based on insufficient evidence. The case was investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Metropolitan Police Department. The administrative investigation was launched after the criminal investigation was closed.

It indeed is case closed — except for the pro-insurrectionist traitors who still claim that Babbitt was killed unjustly.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has no redeeming qualities — she’s stupid, she’s fascist, she’s power-hungry and she’s dog-faced (that she-Nazi-like bleach-bottle blonde hair cannot save her) — for a while now has been waving the bloody shirt of Ashli Babbitt like the piece of white trash that she is, most recently in a House hearing, where the incredibly, painfully dumb cunt actually compared the death of Ashli Babbitt to that of Tyre Nichols.

Tyre Nichols, to our knowledge, never came at any cop with a weapon, or posed any serious threat to any cop, and therefore, yes, he was murdered, beaten to death, by cop — yet Greene compares Nichols’ death to the death of a white-trash woman who was part of a treasonous, felonious mob that was trying to get at members of Congress and that was perilously close to succeeding.

The cop who shot Ashli Babbitt could not have known how armed the mob was or was not, nor could he have known how hell-bent the mob was or was not on causing harm or death to its targets — members of the United States Congress, no less.

The cop was put in a difficult — indeed, in an unprecedented — position; January 6, 2021, was the first time in history that the U.S. Capitol was attacked by domestic terrorists instead of by an enemy nation, and he made the best decision that he could make in that awful moment that a mob of treasonous domestic terrorists were trying to reverse the results of a presidential election via terrorism for the first time in U.S. history.

Indeed, Greene, who clearly supports the fascist insurrectionists because she can’t suck Pussygrabber’s stubby orange dick hard enough, doesn’t belong in the U.S. House of Representatives or in any other federal office, because clearly, her fealty is not to the U.S. Constitution or to the rule of law, but only to the traitor Pussygrabber.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently was asked if he agrees with Greene that Ashli Babbitt was “murdered.”

McCarthy, even as dull as he is, responded, “I think the police officer did his job.”

Of course Pussygrabber had to chime in on his fascist Twitter wannabe “Truth Social”: “I totally disagree with the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy… ASHLI BABBITT WAS MURDERED!!!”

Because putting that in all caps and following it with three exclamation points MAKES IT TRUE!!! (How does Pussygrabber get to act like a teenaged girl every fucking day yet still get to be considered to be “masculine,” even “manly”?)

Of course Pussygrabber wants to paint Babbitt as a “hero,” a “martyr.” Otherwise, he’d have to admit that he caused her death more than did anyone else (outside of herself, of course).

And sociopaths on crack like Pussygrabber never admit wrongdoing, no matter how obvious is their guilt.

And further, clearly, just as Greene doesn’t belong in the House because of her treasonous support for the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, Pussygrabber should not be allowed to run for president again. It’s clear to me that the U.S. Constitution prohibits this; the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Section 3) reads:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

As an editorialist for The New York Times pointed out recently, it is true that “A few legal scholars have argued that Section 3 does not apply to the presidency because it does not explicitly list that position.” However, he writes, “It is hard to square that claim with the provision’s fundamental purpose, which is to prevent insurrectionists from participating in American government,” and:

… Nor is it antidemocratic to impose conditions of eligibility for public office. For instance, Article II of the Constitution puts the presidency off limits to anyone younger than 35. If we have decided that a 34-year-old is, by definition, not mature or reliable enough to hold such immense power, then surely we can decide the same about a 76-year-old who incited an insurrection in an attempt to keep that power.

So could Section 3 really be used to prevent Mr. Trump from running for or becoming president again? As a legal matter, it seems beyond doubt. The Capitol attack was an insurrection by any meaningful definition — a concerted, violent attempt to block Congress from performing its constitutionally mandated job of counting electoral votes. He engaged in that insurrection, even if he did not physically join the crowd as he promised he would. …

I surmise that the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly lists members of Congress and not the U.S. president as being barred from holding further federal office because of their support of insurrection at least in part because when the amendment was ratified way back in 1868, no one really thought that a U.S. president would or could be Public Enemy No. 1. (And, of course, in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the amendment was ratified, the main concern was about allowing former members of the Confederacy to return to the U.S. Congress.)

Former “President” Pussygrabber should be behind bars already — his acts of treason resulted in multiple deaths on and shortly after January 6, 2021 (yes, even including Ashli Babbitt’s), and no one should be above the law. If you needlessly cause multiple deaths — while committing the felony of treason, no less — you should, at the minimum, be put behind bars.

(Pussygrabber’s level of treason — he is a traitor to the entire nation — in my book merits execution. Absolutely; I mean that. While I generally oppose the death penalty, Pussygrabber should be put to death for his crimes against the nation. He does not deserve to be able to continue to draw breath when he has killed people — while committing treason against the entire nation, no less.)

Alas, given the state of actual criminal justice in the United States, Pussygrabber most likely will die from a McDonald’s-induced heart attack (perhaps after he has thrown some ketchup against the wall in anger) than by lethal injection, but minimally, Marjorie Taylor Greene should be removed from the U.S. House of Representatives for her aiding and abetting of the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists that continues to this day.

At the bare minimum, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to protect our democracy from such traitors from the South.

The Repugnican-fascists are correct: Crime is a huge problem in the U.S. — only THEY are the fucking criminals

Shutterstock news photo

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tears up then-“President” Pussygrabber’s State of the Union speech after he delivered it in February 2020. A Pussygrabberian put Pelosi’s elderly husband in the hospital this morning after he broke into the Pelosis’ San Francisco home — yelling, à la the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, “Where is Nancy?” The stupid white man who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer no doubt was influenced by the violence espoused by the Repugnican Party that is enthralled to fascist in chief Pussygrabber.

It’s unshocking that the Repugnican-fascists use the specter of crime in almost every election to spook voters.

Of course, the Repugnicans know their base: ignore the cerebrum and go right for the reptilian part of the their supporters’ meager brains.

It’s also unshocking that the only crime that the Repugnican-fascists actually care about is crime committed by non-whites, especially poorer non-whites; indeed, the “criminal” “justice” system long has served the central function of maintaining the racial socioeconomic status quo by harshly cracking down on non-whites and poor people while rich white people (such as former “President” Pussygrabber) get a fucking slap on the wrist, if that.

The Repugnican-fascists variously have lied that the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by their supporters — which was meant to overturn the results of a presidential election that their preferred candidate had lost by more than 7 million votes, for fuck’s sake — was a peaceful demonstration, was just some tourists who got out of hand (the “a few bad apples” “argument”), and was a false-flag operation that actually was perpetrated by Antifa.

Actually, of course, the Repugnicans are A-OK with (mostly) white fascists committing violent crimes as long as it serves their political goals.

For example, you won’t hear sincere widespread Repugnican outcry over the invasion of Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco early this morning by a Pussygrabber cultist who put her 82-year-old husband in the hospital with a fractured skull and other injuries.

The perpetrator of the home invasion, who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, was yelling, “Where is Nancy?” Just like they were yelling at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. (Nancy was in D.C., by the way, which this criminal fucktard probably should have researched beforehand.)

Not that the Repugnican Party’s years-long, unhinged vitriol against Nancy Pelosi would have had any influence on this man. No, the Repugnicans’ hands are squeaky clean, as always.

The perpetrator of the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s home and her elderly husband is 42-year-old David DePape, and he’s the usual suspect:

He’s a fucking hero to most within the Repugnican Party, rest assured.

To vote Repugnican is to continue the persecution of non-white and poor people via the “criminal” “justice” system that is set up primarily to prosecute and persecute the already powerless — and to protect the rich and powerful, even when, like former “President” Pussygrabber, they perpetrate blatant treason against the United States of America, repeatedly — and to vote Repugnican is to continue to encourage political violence perpetrated by ignorant, angry (mostly) white men who, just like the “Islamofascists,” primarily are just upset about modernity. (Don’t even get me started on “Christian” nationalism, which is just “Christo”fascism — and is just like “Islamofascism” [only the specific content of the bullshit religious beliefs is different].)

Look, I’m no huge fan of Nancy Pelosi. I’m a Berniecrat. (I’m guessing — and hoping — that after the Democrats mostly likely lose the U.S. House come January, she’ll finally retire.)

But under the grip that fascist Pussygrabber has on the Repugnican Party, we can expect political violence perpetrated by these unhinged Repugnican-fascists to continue — while the uber-hypocritical Repugnican Party claims that crime is such a problem.

It would be a huge mistake to worry about someone breaking into your home or your car while ignoring the fascists who want to violently take over the entire fucking nation and forcibly impose their fascist political beliefs and their fascist political “order” on all of us, Nazi-German style.

VOTE.

Your life might actually depend on it.

How the minority seized the U.S. Supreme Court (and maybe finally sparked the next U.S. civil war)

Five of the current nine U.S. Supreme Court “justices” were chosen by two “presidents” who had lost the popular vote. If it feels to you like the current Supreme Court doesn’t represent the majority of the American people, that’s because it doesn’t: five of the “justices” were picked by “presidents” whom the American people did not actually elect and who thus were illegitimate “presidents” — and President Barack Obama treasonously and anti-democratically was denied a pick altogether.

How did we get to this point today, the day that the U.S. Supreme Court, now solidly dominated — 6-3 — by right-wing nut jobs (actually, they’re fucking fascists; “nut jobs” sounds too innocuous), ruled (5-4) that each state may decide whether or not a woman may obtain an abortion after it was decided in 1973 by Roe vs. Wade that no state may entirely prohibit abortion?

How did the anti-choice minority view — about two-thirds of all Americans support Roe vs. Wade — prevail in this fight for a woman’s basic right to choose what goes on inside of her own fucking uterus?

Let’s go back to the “election” of George W. Bush as president in 2000.

The official popular vote count for the presidential election of 2000 was 50,456,002 votes for Repugnican Bush and 50,999,897 for Democrat Al Gore.

Gore won the popular vote by 543,895 votes, yet, because of the Electoral College — and because of the infamous intervention of the U.S Supreme Court in the determination of a presidential election outcome — Bush, the minority’s chosen candidate, nonetheless became “president.” The pick of the majority of the American voters simply did not matter.

On September 29, 2005, “President” Bush’s first pick to the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

You might argue that yes, Bush “won” “re”-election in 2004 — the official popular vote count for that presidential election was 62,040,610 to 59,028,444 in Bush’s favor, a difference of 3,012,166 votes this time.

However, I’d argue that obviously had Bush not been installed as president when he’d lost the popular vote of 2000, of course he never could have been “re”-elected in 2004. Because Bush’s first presidential term was illegitimate — because he had lost the popular vote — I never accepted his second term as legitimate either, because his second term depended on the fruit of the poisonous tree from 2000.

Bush went on to get another right-wing U.S. Supreme Court “justice” confirmed — Samuel Alito, who authored today’s official decision to kill Roe vs. Wade — on January 3, 2006.

Fast forward to the next presidential election in which the loser of the popular vote still became “president”: In 2016, the official popular vote count was 65,853,514 for Democrat Billary Clinton to only 62,984,828 for Repugnican Pussygrabber; Pussygrabber lost even more bigly than did George W. Bush in 2000: he lost by 2,868,686 popular votes.

Yet the illegitimate “President” Pussygrabber would go on to nominate three U.S. Supreme Court justices in just his one (and what must be his only) term.

Former President Barack Obama, who won the popular vote in 2008 and in 2012, put only two justices (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) on the Supreme Court during his two terms — and infamously and treasonously was denied a third pick to the nation’s highest court when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell treasonously and anti-democratically refused to allow the Senate to recognize any nomination to the Supreme Court by Obama in the wake of the overdue death of fascist “Justice” Antonin Scalia on February 13, 2016 — even though Obama had had almost a full year of his presidency left.

So “President” Pussygrabber’s first pick for the U.S. Supreme Court — Neil Gorsuch, who was confirmed on April 7, 2017 — clearly had been stolen from Obama.

The unelected-by-the-majority-of-the-American-people Pussygrabber would go on to make two more right-wing-nut-job/fascist picks to the U.S. Supreme Court: Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed on October 6, 2018, and Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed on October 26, 2020, even though the Repugnicans had told us that Obama couldn’t have a nomination to the Supreme Court so “close” to a presidential election (Barrett was confirmed only about a week [eight days] before the 2020 presidential election, while, again, Obama was denied a pick to the court with almost a full year of his second term remaining).

So under the Repugnicans’ own fucking argumentation in regards to the “required” timing for Scalia’s replacement on the court, Amy Coney Barrett clearly is illegitimate, and, of course, before her, Gorsuch illegitimately was put on the nation’s high court, because that pick clearly had belonged to then-President Obama.

But, even all of this aside, if we believe that only the majority of the American voters should pick the U.S. president, who then should be able to make nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, then George W. Bush’s picks for the Supreme Court — Roberts and Alito — are illegitimate, since Bush never legitimately became president in the first fucking place. And ditto, of course, for the illegitimate Pussygrabber’s picks to the court, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett.

That’s five current U.S. Supreme Court “justices” who were nominated by “presidents” who had lost the popular vote. That’s five illegitimate Supreme Court “justices” — four of whom voted to kill Roe vs. Wade.

(Roberts did not vote to kill Roe, but of course Clarence Thomas did, because he is Clarence Thomas, who I always believed committed sexual harassment and thus never belonged on the U.S. Supreme Court in the first fucking place; I always have believed Anita Hill. [And, of course, Thomas’ baby-boomer cow of a wife’s meddling in the 2020 presidential election, which should land her behind bars along with the dozens of other traitors who illegally and treasonously tried to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results, alone makes Thomas an illegitimate Supreme Court “justice” — and a prime candidate for impeachment and removal. Thomas bemoans that the American people don’t trust “our” institutions anymore, but look what the hypocritical piece of dog shit Thomas has done: he probably committed pre-disqualifying sexual harassment, he apparently has allowed his wife to try to change the outcome of a presidential election, and he helped to kill Roe vs. Wade — and now he wants to deprive Americans of even the right to use contraception and to have sex with or marry a member of their same sex, although, of course, he’ll keep the right to have a mixed-race marriage intact, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because, being the typical baby-boomer asshole [redundant] that he is, he wants to retain his own rights while cavalierly destroying others’ rights.])

So that’s how we got to where we are today in the United States of America: the tyranny of the minority over the majority. Even though the clear majority of Americans support Roe vs. Wade, which had been settled law for almost five decades, the minority once again has acted against the majority.

Again, the American people had spoken: In 2000 and in 2016, the majorities of them — of us — voted for the Democratic candidate for president. Instead, because of the anti-democratic, obsolete Electoral College, the minority prevailed, and imposed on the American people were two Repugnican “presidents” for whom the majority of us did not vote, and these two fascist “presidents” put five fascists on the U.S. Supreme Court.

This, along with the blatant, bad-faith theft of President Obama’s third pick to the Supreme Court, is how the minority took over the Supreme Court — by 6-3, no less.

While I’d never rule out violent revolution by the majority against the tyrannical minority — if the minority dares to treasonously and anti-democratically tyrannize the majority, the tyrannical minority deserves whatever the fuck it gets — there are some ways that we, the majority of the American people, can take our nation back from the minority, even within our corrupt system of so-called “democracy,” including:

• We need to abolish the Electoral College. The popular vote alone should decide who gets to sit in the Oval Office inside of the White House. It’s supposed to be one person, one vote, but the Electoral College gives the minority in the red states significantly more say in the presidency than their actual population does. This blatantly anti-democratic bullshit must stop.
• We need to get enough U.S. senators to abolish the filibuster so that the U.S. Senate can enlarge — yes, pack, if you will — the U.S. Supreme Court. The number of justices on the Supreme Court is set by the U.S. Congress, not by the U.S. Constitution, so if the Democrats were in control of the U.S. House of Representatives and were in control of the U.S. Senate (and eliminated the filibuster, if necessary, which they could do on a simple majority vote, as the filibuster of course also isn’t in the U.S. Constitution, but is an obsolete, anti-democratic Senate rule, much like the Electoral College is obsolete and anti-democratic), they could add as many Supreme Court seats as they pleased (again, the Constitution fully allows this). After how the Repugnicans brazenly stole seats on the nation’s highest court, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. A situation in which only one side of the divide plays by any rules or norms at all is not tenable.
• We need to radically reform the U.S. Senate, and this would be significantly more difficult than abolishing the Electoral College or finally killing the filibuster or expanding/packing the U.S. Supreme Court. The fact that no matter how tiny its population is each state gets two U.S. senators — while no matter how huge its population is, each states gets only two U.S. senators — clearly is anti-democratic. An analysis by Vox’s Ian Millhiser in November 2020 found that in the current 50-50 U.S. Senate, “the Democratic half [represents] 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.” This anti-democratic situation no longer is tenable, and off of the top of my head, I’d start with this suggestion: Change the U.S. Constitution so that each state does not get two (and only two) U.S. senators, but, instead, each state gets from one to three U.S. senators, based upon its population, much how the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that each state gets is determined by its population. We could keep it at 100 U.S. senators, but reapportion the number of senators based upon the states’ population (again, with one, two or three senators, based on the state’s population).* If it were necessary, I’d be OK with adding seats to the U.S. Senate (100 senators is an arbitrary number), but in any case, each state getting two senators each regardless of its population must end. Of course, the red states wouldn’t vote to change the U.S. Constitution to give them less representation in the U.S. Senate, even if their current level of representation is unfair (and it is blatantly unfair). It might be that only a civil war — a great fucking reset — could reform the U.S. Senate so that the minority doesn’t get to continue to tyrannize the majority in a so-called “democracy.”

Yes, that’s pretty much where I am: I’m OK with a second U.S. civil war at this point. The treasonous right wing has brought it on by insisting on running roughshod over the majority of us Americans who disagree with their politics and their (theo)fascist “vision” for the United States of America. We Americans don’t even get to vote for U.S. president, for fuck’s sake, not when the Electoral College simply hands the presidency to the fucking loser of the popular vote.

Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the name of today’s dazzlingly overreaching U.S. Supreme Court decision, in which the minority yet once again has tyrannized the majority — very well might prove to have been the most proximate salvo fired in the Second American Civil War.

P.S. More to the point of the majority-illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court ruling that each state may decide whether or not a woman may control her own uterus, while I’m not a woman and so of course won’t ever need an abortion, and while I live in a state that has codified abortion rights into state law, the rolling back of anyone’s rights — perhaps especially by unelected theocrats wishing to impose their backasswards religious beliefs on the rest of us — is disturbing, and, of course, if it’s open season on others’ rights, your rights might be on the chopping block next. (And, of course, the Dobbs ruling might be just the intended first step in the theofascist-controlled U.S. Supreme Court ruling that no state may allow any abortion at all.)

I’m hoping that Dobbs inspires us, the majority, to finally take our nation back from the tyrannical minority — bloodlessly, if possible, but bloodfully, if necessary.

—

*Even if my plan to change the system so that each state gets one to three U.S. senators based on its population were enacted, the smallest states still would be overrepresented in the U.S. Senate based on their population, but this still would be a move in the right — that is, the actually democratic — direction.

Gavin Newsom is looking quite safe

Associated Press news photo

Gavin Newsom and his wife celebrate his crushing 62-percent-to-38-percent victory in the California gubernatorial election of November 2018. This celebratory scene most likely will be repeated the night of September 14, when the majority of the state’s voters are expected to affirm that they want to keep Newsom, who still is in his first term, in office.

With the bullshit gubernatorial recall Repugnican-vanity-project do-over election just eight days away, California Gov. Gavin Newsom very much appears to not have to worry about having to pack up his office anytime soon.

The latest Public Policy Institute of California poll has Newsom keeping his job handily, with 58 percent of likely California voters saying they want to keep Newsom in his job, and only 39 percent of them saying they want to boot him.

And since vote-by-mail ballots under state law automatically were sent to more than 22 million registered voters beginning August 16, the ballot return rate of more than 5.7 million ballots thus far has been more than 2:1 Democratic:Repugnican — which is in line with the voter-registration composition of California, which is about 2:1 Democratic:Repugnican.

Obviously, Democrats are voting, are not sitting out this stupid, colossal-waste-of-taxpayers’-money election (as the pundits for a while had predicted very well might be the case), perhaps especially since they’ve all been mailed a ballot. (Repugnicans hate voting by mail only because it makes it easier for the “wrong” people to vote, of course. If you want to vote for a Democrat, at the minimum, you should have to crawl for at least a mile under razor wire among shards of glass and fire ants, you see — while being shot at by a firing squad.)

Further, according to the aforementioned PPIC poll, a higher percentage of even Repugnicans are voting to keep Newsom than the percentage of Democrats who are voting to boot him — only 7 percent of the Democrats polled by the PPIC said they’d cross over to vote to oust Newsom, whereas 17 percent of the Repugnicans said they’d cross over to vote to keep him.

(Independent/”no-party-preference” voters were almost evenly split, with 49 percent saying they’d vote to retain Newsom and 44 percent saying they’d vote to eject him, so it looks like Newsom probably will get some net help from the state’s independents, who overall lean toward the Democrats.)

While I don’t see the final, official vote tally putting Newsom at the PPIC poll’s 58 percent, which is only four percentage points away from what he garnered in November 2018 (a whopping 62 percent of the vote), I expect him to keep his job with probably around 54 percent, maybe around 56 percent of the vote.

Indeed, fivethirtyeight.com’s average of recent polls has Newsom winning the September 14 do-over election with 53 percent, which I surmise is close to what the final election result will be.

Still, all that Newsom has to get is a simple majority and he keeps his job, and those who are putting their money where their mouths are at PredictIt.org right now are betting 86 cents that Newsom will keep his job — to 14 cents that he’ll lose it.

Still, fully expect the Repugnicans, a bunch of fucking zombie-sheep if ever there ever were any, to claim, way, way beyond ludicrously, that no, right-wing nut job Larry Elder actually won the recall election, despite the fact that California’s voter registration favors Democrats over Repugnicans by about two to fucking one, and despite the fact that Elder’s cray-cray political positions — such as (not in any certain order) his opposition even to any minimum wage at all, his opposition to the government making public-health rules to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (even though the pandemic at this point is killing mostly anti-vax wingnuts, a.k.a. the Repugnican Party’s base), his desire to turn our public schools into private profiteering centers, and his (timely…) belief that the states should be able to determine whether a not a woman has the right to choose — are wildly out of step with the political positions of the crystal-clear majority of the state’s voters.

These traitors don’t flinch about blatantly lying about “election fraud” and “stolen elections” because they’re perfectly fine with rule by the minority, which, of course, is not democracy, but which is tyranny — as we also see primarily with their continued steadfast support for former fascist “President” Pussygrabber, who lost the popular vote not once, but twice (by almost 3 million votes in 2016 and by just more than 7 million votes in 2020), yet these mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, MAGA-cap-wearing, COVID-19-vaccine-refusing fascist traitors still talk insanely about Pussygrabber’s pending “reinstatement” as “president” — democracy (those 7 million more votes for Joe Biden than for Pussygrabber) be damned.

It is vital that we sane, actually patriotic Americans — you know, actually patriotic because we actually want as many eligible voters to vote as possible, and because we believe in honoring election results instead of treasonously lying pathologically about “election fraud” when we cannot win fairly and squarely at the ballot box — hold the line.

There are millions of rabid traitors out there who are perfectly fine with installing their fascist “leaders” who have only minority support, like Pussygrabber and Larry Elder — no matter how the majority of us vote.

P.S. To be sure, a huge chunk of those voting to keep Newsom in office aren’t totally in love with him, but really, really don’t want a Repugnican as governor. (This certainly has been my case.)

This political dynamic hasn’t changed, I surmise, since the 2020 presidential election, in which, I surmise, hatred for “President” Pussygrabber was stronger than was the love for Joe Biden, but nonetheless, that hatred for the unelected, fascist Pussygrabber — who always was more like a lame-ass mob boss than anything like a United States president — was enough to give Biden the win.

Similarly, I surmise that the majority of those who are voting to keep Newsom are only lukewarm on him — but nonetheless strongly prefer him to the frontrunner on the other side, Repugnican-fascist Larry Elder.

Further, while the Repugnicans of course want to pin all of California’s problems on Newsom, most of the state’s voters aren’t nearly as fucktarded as is the typical Repugnican voter, and they realize that no one individual in the nation’s most populous state is primarily responsible for the state’s problems, and that much (if not most) is out of the control of the state’s governor, whoever that is.

California’s next governor might take office with a minority of the vote — but wouldn’t be governor for very long

Fascist-Repugnican talk-radio host Larry Elder, shown with his buddy former “President” Pussygrabber in a Tweet that Elder posted himself in July 2018 (and again in October 2020), just might become California’s next governor in the September 14 gubernatorial recall election with millions of fewer votes than the number of votes for current Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep his job — but there’s no way in hell that Elder could win election outright in November 2022, which he’d have to do in order to keep the job.

Having lived here in California since September 1998, I think that I’m qualified to state that with each passing year, I’ve agreed more and more with the assertion that the nation’s most populous state inherently is ungovernable.

Nonetheless, the nation’s most populous state has a governor, and soon, the right-wing nut-job minority of the state might be handed the reins of governance.

California has a gubernatorial recall election — the second one since I’ve lived here — on September 14, and, as two law professors correctly and importantly pointed out a few days ago in a piece in The New York Times, we could see the scenario in which current California Gov. Gavin Newsom loses his job by falling just short of the 50.0 percent of the vote plus one vote that he needs to keep his job. Yet thus far, only 18 percent is the highest that I’ve seen for the candidate who is polling the best of the 46 potential gubernatorial replacement candidates who are on the recall ballot.

This means that even if, say, 49.9 percent of the state’s voters elect to keep Newsom in place, a much smaller amount of voters (say, only around 18 percent of them…) could override the wishes of the much higher amount of voters who essentially had voted for Newsom — and put right-wing nut-job talk-radio host (of course…) Larry Elder (the aforementioned front-runner for Newsom’s job, according to the polling) in the governorship.

This is the dream scenario for the increasingly fascist, increasingly authoritarian, increasingly anti-democratic Repugnican Party: rule over the majority by the minority. (Indeed, we saw this in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote yet loser George W. Bush became “president,” and in 2016, when Billary Clinton won the popular vote, yet loser Pussygrabber became “president.”)

Politico reports on this issue: “‘The [recall-election] ballots are out, so I don’t think a judge is going to unwind this [election],’ said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School. A [law]suit could be more ripe after the election, she said, if it turns out that Newsom loses but receives more votes than the winner of the recall.”

Indeed, that’s exactly what should happen if a “new” “governor” is put into place by a smaller number of voters than the number of voters who voted to keep Newsom: it should be challenged in court as unconstitutional, violating the democratic principle that the candidate who wins the higher number of votes is the one who wins the election (any other outcome is blatantly anti-democratic, and yes, for that reason, the antiquated, blatantly anti-democratic Electoral College must go, too).

In the meantime, California’s recall process needs to be fixed so that the will of the higher number of voters always fucking prevails. (Even just requiring a run-off election — instead of allowing a candidate with a small plurality of the vote to become governor — would be an improvement in California’s recall process.) This is, after all, supposedly, a democracy.

Of course, even if fascist-Repugnican Larry Elder becomes the next governor — and his lovely political stances include opposing a minimum wage, opposing the right to an abortion, opposing the idea that there is systemic racism in the United States, and, of course, being a fucking homophobe — he very most likely wouldn’t be governor for very long, and in the quite foreseeable future we even could see the return of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Why?

Because if Newsom is recalled, that doesn’t mean that he could not run for governor again, even in the next cycle, which is next year; he could if he wanted to. And regardless of who wins the September 14 gubernatorial recall election, whoever wants to be governor as of January 2023 must run in the regularly scheduled June 2022 gubernatorial primary election and be one of the top-two vote-getters in that primary election to be able to move on to the November 2022 gubernatorial general election — and then must win that election, too.

I don’t see any Repugnican doing that, not in a state whose voters are 46.5 percent Democratic to only 24 percent Repugnican at last count. Indeed, so deep blue is California that Newsom won election in 2018 by 62 percent to his pathetic Repugnican challenger’s 38 percent, and Joe Biden won California by 63.5 percent to Pussygrabber’s 34 percent.

Despite these daunting numbers, however, fully expect the fascist-Repugnicans to claim that if Newsom keeps his job, as he probably will, it was only because of “election fraud.” (An election is legitimate only if the fascist “wins,” you see; that is a central tenet of fascism, as we’ve seen played out as Pussygrabber & Co. still fascistically, treasonously and anti-democratically claim that Pussygrabber actually won the 2020 presidential election despite having lost it by more than 7 million votes.)

Newsom could lose his job in next month’s recall election, though; for quite a while now California’s voters have been run through the fucking wringer, as California experiences perhaps an unprecedented number of big problems all at the same time, including wildfires (mostly in the northern part of the state, along with Oregon), recurring drought, a serious lack of affordable housing and rampant homelessness* and, of course, probably first and foremost in most voters’ minds, the never-ending novel coronavirus pandemic that probably would have been over by now had the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, MAGA-cap-wearing fucktards** not have tried to turn efforts to beat the pandemic (such as by the use of the three available vaccines and the use of face masks) into some backasswards tribal, political statement.

I mean, it’s ironic that the Repugnicans help to create the problem, such as the wholly unnecessary and wholly preventable extension of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then seek to benefit politically from the problem that they helped create, but we’ve seen this page from the fascist’s playbook before, such as with the Reichstag fire (and even with the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, in which Repugnican Arnold “Baby Daddy” Schwarzenegger had had a secret meeting with Enron — and then used Enron’s raping of the state via a manufactured electricity crisis to get himself into the governorship in that recall election).

Whatever California’s big problems are now, however, under a fascist-Repugnican like Larry Elder (who wholeheartedly supports former “President” Pussygrabber, of course), the state would get even worse.

Therefore, of course I’ll be voting “NO” on Gavin Newsom’s recall, probably within the week (I should receive my vote-by-mail ballot within the next few days and probably will mail it back within a day or two).

I’m not wild about Gavin Newsom — I’m a “Bernie bro,” not a Democratic Party hack (indeed, I’m registered as an independent because I have real fucking problems with the pro-corporate, income-inequality-loving-but-nauseatingly-“woke” Democratic Party establishment) — but right now Newsom (for whom I did vote in November 2018) is our best bet to be at the helm of the nation’s most populous state (which, because it has the highest number of people, of course should have the highest number of problems…).

If we Californians think that we have it bad now, all that we need to do is to allow a Repugnican to take the reins — even if for only a relatively short period of time.

—

*California has only about 12 percent of the nation’s population, yet has about a quarter of the nation’s homeless. The fascist-Repugnicans like to say that this is because California is an inherently failed state, but no, clearly, homeless people are coming to California from other (I surmise mostly red) states, knowing that much if not most of California not only has a more favorable climate that do most other states, but that California isn’t nearly as mean-spirited toward the homeless as most other (supposedly “Christian”) states are.

**Indeed, it seems to me that Afghanistan right now is being overrun by its own type of teatard/Pussygrabber-loving/Q-Anon/anti-vax animals. Indeed, the only difference between the members of the Taliban (“Islamofascists”) and the “Christo”fascists here in the United States is the content of their backasswards religious beliefs. Otherwise, they’re remarkably similar, including their hatred of democracy, science, logic, reason, human rights, actual religious freedom, etc.

DINOs Manchin and Sinema have to go

Democrat in name only U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin says that not only does he oppose eliminating the anti-democratic filibuster, which ludicrously requires a super-majority vote of 60 for anything to pass the U.S. Senate, but that he also opposes the For the People Act, which would combat voter suppression, because it is too “partisan” and we musn’t piss off the Repugnicans (such as by actually allowing people to vote).

Yes, the Repugnican Party wants only Repugnicans to vote; the Repugnican Party targets its voter suppression tactics (mostly in the form of anti-Democratic-voter state laws) to help itself and to harm the Democratic Party. That’s pretty fucking partisan.

The Democratic Party wants to make voting as accessible as possible for those who are eligible to vote. (There is no such fucking thing as widespread “voter fraud.” This is not a matter of opinion; it is a well-established, case-closed matter of fucking fact. There is widespread “voter fraud” just like treasonous, felonious former “President” Pussygrabber actually won the 2020 presidential election — bigly.)

The difference between the two parties’ approaches to voting rights is that the Repugnican Party clearly intends to feather its own political nest by doing its best to determine who can and who cannot cast a ballot, whereas under the Democratic Party plan to tackle voter suppression and facilitate voting, every voter of every partisan affiliation may cast a ballot without unconstitutional, anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) — and mean-spirited — hurdles. That is true bipartisanship.

Joe Manchin is against this, however, and feels the need to make the “case” for the Repugnican Party that the Democratic Party’s vision of voting rights is too “partisan” — and thus “divisive.” (Because the Repugnican Party isn’t at all divisive!)

Democrat in name only U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a real fucking over-privileged princess whose adolescent antics make me want to vomit, couldn’t be bothered to vote on the creation of a commission to study the treasonous January 6 attack upon the U.S. Capitol. (She claims some conveniently unspecified personal emergency, but probably the princess — who curtsied like a punk-ass teenager, replete with schoolgirl uniform and backpack, while she literally voted thumbs-down against a federal $15 minimum wage — wanted to go shopping instead.)

Of course Sinema, like her fellow fucktard Manchin, loves the filibuster, and, with Manchin, is determined to see to it that the Repugnican Party, at least via the filibuster, blocks every significant advancement that the Democrats could make while they still control both houses of Congress.

Sinema and Manchin need to leave the Democratic Party and become the Repugnicans that they are.

But no, I don’t expect either Manchin or Sinema to change their ways (including officially becoming the Repugnicans that they already are), or to voluntarily stop inflicting us, the majority of the American people who voted for Joe Biden for president and who voted in a Democratic-majority Congress, with their love for the Repugnican Party. Their lack of character, morality and intelligence appears to be deeply entrenched, as is their anti-democratic — and anti-Democratic — sentiment.

We need to primary the holy living fuck out of both Sinema and Manchin. My guess is that it would be significantly easier to topple Sinema than Manchin in a primary* (both DINOs are up for re-election in 2024), but we won’t know until we try.

But trying to rid ourselves of the traitors Sinema and Manchin in their next primary election isn’t enough — and might be too little too late; in November 2022 we need to expand the number of Democratic seats in the U.S. Senate so that a progressive, pro-democratic agenda can pass with or without their sorry treasonous, self-serving, obstructionist asses.

I, for one, will continue to donate to progressive candidates who have a good shot at winning U.S. Senate primary elections next year, such as John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, to whom I’ve already given several small donations.

It’s rare that the Democratic Party has the trifecta of controlling the White House and both houses of Congress. The stars don’t align like this often, and they don’t stay aligned like this for a long time.

It is unconscionable that the likes of Manchin and Sinema believe that they can sabotage their own party — and their own nation — without paying a serious price.

—

*Former “President” Pussygrabber lost Sinema’s state of Arizona in November 2020 (but by only 0.3 percent, admittedly), while he overwhelmingly won Manchin’s even more backasswards state of West Virginia (by about 39 percentage points). It seems to me that someone to the left of Sinema (and it wouldn’t be hard to be to the left of her) could have a decent shot in Arizona in 2024, whereas West Virginia appears to be a lost cause, but it still might be worth a try.

With treason against the American people, it’s the thought that counts

AFP news photo

Rank traitors like this one should be executed for their treason. Instead, they’ll be allowed to remain in Congress, where their treason will continue to poison the nation.

This indeed is what the Repugnican Party has come to: Repugnican U.S. “Rep.” Louie Gohmert (of Texas, of course) sued in federal court for “Vice President” Mike Pence this coming Wednesday to be able to simply invalidate, on his own, the results of the Electoral College vote that took place in each of the 50 states on December 14.

So we, the American people, vote for president. Our popular vote doesn’t count, not wholly, because our popular vote is then quite imperfectly translated into “electoral votes” via the Electoral College, which should have been abolished long ago.

This is how although Pussygrabber lost the popular vote in November 2016 by almost 3 million votes, he still became “president”: he won the Electoral College. (Ditto for George W. Bush in 2000; he lost the popular vote but “won” the Electoral College. Indeed, since 1992, the Repugnican candidate for president won the popular vote exactly one time, in 2004 [as suspect as the presidential vote in Ohio was in 2004]. Marinate in that fact for a little while.)

This is bad enough, that the popular vote might not actually pick the fucking winner of the fucking presidential election, but many in the anti-democratic, treasonous, fascistic, authoritarian, far-right-wing (all redundant) Repugnican Party don’t think that even the Electoral College fucks over us, the people, nearly enough.

No, you see, even when the Repugnican candidate for president loses the Electoral College, as Pussygrabber did on November 3 — by 74 electoral votes (certified on December 14, when the members of the Electoral College met in each state’s capital to cast their votes) — the vice president (in this case, very conveniently a Repugnican) should be able to simply declare, while presenting the results of the Electoral College vote to Congress (as “Vice President” Pence is to do on Wednesday), that no, the Repugnican candidate for “re”-election as president didn’t lose by 74 electoral votes, but actually won the majority of the electoral votes.

It’s that simple: A simple declaration by the assuredly non-partisan and impartial “vice president” that the “presidential” candidate of his own party actually won the presidential election — thereby also giving himself another four years in office against the vote of the Electoral College — is enough to simply reverse the will of the clear majority of the American people. (It’s so cute that you voted for president and vice president, commoner! However, we’ll take it from here, fuck you very much!)

Gohmert, besides being an abject fucktard — really, it seems to me that he should have literally imploded by now due to his incredible level of fucktardation — is a fucking traitor. Because of his treason, minimally he should be booted from Congress for having violated his oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and to the American people. I wholeheartedly mean that.

In criminal law, there is the concept of “conspiracy”: You don’t have to be successful in carrying out your criminal act (in this case, rank treason); you only have to have tried. Gohmert tried.

Of course a federal judge threw out Gohmert’s batshit-crazy lawsuit, but Gohmert certainly isn’t the only traitor in Congress. Every Repugnican “senator” and “representative” who votes to invalidate any state’s presidential election results on Wednesday is a fucking traitor.

Why?

Because Team Pussygrabber filed lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit to “prove” that several states’ election results were actually “fraudulent,” and that Pussygrabber actually won those states.

In a court of law, you actually have to present evidence and proof of your allegations of wrongdoing before you can be awarded the “relief” that you seek (who knew?). Team Pussygrabber, with all of its legal resources, failed miserably to do that — because they have no evidence, no proof whatsofuckingever, of any widespread “fraud” that cost Pussygrabber any state.

Wikipedia notes:

After the 2020 United States presidential election, the campaign for incumbent President Donald Trump and others filed 60 lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in multiple states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Nearly all the suits were dismissed or dropped due to lack of evidence; judges, lawyers, and other observers described the suits as “frivolous” and “without merit.”

Trump, his attorneys, and his supporters falsely asserted widespread election fraud in public statements, though few such assertions were made in court. …

Apparently even Pussygrabber & Co.’s lawyers didn’t want to jeopardize their law licenses by blatantly lying to a court of law, you see.

The results of the 2020 presidential election already have been litigated to death — literally (as in the lawsuits died).

Therefore, there is no good-faith basis for any Repugnican “senator” or “representative” to vote to object to any state’s electoral vote count on Wednesday.

I get it: These are fucking fascists who are trying to feather their political nests for future elections. They want their mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, relative-fucking, MAGA-cap-wearing voters to know that they did their best to overturn the presidential election in which more than 7 million more Americans voted for Joe Biden than for the “incumbent” Pussygrabber.

Regardless of whether it’s a political stunt or not, Louie Gohmert is a fucking traitor. So is any member of Congress who votes to invalidate any state’s Electoral College results on Wednesday.

These traitors won’t succeed in treasonously overturning the will of the clear majority of the American voters as they clearly expressed in the presidential election of 2020.

A majority of the members of both the Senate and the House would have to vote to reject any state’s Electoral College results. With the House controlled by the Democrats, of course that won’t happen.

But we must shudder to think what the outcome might have been if the House were controlled by the Repugnicans. A Repugnican-controlled Congress overturning the presidential election results in their party’s favor probably would have started the second American Civil War — no exaggeration.

I know that I would have resorted to any means necessary had the Congressional Repugnicans simply outright treasonously, tyrannically stolen a presidential election that they in fact had lost by a sizeable margin. Because the alternative to that would be to simply allow a Repugnican dictatorship, and that is not a fucking option.

But, again, that a conspiracy doesn’t come to fruition doesn’t make it any less of a crime.

With the crime of treason, it’s the thought that counts, and we already have many of these traitors — including at least a dozen Repugnican “senators” on record and at reportedly at least 140 Repugnican “representatives” — intending to treasonously try to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election on Wednesday.

(Some of them passively aggressively claim that they’re not actually trying to reverse the presidential election results, because even they know that that is treasonous, but that is bullshit; simply saying that you’re not actually doing exactly what you self-evidently are actually doing is no fucking defense.)

Those who commit conspiracy to commit treason — all of them — should, minimally, be booted from public office and be banned from all future public office (even local public office), even though in my book, execution is the appropriate punishment for treason against the entire fucking nation; and if trying to overturn the will of the American voters as clearly expressed in a presidential election isn’t treason, then I don’t know what the fuck is.

Something wonderful just might rise from the ashes of the United States

“President” Pussygrabber opposes the people who oppose neo-Nazism because he’s a fucking neo-Nazi himself. Our fascist overlords are paper tigers, however; because they are parasites on the rest of us, all that we have to do is rise up, refuse to allow them continue to suck our lifeblood, and they’ll fall like the house of cards that they are. They know this, and it terrifies the shit out of them that the game might, this time, finally, be up.

The looting and vandalism that has taken place in numerous Americans cities over the past several days — including my own — at first blush probably looks to many if not even most Americans as pretty senseless.

It would appear, superficially at least, that there is no logical line from the cruel, slow murder by cop of George Floyd in Minneapolis last Monday to the looting and vandalism of (mostly) small and larger businesses throughout the nation, but the line is there.

You just have to flush out all of the dust from your eyes that the capitalists put there with years and years and years of their profits-and-property-over- people propaganda, aided and abetted not only by the corporately owned and controlled “news” media doing the bidding of the corporations and of the corporatocrats, but also by our corporately owned and controlled elected (and “elected”) officials, from the local level all the way up to the White House.

Looting and vandalism seem like desperate acts, but the cruel, unjust, dog-eat-dog American socioeconomic system naturally, inevitably produces an awful lot of desperate people.

History suggests that a majority of Americans won’t learn a fucking thing from what’s going on now — the ongoing nationwide novel coronavirus pandemic as well as the nationwide unrest caused by a bad white cop who didn’t cause all of this, but who definitely lit the fuse — and that the American impulse will be to try to sweep all of this unpleasantness under the national rug and pretend that none of this ugliness had ever happened.

I mean, fuck, the coronavirus is still doing its killing, but after not even a full three months of a nationwide shutdown (it’s been more like a slowdown than a complete shutdown, but still), already a huge chunk, if not the majority, of Americans want to pretend that the coronavirus thing is all over already and open up the nation again — which is going to have quite predictable results.

Property destruction in the wake of another murder by cop seems appropriate to me. Maybe in the past I’d have questioned the logic of it, but it is clear to me now.

Why? Because the upper classes constantly give the message to the lower classes* that the property of the former is far more valuable than are the very lives of the latter.

No, the upper crust don’t come out and say that that is their belief, but their words and actions, repeated year after year after year, make it clear that that is their belief nonetheless.

So, if our lives are so expendable and “your” property (which our labor and our common natural resources have made possible in the first place!) is all that you care about, then we’ll go after “your” property, the message of the looting and the vandalism is, whether we are willing to acknowledge that or not.

All of this — the nationwide coronavirus pandemic, the protests that are roiling the nation right now — are identifying for us, starkly, our long-standing national problems, and the solutions are just one step behind our identification of and acknowledgment of the problems.

Ironically, actually solving even our entrenched problems probably isn’t the biggest hurdle — it’s acknowledging them in the first fucking place that is the biggest hurdle, because with such genuine, widespread acknowledgment would follow a radical reordering of the socioeconomic order that those at the top have been doing their best to stave off for generations. They even put a considerable chunk of their fortunes — I say “their” fortunes, but, again, since they stole “their” fortunes from the rest of us, they’re our fortunes — toward maintaining their unfair socioeconomic and political advantage.

(These plutocrats and oligarchs pour billions of dollars into pro-corporate propaganda that’s pumped to us masses en masse every fucking day, and they give billions of dollars to corrupt elected officials who are supposed to do the bidding of the people but who instead do the bidding of their highest corporate bidders.

And, of course, the plutocrats and the oligarchs spend quite a lot of money [again, our money, since they stole it from us by reaping the benefits of our labor while we try to survive from paycheck to paycheck] on personal security [including having the “people’s” cops and the “people’s” military in their own rich, right-wing pockets] and ensuring that in their day-to-day activities they have as absolutely little actual contact with us dalits as possible.)

You know that the recent nationwide protests are working, because “President” Pussygrabber, the Looter in Chief, now proclaims that he is deeming antifa a “terrorist organization.”**

Clearly, this would be just the first step in the unhinged, fascist “president” declaring all of his political detractors to be “terrorists” when he and his right-wing, fascist ilk, of course, are the actual terrorists, just as they are the actual looters.

And, of course, our “president” opposes an anti-fascist group only because he’s a fucking fascist himself.

Hitler and his supporters did all that they could do eliminate their domestic political opposition, too, before they expanded their reign of terror.

We’ve seen this playbook before.

It’s up to us to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself this time. American fascism must be stopped in its tracks.

It probably will get ugly, but what emerges from the ashes just might be wonderful.

That’s why I still say: Let it burn.

P.S. I would be remiss if I did not note that the pro-corporate Democratic Party establishment is guilty as sin, too, of course.

The people — you know, we dalits — had hope in actual Democrat (that is, the actually progressive) Bernie Sanders actually becoming president and helping to turn the Titanic around, but the pro-corporate Democratic Party establishment hacks, always only ever looking out for themselves like the fucking traitors that they are, made damn sure that they torpedoed Bernie (by coalescing right before Super Tuesday) — and they gave us, in Bernie’s stead, the utterly uninspiring corporate whore Joe Biden, who barely can speak a coherent sentence (but who at least by now, hopefully, finally at least has learned to keep his nasty hands to himself).

We, the people, were just supposed to sit down and shut up about the fact that the party that is supposed to stand for the people fucked us, the people, over yet once again, like Lucy with the football on crack.

This time, we, the people, are not just sitting down and shutting up like the good little sheep that we’re supposed to be.

—

*To be clear, by “class” here I mean strictly income level and the level of possession of wealth, not the level of one’s character.

Most wealthy Americans are of low character — it disturbs them not that their excess comes at the expense of those who don’t have the basic necessities of life — and many if not most Americans who are struggling to get by are of high character (because if nothing else, they — we — should have brought out the guillotines a long, long time ago, but we have yet to do so).

**As with most of the vile things that “our” vile “president” threatens to do, he does not have the legal authority to unilaterally designate entire swaths of American citizens as “terrorists.” Politico notes today:

President Donald Trump tweeted [today] that the U.S. government would be “designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”

There were just two problems with that. First, he doesn’t appear to have the legal authority to do so. And second, it’s by no means clear the loosely defined group of radical activists is an organization at all.

The Trump administration’s push to crack down on antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — comes as large and small businesses in a host of American cities were looted and vandalized as people protested the death of a black man, George Floyd, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.

The president and his top officials, including Attorney General Bill Barr and national security adviser Robert O’Brien, have blamed antifa for violence and property damage. In an on-camera statement Saturday, Barr said the Justice Department wouldn’t hesitate to prosecute people who crossed state lines to participate in violence, citing his authorities under anti-riot legislation.

Barr did not invoke laws against terrorism, which do not let the U.S. government designate purely homegrown groups as terrorist organizations.

Under current law, the State Department can designate foreign organizations as terrorist groups. But the U.S. has no domestic terrorism statute, and the FBI uses other legal authorities to prosecute domestic terrorism here. … [Emphasis mine.]

This is why you don’t “elect” as “president” an abject fucking retard who has not held high office before, at least as the governor of a state, as a U.S. senator or as vice president.

Pussygrabber clearly has no idea of — and certainly has no respect for — what the U.S. Constitution allows and disallows him to do. Had he had any experience in high elected office before, he might fucking know something about the constitutionally instituted limitations on the power of any U.S. official, including, and probably especially, the president.

Instead, Pussygrabber has treated the presidency as just an extension of his corporate kingdom, over which he is the undisputed and absolute monarch.

The United States of America is not a fucking monarchy and we’ll never allow it to become one.

If Mad King Pussygrabber knew his very basic U.S. history, he would know that much.

The inevitable impeachment is great news — and no, Bernie isn’t Jeremy

No, Bernie Sanders does not equal Jeremy Corbyn. For starters, while Corbyn is much more unpopular in the United Kingdom than is Boris Johnson, Bernie Sanders is much more popular in the United States than is “President” Pussygrabber.

I’ve long supported the impeachment of “President” Pussygrabber. He’s not our president; not only was he not elected by the most voters, but he is a mob boss. He simply has continued his life-long criminality into the White House, and to his long list of crimes we can add treason. Plenty of treason.*

That said, I’ve also always known that the Repugnican traitors (redundant) in the U.S. Senate never would remove a member of their own wingnutty party, pretty much no matter what he’d done.

Still, impeachment is necessary if we give a flying fuck about such trifles as the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

I’ve only sporadically listened to the live coverage of the House impeachment hearings via NPR. I never felt that I needed to attend to every detail, as Pussygrabber is, of course, as guilty as sin — the transcript of his infamous, treasonous, quid-pro-quo July phone call with the Ukrainian president that the White House itself publicly released amply shows that, and that’s only one of his many crimes — and as the Repugnican-controlled Senate won’t remove him, no matter what.

Listening to Pussygrabber’s Repugnican buttboys (perhaps most prominently Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Reps. Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz) lie for him like pathological liars on crack, however, has been interesting. It’s been a veritable gaslighting marathon: What you have seen with your own eyes and what you have heard with your own ears? You’re wrong! Let us tell you what you have seen and heard!

The Repugnicans will get their short-term “victory” — Pussygrabber won’t be removed from the Oval Office before January 2021, when, very hopefully, the American voters will have done the job — but one does have to wonder what the Repugnican Party’s pathological lying in pursuit of defending a treasonous, uber-corrupt “president” will do for it in the long term.

And of course when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party did not win the UK election this past week, U.S. “pundits” were quick to say that of course this means that no progressive (that is, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren) possibly could win the U.S. presidency in November 2020.

Except that this isn’t the UK.

There are philosophical and political parallels between the Labour Party and the Democratic Party and the Conservative Party and the Repugnican Party, of course, but we’re talking about two separate nations with different histories that are separated by a wide fucking ocean.

The United States is not in the midst of anything like a “Brexit,” and while Jeremy Corbyn is pretty fucking unpopular — Boris Johnson has a negative favorability rating in most polls, but Corbyn’s negative favorability rating in most polls is much higher** — comparing him to Bernie (or to Warren) is incredibly sloppy at best.

There has been socialism in Europe, but never has there been socialism in the United States (with the exception, perhaps, of some Native American societies). The historical contexts of the two nations are quite different; Americans cannot point to socialism ever actually having failed in the United States because we’ve never actually even had socialism.

And Bernie Sanders — and all of the top-tier candidates for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination — are significantly more popular than is Pussygrabber. Here is a graph from a fivethirtyeight.com piece from just yesterday:

“Trump remains really unpopular — far more than any of the leading Democratic presidential candidates,” notes fivethirtyeight.com, adding:

But Democrats’ net favorability ratings have taken a hit. As you can see in the chart above, even though Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg are nowhere near as unpopular as Trump, their net favorability ratings have trended downward recently.

This isn’t totally surprising, though, as my colleague Geoffrey Skelley noted a few weeks ago: Many presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings have been negative or close to zero since at least 2008, a sign, perhaps, of the polarized times we live in.

Of course, there is still time for public perception to change (in either direction) between now and November. But if the polls are any indication, opinions of the Democratic candidates seem much more likely to shift than opinions of Trump. That might be because people’s opinions of the Democratic candidates aren’t nearly as entrenched. …

Again, Corbyn is much more unpopular than is Johnson. As elections still so often amount to popularity contests rather than contests of ideas, that is no tiny detail. (Thankfully, Corbyn is stepping down as the leader of the Labour Party.***)

In the U.S., it is the opposite: the top four Democratic presidential candidates all have significantly higher favorability ratings than does Pussygrabber.

And, again, not only has the post-colonial U.S. never been socialist, but a President Sanders (I love the sound of that!) of course very probably could not usher in a socialist utopia.

If he had both houses of Congress in his party’s control, President Sanders could make some significant improvements in the average American’s life — our Americans’ biggest enemies, after all, are not each other or other nations, but are the treasonous corporations that attack us from within — but within the next few decades we are likely to see, at best and at most, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, in which basic human needs (medical care, food, water, shelter, education, etc.) are covered by a socialist system while capitalism continues its dominance over pretty much everything else.

But, of course, those who protect the status quo — because they personally benefit from the pro-corporate, anti-individual socioeconomic status quo or because they’re just sheeple who think the way that Faux “News” tells them to think (even if that makes them just like chickens that support Colonel Sanders [no relation to Bernie!]) — want us progressives to give up before the game has even begun.

And one of their “arguments” is that Jeremy Corbyn = Bernie Sanders. Except that that’s complete and utter bullshit.

Where Corbyn failed in the UK, we progressives can prevail here in the United States. We just can’t lie down and allow our enemies to keep walking all over us in perpetuity, as they want us to do.

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*My definition of “treason” is broad, such as dictionary.com’s No. 2 and No. 3 definitions: “a violation of allegiance to one’s sovereign or to one’s state” and “the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.”

**This fact does remind me of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which both Billary Clinton and Pussygrabber were underwater in their favorability ratings. Our “choice” of president was bad (Billary) or even worse (Pussygrabber).

***I haven’t studied Corbyn nearly enough to have a super-informed opinion of him, but clearly, it’s indisputable that he is poison at the ballot box.

And at least we can’t call the ethnically Jewish Bernie Sanders anti-Semitic, as Corbyn has been called, whether he is or not. (Again, I haven’t studied Corbyn much, but the charge of anti-Semitism, whether it is accurate or not, often is bandied about in order to damage one’s political opponent.)

Long past due: IMPEACH THE TRAITOR IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Associated Press news photo

People protest at the White House in 2018. “President” Pussygrabber has avoided impeachment proceedings thus far, but that officially changed today.

Finally we get to the point where the Democrats decide to do their fucking job to protect the republic, its constitution and the rule of law, and its people.

I’ll paraphrase Winston Churchill: The Democrats always do the right thing — after they have run out of all other options. (That quotation apparently is apocryphal, but I love it anyway…)

Of course, the presidential impeachment inquiry formally announced by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi today is in its infancy, and the Democrats still have plenty of time and opportunity to find a way to fuck it up.

Yes, it’s true that as long as the U.S. Senate is controlled by his fellow Repugnican traitors (redundant), “President” Pussygrabber won’t be removed from office because of his treason and other serious crimes. As Pussygrabber might tell you himself, he could eat a newborn baby alive on live television — bite right into its little head like a large, juicy apple — and his Repugnican co-conspirators wouldn’t make a peep.

But regardless of what the slimy, spineless Repugnicans in the U.S. Senate do, the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are mandated by the U.S. Constitution to do their job of investigating the U.S. president for serious crimes of his that come to light. (No, lying about having received a blowjob in the Oral — er, Oval — Office would not rise to the level of a serious crime. Pressuring a foreign government to sink your potential rival in the next election — that would.)

Nor is it a consideration as to whether or not impeaching Pussygrabber might actually help him politically.*

When Bill Clinton was impeached (but not removed from office) in late 1998 and early 1999, it politically helped him and his party — but that was because the impeachment, because it was over a “crime” that didn’t amount to treason or anything else that serious, clearly was a purely partisan, vindictive exercise and a waste of the nation’s time and attention (and taxpayers’ dollars). The case of Pussygrabber is quite different. He’s guilty of treason and other high crimes and he must go.

Pussygrabber apparently was so emboldened by the fact that thus far he’s gotten away with his collusion with Russia to help him “win” the 2016 presidential election that he decided to try to induce a foreign actor to fix the 2020 presidential election for him, too.

This level of presidential malfeasance cannot, must not, be allowed to pass if we, the people, wish to keep the republic that was formed 243 years ago. Otherwise, we turn into just another failed, backwater banana republic (if we’re not already there).

The likes of Pussygrabber doesn’t learn, is not humbled by his mistakes. Pussygrabber is a shameless fucking sociopath, and when he gets away with something, it only makes him want to commit even more high crimes.

Worse for the Democrats than any possibility of an impeachment proceeding actually helping Pussygrabber would be giving Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters the strong message that the Democrats won’t fucking fight for us, the people. Why the fuck should anyone vote Democratic in November 2020 if the Democratic Party refuses to confront one of the greatest evils that ever occupied the White House?

“President” Pussygrabber must be impeached. The U.S. House of Representatives can and must do so.

If the U.S. Senate refuses to do its constitutional duty and remove the traitor in the Oval Office, then we must do our best to get these treasonous co-conspirators out of fucking office as well as take back the presidency — the presidency that never legitimately was Pussygrabber’s in the first place.

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*With an approval rating still averaging no more than in the low 40s, and with the polarized political environment, methinks that Pussygrabber already has all of the support that he’s going to have for November 2020.

I don’t see backlash from an impeachment proceeding helping Pussygrabber nearly enough to help him “win” “re”-election. (Um, if you didn’t win the popular vote, you’re not the legitimate president, in my eyes.)

I do see an impeachment proceeding firing up Democratic voters perhaps like they haven’t been fired up in a long time — not out of partisan acrimony, but out of the sheer ecstasy of the Democratic Party finally living up to its supposed principles in our lifetime.