Finally Friday Reads: The Petty American Minority Runs Amok! Amok! Amok!

John (repeat1968) Buss, 
Damien… er Donald, seems pissed. #TrumpMugShot #TrumpArrest #Omen #PAB #FullDiaper

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

All I can say today is, “We’ve seen the enemy, and he is us!”  The last of the Trump co-conspirators have turned themselves in. Fittingly enough, the last guy was a Lutheran minister and retired California cop.  A Naptha Fire at a Marathon Oil Refinery just west of me is causing schools to close and nearby residents to evacuate.  Fires are now a big thing in Louisiana, and we’re still setting record highs that should have the asterisk next to them since they’ve been super fueled by Climate Change.  Most years, we never see much of the upper 90s, let alone the 100s, but this year oy, such a heat dome!  This election year will deliver a Republican governor to us that’s bound to make things worse.

Maui County’s Power Company is destroying the evidence that could possibly point to their malice in the big fire there. Compromising Evidence seems to be a pastime these days. Oh, and some idiot saw fit to bring Sarah Palin back into the Public dialogue as if she ever had anything intelligent to say. Today, she’s inciting a riot.  Setting fires is what all Republicans are suitable for these days. That idiot was Eric Bolling, by the way.

This is from The Daily Beast. “Sarah Palin Says Civil War Is ‘Going to Happen’ After Trump’s Arrest.” I’ve never seen a political party so willing to say anything that nearly everything is an outright lie, a conspiracy theory, or propaganda.

Sarah Palin responded to Donald Trump’s arrest in Georgia on Thursday night by talking up the possibility of civil war. Speaking to Eric Bolling as the former president was booked at the Fulton County Jail on election interference charges, Palin slammed “those who are conducting this travesty and creating this two-tier system of justice.” “I want to ask them: What the heck?” the former Alaska governor said. “Do you want us to be in civil war? Because that’s what’s going to happen. We’re not going to keep putting up with this.” Addressing Bolling, Palin went on to say: “I like that you suggested that we need to get angry. We do need to rise up and take our country back.”

Trump Supporters in Georgia couldn’t even tell the difference between Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms and current Fulton County District Attorney Fawni Willis. 

Do Trump supporters even know what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis looks like? When former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms appeared at the Fulton County Jail on Thursday, MAGA fans berated her and yelled “Lock her up!”—because they mistook her for Willis. “They thought I was Fani and started chanting at me as well, and just walking through the crowd, there was a lot of hatred out here,” Bottoms told CNN. “Imagine that. A lot of hatred and really bad energy out here, but, you know, this is—when you sign up for public service you don’t get to pick and choose your good days and your bad days.” She went on to say being “subjected to threats” is “part of the job” but added that it’s “a threat to our democracy in and of itself” when people “people don’t serve because they fear for their lives.”

We can’t even have any conversations about policy or strategy differences anymore because the Grand Old Party is full of hypnotoads swaying the opinions of the idiots that watch them.  I watched the entire GOP debate on Wednesday. What a shit show!  I could make so many remarks about misogynoir right now, plus the fact the two women do not look alike, which leads straight down to that old cracker troupe, but hey, there’s more shit to show!

The biggest shit show was the Republican Debates. “The First Republican Presidential Debate Was Rife With Abortion Misinformation. “Abortions on demand,” “born alive abortions” and other fact-free claims were on display at the first GOP debate.”   This is from HuffPo.

The first Republican presidential debate included a lot of fake news about abortion.
At least four of the eight candidates standing on the debate stage on Wednesday night repeated the flagrant lie that people are getting abortions “up until birth.”

“I would love for someone to ask Biden and Kamala Harris: Are they for 38 weeks, are they for 39 weeks, are they for 40 weeks? Because that’s what the media needs to be asking,” said Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, referring to President Joe Biden and his vice president.

“What the Democrats are trying to do on this issue is wrong — to allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis added, before diving into a story about a woman named Penny who allegedly “survived multiple abortion attempts” until her grandmother saved her. So-called “born-alive” anti-abortion legislation ― purportedly meant to protect fetuses that survive botched abortions ― has flooded the country in recent years and become a right-wing talking point even though it has no scientific basis.

Other contenders like Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) fanned the flames around the “abortion up until birth” myth.

“We cannot let states like California, New York and Illinois have abortions on demand up until the day of birth,” Scott said. “That is immoral. It is unethical. It is wrong.”

But it’s downright wrong to suggest that women are getting abortions up until their last days of pregnancy simply because they changed their minds about having a child. To start, abortion later in pregnancy is extremely rare: Less than 1% of abortions occur at 21 weeks or later and the subset of abortions in the third trimester (after 26 weeks) is even smaller.

My OB/GYN, board-certified, Dr Daughter reminds me that anything after 26 weeks isn’t even considered an abortion.  At that point of viability, there’s a delivery that is either successful or not.  It’s done because something is drastically wrong with the fetus or drastically wrong with the mother.  Anyone who believes anything else belongs to a cult for a tortured death.

Additionally, the large majority of pregnant people who are in their third trimester have wanted pregnancies and often need an abortion for medical reasons, like finding a fatal fetal abnormality or the health of the pregnant person is being threatened.

“Abortion ‘up until birth’ simply does not happen,” Angela Vasquez-Giroux, NARAL Pro-Choice America vice president of communications and research, told HuffPost.

“The GOP candidates know that Americans don’t support their extreme bans on abortion, and they are desperately grasping at straws to muddy the waters,” Vasquez-Giroux said. “Republicans want you to be fooled by the disinformation they pushed tonight – but they want a national ban on abortion, full stop. A ban is a ban, no matter how they try to spin it.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence piled on to the misinformation garbage fire, telling the American people that 70% of the U.S. supports a federal 15-week abortion ban. Recent polling from USA TODAY/Suffolk University found that 80% of voters oppose a federal abortion ban ― including 65% of Republicans and 83% of independents.

While Nikki Haley did manage to sound reasonable on a few issues, this was only because she was surrounded by worse fools.  I believe one of the candidates is secretly an animatronic character on the run from Chuckie Cheese. Either that, or he jumped out of some cartoon strip somewhere.  It figures he’s a tech bro and the darling of right-wing billionaires.  He’s as odd as Musk in his overly animated way. This is from Margaret Sullivan, writing for The Guardian. “Vivek Ramaswamy is America’s demagogue-in-waiting.’ Ramasmarmy is more like it. But, he’s racking in bucks and taking them from DeSanctemonius and wow is he chatty.

He thinks the climate crisis is a hoax, supports Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and would gladly pardon Donald Trump on day 1 of his would-be presidency. A wealthy biotech entrepreneur, the 38-year-old has never before run for public office.

Despite all of this (or maybe because of it), this week’s Republican debate became a national coming-out party for Vivek Ramaswamy.

Suddenly, this inexperienced and dangerous showoff is almost a household name.

Many in the Republican base ate up his showmanship and blatant fanboying of their hero, Donald Trump. In CNN’s post-debate focus group of Republican voters in Iowa, for example, Ramaswamy got the most favorable response.

Trump publicly applauded him. And many in the mainstream media declared him victorious. The Washington Post put him up high in its “winners” column, trailing only behind Donald Trump, who notably wasn’t even there. (Choosing not to enter this particular clown car showed some uncharacteristic good sense on the former president’s part.)

The New York Times analyzed the situation under a glowing headline “How Vivek Ramaswamy Broke Through: Big Swings With a Smile”, with emphasis on his style: “unchecked confidence and insults”.

For this millennial tech bro, his performance on the Fox News stage in Milwaukee couldn’t have gone much better.

As a glimpse of America’s future, it couldn’t have gone much worse.

“If you have wondered what Trumpism after Trump looks like, ask no further,” suggested the magazine writer David Freedlander on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. His prediction accompanied a debate stage photo of Ramaswamy with clenched fist.

Certainly, he has the essentials covered. No, not foreign policy chops or a background in public service, but a mocking aversion to social justice and equality.  Amelia Robinson of The Columbus Dispatch provides links on the newest cipher to enter the race. Dive in if you dare!

Dick Wright has been an award winning editorial cartoonist for decades, drawing for the San Diego Union, the Providence Journal, Scripps-Howard Newspapers and the Columbus Dispatch.

Great!  Shallow and narcissistic!  Just another Republican!

So, I will end with Don the Con that took ConAir back to New Jersey yesterday and immediately go to work on hi merchandising mugshot paraphenalia.  I can only imagine how much his fools will send to him.  This is from Salon.  It’s written by Chaucey DeVega. “Trump is in the final stage of cult leadership”: Fulton County arrest elevates his MAGA “martyrdom”. The “country is on the precipice of sustained violence we haven’t seen in 150-160 years,” says Republican Joe Walsh.”  Yes, when I don’t remember my history, I ask my plumber to remind me.  Oh, well.

In all, this week has been a spectacle of the worst sort. At CNN, Stephen Collinson accurately described it as, “No other GOP leader could confidently snub a prime-time television debate and turn his no-show into an argument for his inevitability. But Trump – as with his attempt to use criminal indictments to advance a political career that has always prospered amid perceptions that he’s being unfairly treated – is changing all the rules of campaigning once again.”

The American news media, political class, and general public will do their best (and will largely fail) to navigate these “historic” events with the goal of finding some sense of balance, normalcy, and clarity in unprecedented times. Unfortunately, it is those same bad habits and norms that helped to create the disaster that is the Age of Trump and ascendant American neofascism in the first place.

So, in an attempt to make sense of what comes next in this truly historic and unprecedented moment with Donald Trump and his criminal indictment(s) in Georgia, wishcasting and other forms of denial by the news media and political elites about the true depth of the country’s democracy crisis, and what potentially comes next, I recently asked a range of experts for their thoughts and insights.

What follows is an interview with Gregg Barak who is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and author of “Criminology on Trump.”  Good. Not a Plumber, not that I don’t appreciate and love talking to my plumber about all kinds of things while he works miracles on the plumbing that brought fresh water to my house and made the outhouse unnecessary in my 1840s era house.  He and my electrician work your basic wonders in my eyes. We just don’t talk politics.

I am looking forward to each of these criminal trials especially because they are “slam dunks” for the prosecution regardless of what Trump or his attorneys and supporters have been saying up to now. Reality check: There are simply no legal defenses for Trump’s criminal behavior other than trying to procedurally dissolve these cases by denying that they were crimes in the first place or to simply make motion after motion in the hopes of delaying these trials from beginning for as long as possible.

With respect to the January 6 and Georgia election fraud and conspiracy cases, neither one has anything to do with free speech or with the weaponization of the Justice Department (DOJ) by either President Joe Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland. While both of these political talking points may continue to thrive in the Trumpian alternative universe, I believe that their powers of persuasion are already starting to fade or decline as a byproduct of the powerful RICO indictments in Georgia. No matter though, these arguments may have had or have value in the court of public opinion, they will have no value whatsoever in the federal or state criminal courts of law where Trump should ultimately be tried will also be convicted.

I am especially looking forward to these trials as they converge with Trump’s campaigns during the GOP primaries like Super Tuesday in March and in the runup to the general election as well. Although Trump could probably stop campaigning altogether and still win the GOP nomination he won’t have to. Instead of taking to the expensive campaign trail week after week, he will simply transfer what passes for political campaigning, or more accurately, his staged and unhinged tirades of doom, gloom, and bada-bing bada-boom to the courthouse steps each and every day of those first two federal criminal trials that will probably not be televised.

I am looking most forward to the RICO trial and to Trump’s Court TV reality show because it will be televised, and its star defendant Donald Trump won’t say one word because he will never take the stand. More importantly, the trial of Trump’s criminal enterprise will be a most illuminating and entertaining criminal trial. If it materializes, this trial will captivate viewers and audiences like never before and that includes the 9-month-long criminal trial of OJ. Simpson. Watched literally by the whole world, this fairly complex yet easily understood criminal trial will witness the prosecution methodologically taking us through those 161 acts that furthered the conspiracy of their criminal enterprise. When Trump leaves the Fulton County criminal trial daily for perhaps as long as nine months he will uncharacteristically no longer be talking about his innocence or his persecution. Instead, with his tail tucked firmly between his legs Trump will be demonstrating that he is quite capable of keeping his gaslighting mouth shut when it better serves his interests or when his talking will only make a fool of himself even to his sycophantic MAGA base.

In other words, stay tuned.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Thank you @Caylen Duke. I’m taking your suggestion.