Refugees and Taxes and Terror

Erie County Sours on Refugees

Erie County has a lot of descendants from Polish and Italian and Irish immigrants, among others. These people proudly celebrate things like the Italian Fest and Dyngus Day and St. Patrick’s Day, but far, far too many of our neighbors here in the nominal city of good ones would like very much to tell the new immigrants from Ghana and Venezuela and Somalia and Yemen and Burma (etc. ad infinitum) to please just fuck off. Not just to fuck off, but to go anywhere but here. Ironically enough, the long-ago immigrants who came here from the Old World of the late 19th and early 20th century were, for the most part, economic migrants leaving not violent oppression but simple poverty. And good for them. The asylum seekers now making headlines are fleeing not just poverty alone, but political and gang violence. They are fleeing lawless failed states and oppressive totalitarian regimes. They are not “illegals” but lawfully in the country and would very much like to take some sort of menial work that you and your kid don’t want to do, in order to rebuild their lives in a new country. Some of them will succeed and others will fail, but not one of them is less deserving of a chance to become an American than any prior immigrant or refugee. =

To the people whose biggest pet peeve is why those refugees did not seek refuge via some other way, you can thank your master Trump, who shuttered the US offices worldwide that helped to vet and process asylum claims.

I also want to criticize the local TV news, especially Channel 2, which has really helped to fuel distrust and hatred of refugees thanks to clumsy reporting by Ron Plants. Look at these posts to xitter:

I don’t know whether it ever occurred to anyone to just leave the asylum seekers the fuck alone? These people who gave up and risked everything – including their lives – to flee violence and persecution only to come to western New York to be pummeled with more hatred and misinformation, distrust and suspicion egged on by the local GOP (“guns over people”) and media dullards?

You’re really going to go on the television and insinuate that helping 115 kids get an education is a terrible burden that no district in WNY should bear? I am absolutely sickened by people with Polish and Italian surnames taking the lead on heaping scorn and derision on these refugees, and fueling hatred and resentment of them. Obeisance to Trump and gratuitous cruelty are the two platform planks that make up the contemporary GOP. It was absolutely disgusting for failed politician Stefan Mychajliw to refer to immigrants as an “infestation” but now it’s become Republican policy to be as nativistic as they can get away with without being overtly racist about it.

The Trump Tax Hike

Hey, remember when the Donald Trump tax reform was passed back in 2021, which cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans?

President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.

For most, in fact, it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised — correctly, so far — that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few of the people most affected were likely to remember who was responsible.

Guess what? That’s starting now! Those rich men north of Richmond sure did a number on you all.

This is why the right-wing are going in so hard on culture war bullshit like Bud Light and Disney and drag queen story time and whatever other outrage they can concoct – it’s to keep you poor, angry, armed to the teeth, and blaming someone else.

Right-Wing Terrorism

We all saw it on January 6th, well it continues apace as these monsters who scream bloody murder about “antifa” and “BLM” have their acolytes going around literally murdering people who dare to fly an LGBTQ flag outside of their private business. This is the future that the right-wing want.

Didn’t hear about the cold-blooded murder of Laura Ann Carleton in Lake Arrowhead? Don’t know that a right-wing lunatic murdered her for the crime of flying a pride flag? I’ll bet you that you would have heard all the fuck about it had she been flying a Trump flag and some young zoomer leftist killed her. That’s because the whole notion of there existing a “liberal media” is a joke and a lie. The media in this country are owned by millionaires and corporations. If they have an underlying agenda at all, it is to protect and defend whatever status quo exists to enable them to continue to make money. The murder of Laura Ann Carleton will never get the attention it deserves, as an avatar for nascent right-wing eliminationist violence. They tried to hang Mike Pence, they tried to murder the governor of Michigan, and now they have a lunatic shampoo magnate running around calling himself the “maximum leader” waiting to create a “Foundationalist” society that is violent and medieval.

This Nazi shampoo cult sounds right up Mychajliw’s depraved alley.

It is high time that the conservative movement and Republican party underwent its reckoning for barrelling full steam ahead into authoritarian cultism, but only Chris Christie, the opportunistic New Jersey loudmouth, has the guts on the right to say what needs to be said about Trump – that he’s a loser, a fraud, un-American, and anti-American.

“Conservative Anthem”

The way you could tell that “Rich Men North of Richmond” was going to become a “conservative anthem” is this lyric in particular:

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

It is a gripe song. It is whiny. Poor me. To backtrack for a second, these are the narrator’s central complaints:

  • The main character has a shitty job that doesn’t pay much.
  • His job does not offer much meaning to his life, so he comes home and gets drunk.
  • The world is a complicated mess.
  • “Rich men North of Richmond” want “total control.” No explanation for this is noted.
  • You’re “taxed to no end” and this results in your “dollar ain’t shit.” The federal income tax rate for someone with a job so shitty and low-paying that it constitutes the opening lyric to a conservative anthem would be rather low, maybe 10%.
  • Just before he swings two verses at short fat people eating “fudge rounds” “milking welfare” he complains about “rich men north of Richmond” caring more about “minors” on “an island somewhere” than “miners.” So, an assumption has to be made that this song is about the poor and working class. The concept of solidarity for the working class doesn’t jibe with the jab against people on welfare.
  • The main character laments how “Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground ’cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.”
  • Then repeat prechorus and chorus.

I am old enough to remember when protest songs were about shared values and unity, not dividing. I’m also old enough to remember when conservatives were all about taking personal responsibility and pulling oneself up by their own bootstraps. Under Limbaugh’s law, the song’s protagonist is poor simply because he isn’t trying hard enough.

The welfare queen trope as set forth in this song is also a dog-whistle – if the main villain is supposed to be “rich men north of Richmond” why would the song devote so much time demeaning people who, like the song’s protagonist, are poor and struggling? Why would someone who expresses solidarity for “miners” downtrodden by DC politics not also express solidarity for other people whom this system has ill served?

This is why it’s a conservative anthem – because it doesn’t really attack politicians nearly as much as it attacks welfare queens, and it doesn’t take a genius sociologist to figure out exactly what’s being talked about here.

The Email Lady Warned You

Every vote mattered so dearly in 2016 and I will never not be mad about people on the left working their damnest to tear down the Democratic nominee, and I can draw a straight, dark line directly from that behavior 7 years ago to this week.

The sharing and repetition of smear after lie after libel against Hillary Clinton helped ensure that Donald Trump would hasten in this current kakistocracy. It was nothing new. It was easy to hate Hillary Clinton. After all, she was a female Democrat with influence who was smart, savvy, professional, and competent. All of this is a lot of people’s kryptonite, to this day.

Donald Trump selected fully 1/3 of the current, corrupt Supreme Court – the same court that embodies what amounts to a coup by the likes of Leonard Leo and his ultra-right-wing, Christianist ideology. All of this matters tremendously, and the disingenuous cries about the “neoliberal shill” who “can’t be worse than Trump” because “Democrats are just rainbow Republicans” really didn’t do the country any good.

The Supreme Court’s legitimacy is reliant, in large part, on people’s confidence in the impartiality, independence of that body, and its separation from politics. Well, how’s that working out? Anyone feel real confident in today’s Supreme Court? The one where Trump got to pick Barrett in direct defiance of the supposed rule that prevented Obama from picking Garland? The one where Samuel Alito is being feted by billionaires – organized by Leonard Leo – and by right-wing Catholic special interest legal clinics that have business before the court as a payoff for his reversal of Roe v. Wade? The one where Leonard Leo hooked Clarence Thomas up with a billionaire benefactor to pay off his kid’s private school tuition, buy out his mom’s house, and take him on million-dollar junkets all around the world via yacht and private jet?

The 30-year-long smearing of Clinton won, as did the 40-year effort to turn back the clock on America through the Courts.

I know it’s trendy for many of the same people who hated this woman from the left to mock cries of “vote harder”. Ha ha, so droll. But now is not the time to discount the importance of voting. There was a primary election just this week on the (R) side where a nepo-candidate won by like 20 votes. Votes matter. Votes for Hillary Clinton mattered. Those who spouted foreign and right-wing propaganda to advance a leftist argument against Hillary Clinton are as culpable for this week’s absurdity from the Court as any MAGA voter.

It is time for the Supreme Court to have a mandatory retirement age or a term limit of some sort. It has become an unaccountable junta with zero oversight and zero accountability to anyone – not Congress, not the American people.

Alito and his Oligarchical Ethics

I need to return briefly to a theme touched on the post immediately preceding this one. The profound dishonesty of the entire conservative movement is embodied by Justice Samuel Alito and encapsulated by something that happened just last year.

For years, it has been conservative dogma – wholly false – that the Supreme Court should be made up of jurists who “call balls and strikes” and do not allow their policy preferences or ideological beliefs to color how they rule on matters of great import for the citizens of this country. That the court should not “legislate from the bench” and merely interpret the Constitution as its drafters intended.

We can call bullshit on this sort of rhetoric by looking at the Court’s conscience-shocking reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision. It is not “conservative” to ignore stare decisis or to literally use the power of the court to strip women in this country of what had been between 1973 – 2022 a Constitutional right to personal privacy.

The author of the majority’s decision was Samuel Alito, who is also the most likely suspect with respect to the early leaking of that shameful screed, unique in that it shrunk rights for women in this country, rather than expanding them. Alito’s decision was released on June 24, 2022.

Literally a month or so later, Alito gave a speech in Rome, Italy wherein he mocked foreign criticism of the Dobbs decision. That speech was given at an event organized by Notre Dame University Law School’s “Religious Liberty Summit”. I’m sure it was all about religious liberty for Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists, what with it being a speech by a Catholic justice hosted by a Catholic school in Rome.

It also seems hypocritical for a jurist-for-life who is supposed to be somehow above politics – at least in the fairy tales they told us in school – to opine on matters of current political events. Or to whine so shrilly about criticism leveled at him.

The part that is fundamentally corrupt has to do with the fact that Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative invited Alito and paid for his and his wife’s travel to – and lodging in – Rome. Imagine that! An all-expenses paid trip to the Eternal City! Now, consider that Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case, arguing for the outcome that Alito delivered.

This wasn’t a scholarly invite. It was a payoff. It was a transaction.

The Leonard Leo Coup

The Leonard Leo coup has seen its first major success. Gutting affirmative action in college admissions – that’s low-hanging fruit. For decades, movement conservatives have focused their efforts on manufacturing an artifically biased right-wing Supreme Court in order to reach the goals they cannot accomplish through electoral politics.

The movement conservative right-wing Supreme Court – completely out-of-touch (by design) with the people of this country, have today gutted our entire civil rights infrastructure. It is no surprise or accident that at least two of the Court’s right-wing members maintain a level of ethics and good government one might expect from a Russian oligarch. Alito and Thomas – Leonard Leo’s pets.

It was not too long ago – 60 years – that the Jim Crow South still had legal, institutionalized segregation in public accommodations. Whites-only water fountains, waiting rooms, means of egress, etc.

The pain and anguish and hard work of the ensuing six decades do not matter one whit to a movement hell-bent on ensuring that white elites maintain their slipping grip on power and institutionalizing one specific subset of Christianist ideology on the entire population.

It’s why today’s Republicans are so busily gutting and weakening voting access and rights in a way that is specifically designed to most adversely affect voters whom they perceive to be friendliest to centrism and Democrats. They are a fundamentally anti-democratic coterie of liars, hypocrites, and charlatans.

It is only thus that a contrived, fake “controversy” over a website for a gay couple that never existed could reach the highest court, and that court would rule that it is ok for places of public accommodation to discriminate against a protected class, so long as the discrimination is arguably based on moral or religious beliefs.

Just think! Soon we may have the benefit of living actual history with storefronts in East Aurora or Williamsville peppered with “no gays” (certainly any such establishment would use a stronger, more offensive epithet), or “trans not allowed” or “interracial couples need not apply.” Perhaps we can usher in a return of the Green Book – digitized for our “modern” era – so that LGBTQ couples and people of color can find which places of nominally public accommodation are welcoming to them.

Run a public opinion poll on that and find out whether normal Americans agree with a return to institutionalized segregation and bigotry.

But this post is the principal reason why the Leo Christianist right are having such a lovely time and a field day – they’re making the right people (namely, “libs”) angry. Owning the libs is the central ideological feature of modern conservatism, and nothing makes these snowflakes happier than making sure that any historically marginalized group from black folks to gay folks are spat upon and treated as dirt. They are fighting the war against “woke!” They are battling something they call the “woke mind virus!”

I am not a Christian of any ilk, so perhaps one of you who is can explain to me – reconcile for me – Christian religious doctrine with a political ideology grounded in hatred and cruelty?

Just wait until someone with a business open to the general public decides that their morality dictates that they not serve white heterosexual couples, or conservatives, or people with tattoos or facial hair.

Certainly religious doctrines deserve to be protected by the Constitution, which is why the Court did not – and cannot – force churches or other places of worship to solemnize same-sex unions, and cannot force a religion to recognize or perform such marriages. That is fine. What this right-wing ideology is doing, however, is giving a place of public accommodation the same treatment as a religious organization or facility.

I guess they were right about the arc of the moral universe and its length. Rest assured that history will view this coup-Court as a national embarrassment and disgrace. Someday.

Welcome to the tyranny of the unelected Christianist dictatorship-for-life.

Poyer/Bush Love Trump And So Must You

Bills player Jordan Poyer and his wife, Rachel Bush, are very vocal pro-Trump conservatives, and they are completely free to be exactly that. Literally no one in the world is trying to take away from them their right to be as right-wing and pro-Trump as they wish.

This being a free country, anyone has the right to adhere to just about any other political ideology or faction, and possesses a concomitant right to think that Donald Trump is a proto-fascist idiot buffoon who has done more to divide America and to stoke its most base and disgusting hatreds than any other contemporary mainstream political figure.

Poyer and Bush have the right to give Trump and his family as many of their dollars as they wish.

Others have the right to boycott Trump completely.

This isn’t hard stuff to grasp.

This means that anyone has the right to condemn and to not associate with Trump any more than a Trumper can be compelled to love Hunter Biden. The woke are also free.

Yet Trumpers like Poyer and Bush demand to foist their adherence to that cult on others. When they are confronted with the fact that not everyone thinks in lockstep with them, they throw a predictable tantrum on social media. Like your aunt, who thinks that she has taken away Facebook’s right to use her images by posting some spam she found.

Poyer was set to host at a Trump country club a celebrity golf tournament to benefit the ECMC Foundation – a charity set up to raise funds that benefit the hospital and enable donors to offset some of their tax burden by taking a deduction against their donation.

If the intent was purely charitable – to raise money for an ECMC charitable initiative – then Poyer could have had the self-awareness to recognize (or react to the fact) that many people do not want to in any way be associated with the Trump name – directly or otherwise. For the uninitiated, Trump is currently under arrest and indictment in New York and the federal courts for various and sundry crimes.

Poyer and Bush demand to hurl their Trump support in your face, whether you like it or not, and then to complain wildly when you do not. Poyer took to Instagram to take his ball and go home, and then make-believe he doesn’t get it.

“Am I stressed about it? Not even the slightest bit,” he said. “Am I upset about it? A little, but I’m not even upset about the tournament being canceled. I’m upset about this is where we are in America.”

You’re not upset that you canceled the tournament? Then why the hell are you holding the tournament? Is it about ECMC or about your ego, or your ideology, or your obeisance to Trump? His wife, Rachel Bush, famously maintains an especially aggressively hostile pro-Trump Twitter feed so this feigned ignorance about “where we are in America” is a bit rich.

If raising money for ECMC was the primacy concern, Poyer could have – and certainly would have – been more thoughtful about where he chose to host his tournament. If the aim was purely charitable in nature, then he’d have chosen a course that does not come with obvious political baggage.

People have a right to object to participating in something involving the Trump name. A more cynical person might suggest that the whole point of this being scheduled at a Trump course was specifically to bring about the sort of poor me victimhood we’re seeing. “See, the woke Soros libs did it again.” Yeah, well, the libs detest Trump and don’t want to give him any money or anything else. It’s especially ridiculous, given the ECMC mission, vision, and values, many of which are in complete opposition to everything for which Trump and Trumpism stand. How do Poyer and Bush reconcile their devotion to Trump with their support for a hospital that is a “top performer in LGBTQ health equity“? Geez, who knew these two were so woke?

Poyer complains, seemingly without irony,

“I believe in the universal law that the energy you put out is the energy you get back and we’re not doing that right now. All we do is fight with each other all day. Fight with each other about politics, about religion, about race. The issues that come up are the issues we create. … It blows my mind that we sit here in America today with these issues.”

Yes, Mr. Poyer – it blows my mind, too.

The issues that come up are the issues we create.

The energy you put out is the energy you get back.

It’s helping others. It’s sharing those experiences and about being open about we’re not perfect. Nobody is perfect…. The thing is we need each other. We are we arguing over (stuff) that does not matter?

“It seems like our egos get in the way of being a good human being. (Not) sharing love, sharing conversations, sharing laughter with people who may not believe in the same things that you do, it’s a huge problem in America right now. 

Our egos taking over the majority of our lives. A lot of us don’t even know who we are anymore. We’re run by that ego self, run by the materialistic side, run by the things that don’t really matter.

Are Poyer and Bush ignorant, or do they know exactly what they’re doing? Do they really think it is ridiculous that people would object to participating in something involving Trump? Do they think that they are the only people who are permitted publicly to have political beliefs? A charitable person would want to maximize participation and go out of his way to avoid controversy.

But ego and arrogance win. It’s not about the right to love Trump or be a conservative – you have to, too. It’s now a matter of principle for them that next year they will try to do the same thing, having not learned anything from this or listened to anyone about it. For just one second if Poyer and Bush could set their colossal egos aside and consider for just a nanosecond why people object to Trump, maybe their “can’t we all just get along” wouldn’t ring so hollow. Maybe they could learn something and choose a less obviously controversial venue. That is, if they really care about being uniters rather than dividers.

They will frame this as an issue about their rights rather than an issue about public relations, respect, and inclusivity, (lol). Maybe they get a few seconds of airtime on Jesse Watters’ show. Or the Five. Or Gateway Pundit.

But ECMC – whom they misidentify as a sponsor, rather than a grantee – is really only an afterthought, in the end.

The Majestic Plural

There was a small handful of local lawyers who tried to make a name – and some coin – for themselves by challenging the government’s ability and right to impose quarantines and restrictions during a pandemic emergency. The Covid-19 pandemic killed well over a million Americans, and counting. Covid antibodies helped end the pandemic emergency – whether through infection or injection. Or both.

One of the lawyers in question is the person who penned the thing I reproduce below. It is important to remember that the pro-Covid argument he and others propounded was that the government did not have the right to, e.g., tell kids in school to wear masks, to keep school populations down to enable distancing, or restaurants to require patrons and staff to wear masks when not eating or drinking.

Below is a document that noted local emailer Carl Paladino sent to his broader campaign list. It is a shocking compendium of nonsense masquerading as legal analysis. In order for it to be valid, it would have to ignore and negate literally the entire text of the United States Constitution as adopted in 1789, and its various and sundry Amendments.

This is a Nixonian view of Presidential power – “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

The fundament of the American Constitution is that the people are sovereign; not any one individual. The entire point of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution was to overthrow a corrupt and unfair system whereby the people of the thirteen colonies had little or no say in their own affairs. The Declaration is most remembered for the clause that begins “[w]e hold these Truths to be self-evident…” but the remainder of the document is a list of grievances specifically directed against the King. The Declaration demands that a government be “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Constitution sets up the framework for the institution of this government. The preamble to the Constitution ironically turns the royal “We” – the majestic plural – on its head with “We, the People.” If you look carefully at George III’s 1763 Proclamation, partially reproduced above, his preferred pronoun was “we.” The same is true of many monarchs.

And so, the entire point of the creation of this republic was to eliminate monarchical rule and to replace it with representative democracy. It was a radically progressive notion at the time, one that Europe took seventy-or-so years to begin to duplicate in earnest.

There is, in the United States, a “presidential sovereign immunity.” In fact, many elected officials and public servants at every governmental level enjoy some level of immunity from legal action. (We prefer to call it governmental immunity because – you guessed it – the people are sovereign). The qualified immunity that an average police officer enjoys is currently a source of debate. Whilenot expressly mentioned in the Constitution, it is agreed that a President enjoys absolute immunity from civil liability – that is lawsuits for money or injunctive relief – for decisions taken while in office. A President is not immune from such liability for pre-office wrongdoing, however.

As to the question of whether a President can be prosecuted for criminality, he cannot, for so long as he holds the office. The method to deal with Presidential illegality is supposed to be impeachment, and after the President reverts to private citizen, he can then be subject to prosecution. The notion of impeachment is seemingly now an anachronism, as it requires elected officials to treat government and their offices seriously. We know now that the Republican Party has devolved into a personality cult that will literally tolerate and uphold any type of illegality from Donald Trump, including an insurrection. While the Parliament of the United Kingdom – including almost all Conservative MPs – take their duties to their government seriously, Republicans do not. Donald Trump was impeached on two occasions – once for threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine if its President did not help him smear Joe Biden, and once for fomenting insurrection. Republicans simply let him get away with it.

The criminality of the Trump Administration is unprecedented in American history and one which the Founders could not reasonably have foreseen. How could a person in the 18th century have envisioned that executive power would be wielded so clumsily and with such malign intent by someone doing, in turn, a bad imitation of late-1980s era John Gotti or Howard Stern.

The federal criminal charges against Donald Trump are set forth here. Aldinger recounts two recent cases, Bruen and Dobbs (both written by Supreme Court Justices who have in recent months been exposed as billionaires’ playthings ). Bruen overturned New York’s handgun registration laws while Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, presumably allowing states to ban all abortion in all cases, if they choose. Dobbs in particular has the dubious distinction of being the first Supreme Court decision to take away from one class of people a Constitutional right, which a prior Court had declared to exist.

Everyone knows that allowing any freak to waltz down Madison Avenue in possession of a concealed handgun is exactly what the Framers intended, what with that pesky “well-regulated militia” language being effectively ignored by successive Courts. Similarly, the idea of a right to privacy is very important when, for instance, it works with the First Amendment to prevent disclosure of million-dollar SuperPAC donors, but not at all important when it comes to a woman maintaining control over her own reproductive system.

Aldinger seemingly argues that the President of the United States should enjoy the same sovereign rights and privileges as the “King of England, the King of France, or the Holy Roman Emperor” as they existed in 1789. Aldinger argues that these three monarchs – hereditary heads of state – were “all above the law” and so, too, should the President of the United States, even though he is elected. Aldinger argues that even today, Charles III – the UK’s head of state – enjoys sovereign immunity. But that is because Charles III is, and Louis XVI, and Leopold II were, sovereign monarchs. In the United States, the people are sovereign, and in order to buy into Aldinger’s argument, you have to reject that idea entirely. We in the United States do not have a monarchy or a dictatorship, nor were Presidential powers set up in the Constitution to create a pseudo-monarch to wield supreme executive power by decree. Alexander Hamilton agreed with Aldinger that the President should be a quasi-kingly figure, and the Constitutional Convention rejected this in the 1780s, so why on Earth are we discussing it in 2023?

Aldinger argues that the example of European autocratic monarchies was the norm in 1789, so we must have somehow magically intended to adopt that model ourselves, despite all evidence to the contrary. Although Charles III is the head of state, he is not head of government. In the US, the President is both. France has no king and the Holy Roman Empire no longer exists. Extending Aldinger’s “place yourself in 1789” logic, women cannot enter into contracts or own property. Although women’s right to vote was guaranteed via Constitutional amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified.

Aldinger, however, misapprehends the idea of impeachment; he supposes that the sole and exclusive remedy afforded to our democratic republic to deal with a criminal and corrupt President is to impeach, convict, and expel him from office. He argues that impeachment is the sine qua non of any subsequent criminal prosecution – a substantive and procedural prerequisite, “…but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to Law.”

I do not read that passage as a prerequisite because it is not drafted as such. There is no clear language setting forth that conviction on impeachment is a prerequisite to criminal prosecution; instead, they are separate and distinct processes. Impeachment is not a criminal sanction, but a political one – it removes the President from office. There is no fine or imprisonment that accompanies conviction on impeachment. Indeed, there is nothing in the Constitution that immunizes a former President from criminal exposure, whether impeached and convicted by Congress or not.

While Mr. Aldinger deems it necessary to repeat that Charles III has extraordinary rights as King, the Constitution does not “allow the President to give state secrets to anyone with impunity – including to themselves in their capacity of being a private citizen.”

It bears mentioning at this point that Aldinger’s argument about impeachment and sovereign immunity must fail because Donald Trump has not been Emperor-King President since late January 2021. The crimes alleged in the federal indictment all occurred after his departure from office. The allegation is that he illegally retained public documents – many of them classified and secret – without right or authority to do so.

Aldinger goes on to suggest that Trump – as the “sovereign equivalent of a monarch” has the full right to give any state secret to anyone, at any time. This would be true were we not a democratic republic with a system in place of checks and balances. In reality, the Presidential power to declassify is not absolute, is subject to limitation, and can typically only be done via Executive Order, as Trump himself was well aware. An Executive Order from 2009 sets forth the current guidelines for Presidential declassification, and this set of regulations from NARA further sets forth how the process of declassification must be administered. When Presidents declassify documents, some information contained therein may continue to be classified, as seen in these redactions. This is what it looks like when a President declassifies secret information, and it is not done lightly and the idea of a standing order of declassification does not exist in our country.

So, we know that Trump is not a king, and does not possess monarchical, absolute powers. We also know that Donald Trump, as a private citizen, was in possession of numerous materials that should properly have been left with the National Archives or otherwise protected due to their classification, and that Trump repeatedly failed and refused to cooperate with efforts to do that. Aldinger’s proposed scheme would enable the office of President to be a license to commit any crime under the sun, with impunity from criminal prosecution absent the precondition of impeachment, conviction, and removal from office. An outgoing President, he argues, could even pardon himself on his way out of the White House. How little Aldinger thinks about the office of President and our institutions of popular government.

In his text, Aldinger differentiates President Trump from “citizen Trump”, but that’s the whole point of this democratic exercise we’ve endeavored to perfect since the 18th century – the President is just another citizen. He has temporary powers and privileges lent to him through the Constitution – and laws and regulations promulgated thereunder – but he is not above the law.

If, as alleged, Trump retained classified materials that had not properly been declassified, then as a private citizen he had no right to possess them and had a duty immediately to return them. The indictment itself is damning. Others have improperly retained classified information inadvertently, and when discovered they have immediately rectified the breach – Clinton, Biden, Pence. But Trump refused to cooperate and knowingly kept some of America’s most sensitive secrets in his country club hotel/residence.

As mentioned above, Aldinger was big on suing the government for Covid restrictions – he simultaneously thinks the government possesses the powers of a king, but not enough power to take temporary emergency action to protect people from infectious disease. It is a good distillation of modern conservative thought – its “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” The law protects Trump and MAGA, but does not bind them. Trump can crime all day long with impunity. But were one to apply this reasoning to a Clinton, or even Joe Biden’s private citizen son, the law binds them but ought not protect them. The law binds governments and prevents them from requiring masks and distancing, and ought not protect them. As you would expect, the notion of government being powerless to act during pandemic is ahistorical nonsense.

We know that there is not a low low enough for Donald Trump, and that his depravity and illegality are limited only by his own imagination. That a lawyer would dream up and publish this piece of ahistorical, unsupported, un-American rubbish to justify it can only mean that we have found our next Sidney Powell.

The Big Distraction

While this country continues – systematically and on a daily basis – to fail its regular citizens, the GOP continues its Trumpist bandwagon to divide the country by distracting everyone with the shiny objects that make up the culture war.

If contemporary Republicans are to be taken seriously, the very fabric of our nation is at risk of being destroyed because a beer brand sent a can of beer to a transgender woman influencer. If contemporary Republicans are to be taken at face value, Target associates should be threatened with murder because the company is allegedly selling bathing suits that encourage “tucking” by boys so they can pass as girls. (The fact that this is just a lie does not matter. It sounds true). If contemporary Republicans are to be given a millisecond of your attention, asylum seekers are no different from “illegals” and must be hated when not feared, but excluded either way.

On the other hand, we have Republicans in congress who gleefully helped Donald Trump add fully a quarter of what constitutes today’s sovereign debt, but now refuse to raise the debt ceiling to pay their own bills because they believe it will hurt Joe Biden and the Democrats.

The Republicans do not care to make America better – they now care only to make America a safe space for their nominally Christian white supremacy. In order to do this, they now openly embrace fascism and say democracy is a failed experiment.

None of this is an exaggeration, as evidenced by the links accompanying each allegation.

Yesterday, sunshine fascist Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began his run for President. I do not know how it will fare because I have long ago stopped pretending to understand what motivates the Republican rank-and-file, apart from its reliance on hatred, division, and the culture war.

I heard him say via a radio report that, “the woke mind virus is basically cultural Marxism.” These are words that mean nothing in that order. This is just shorthand for the terminally online alt-right whom DeSantis is courting. “Woke mind virus” is a term used by cis-gendered older white people to express their misunderstanding, hatred, and fear of anything and anyone even mildly supportive of any ethnic, religious, racial minority or non-gender-conforming person. It is what fuels “all lives matter” and the so-called “Moms for Liberty.”

This is P.W. Botha’s Republican Party. They are the Christianist minority. If they don’t like it, it must be abolished and destroyed. They will bully and legislate the “woke” until they are too afraid to show up or speak up. They will take their AR-15s and threaten to murder the “woke”. They will erase the “woke” because they are little more than nihilist eliminationists pretending to be patriots.

“Cultural Marxism” – can you imagine Karl Marx, a bourgeois German philosopher of the mid-19th century having any inkling of what culture would be like in 2023? This term is not new. It was coined a couple of decades ago by the likes of Botha fan Pat Buchanan. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory because somehow the Republicans have magically paired an obsessive support for Israel with a pretty transparent fundamental anti-Semitism.

This is, I suppose, what one gets when one marries a political party to one set of religious sects and a gun lobby.

I am not someone who thinks that the squad are especially influential or persuasive, but they are pretty good at messaging. I am also not someone who thinks it’s cool to shit on Biden because he’s old. He won in 2020 precisely because he is not busy wasting time on Twitter. But I am someone who believes that immigration is a positive, regardless of someone’s visa status. I believe that gay and lesbian and trans and bi and any other queer or non-gender-conforming person has as much of a right to live a happy life, free from discrimination or violence as any other person. I believe that democracy is good, and that people who say “we’re a republic not a democracy” are idiots, because we are both – a democratic republic insofar as we have a popular vote and no monarchy.

I just sometimes wish that all of this idiocy and hypocrisy would end. This country – where guns are the biggest killer of children – is so deeply sick yet here we are talking about underpants sold at Target and a pretty pedestrian brand of beer.

Conservatism

Wilhoit’s law says that “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

One need only look and see what is going on in Tennessee and Montana as just two examples in the last few weeks to prove the truth of this law. It’s why we have gerrymandered electoral districts and Republicans calls to make voting more restricted and difficult.

I have to say there is nothing more hilarious than the party of Donald Trump crying about “decorum”, except for the fact that it’s all they can do to prevent Democrats from calling them out over their permissiveness over mass shootings and their cruel authoritarianism over transgender Americans.

It’s why the former Comptroller for Erie County – a guy who people used to like when he was on Channel 2 – posts things like this on his Twitter.

Baseball Bat Politics

Can we really be surprised by Donald Trump expressly threatening to assault or kill the Manhattan District Attorney with a baseball bat? Or, as Trump calls him, a “Soros-backed animal,” which is totally deranged and completely racist.

Rupert Murdoch’s foreign-owned NYPost

The answer is no, we cannot be surprised. Trumpism and the MAGA movement, (which currently controls the entire Republican Party), is nothing more than a neo-fascist, eliminationist, nihilistic, strongman cult. I mean, these people are literally praying to Trump now, which goes well beyond the definition of “cringe.” He is not just their dictator, their king, their Leader – he is their God and deity.

And if you are his enemy, he will threaten you and one of his well-armed – but poorly regulated – cultists will kill you.

Is it really any different from anything this lunatic has said or done in the last 13 or so years?

Via YouTube

Hey, maybe when Chrissy Casilio says she’s MAGA and proud of it, this is what she means? Someone should ask her, since she’s literally running for office and this is MAGA.

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