I've been working on a project unrelated to politics and thus had little time for writing. Frankly, I had hoped to let D-Jay carry the ball for a while.
And then the NY Post launched its big anti-Biden smear story. It's the latest version of the Ukraine smear that led to Trump's impeachment.
I smelled bovine excrement when the Post shamelessly repeated a Big Lie that was exposed a long time ago. The article says that Biden sought the removal of the notoriously corrupt pro-Putin Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin because Shokin was looking into Burisma, the Ukrainian oil company that had hired Hunter Biden. In fact, the opposite was true. The Obama administration -- along with the entire civilized world -- demanded Shokin's removal because he refused to investigate corruption.
Same old, same old. Here's the twist: Supposedly incriminating new emails were found on a laptop. Yes, it's 2016 all over again: Another friggin' laptop.
This computer was allegedly deposited with a computer repair guy. We are supposed to believe that the owner of the device forgot all about this machine; he never picked it up and never paid for the job. And Computer Repair Guy, contrary to all professional practice, did not take down any contact information. So he had no idea whose machine this was.
Sure. Happens all the time.
There was a Biden sticker on the laptop cover. Clue! Computer Repair Guy examined the laptop's contents (something repair guys are not supposed to do) and found the emails -- plus home-made porn involving Hunter.
(Riiiiight. If I had that sort of thing on a computer, I'd sure as hell keep track of the machine!)
Computer Repair Guy contacted Rudy Giuliani's lawyer -- because of course he would. Rudy has been holding onto this data all this time. Computer Repair Guy also sent it to the FBI, although there are varying claims about this point. Why would the Bureau be interested, since there's no indication that they are investigating anything related to this?
Somehow, the alleged emails fell into the hands of Steve Bannon, who contacted the NY Post.
Wow. Rudy and Steve. Could you ask for better provenance? Never
mind those recent stories which have linked Rudy to Russian disinfo
peddlers. Never mind the fact that Bannon is under indictment for his
shennanigans.
By the way: The Russians hacked Burisma months ago. At the time, there was much speculation that they would use altered versions of whatever they found to help Trump get elected.
The Biden campaign has responded:
In a statement, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said, “we have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”"Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as 'not legitimate' and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath,” Bates said.Bates added that the Biden campaign could not immediately respond to the story’s allegations in the Post story when it ran on Wednesday morning, because the publication “never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials.”
Computer Repair Guy has been interviewed. His name is John Paul Mac Isaac, and he's...weird.
I'll probably have more to say about this obvious smear-job in the near future, but the above should suffice for now.
Here's D-Jay:
* * *
White House News
I was delighted to see the statement made by the White House Tuesday.
No – not that White House: Sheldon Whitehouse, the junior senator from Rhode Island, and tireless campaigner against the evil influence of dark money in U.S. politics.
During the first day of questioning of Trump bottom-of-the-ninth Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, Whitehouse didn’t use his allotted thirty minutes to ask the usual pointless questions. Knowing that these would only test the nominee’s ability to dodge, obfuscate and deflect, the senator chose instead gave a brilliant presentation examining exactly how dark money led to her nomination in the first place…and what her backers hope to get for their investment.
Citing figures and naming names, Whitehouse put a concise, but comprehensive and convincing case – perhaps the best I have seen to date – into the Senate record.
Bravo!
In case you missed it, the best summary of the event -- IMHO at any rate -- was posted on the Esquire web site by author Charles P Pierce.
To quote his excellent introduction to the piece:
The general feeling that the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is the capstone of a lavishly funded, long-term conservative plan to own the federal judiciary for the foreseeable future, and that Barrett's career is altogether a product of that project, has hung over the confirmation hearings like a foul mist. On Tuesday afternoon, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave that feeling form and substance, and charts, too.
Whitehouse used every one of his allotted 30 minutes to describe in detail the mechanisms by which conservative activists, fueled by the unlimited corporate money unleashed by Citizens United v. FEC, have fashioned to produce judicial nominees—and, ultimately, judges—on what in the last decade has looked very much like an ideological assembly line. Whitehouse showed in (occasionally excruciating) detail every aspect of the complicated network at the center of which is the Federalist Society, the intellectual wingnut-welfare chop-shop to which this president* outsourced the selection of federal judges.
He then tied all that research into the current full-court press across the federal courts to kill the Affordable Care Act, curb reproductive freedom, and reverse marriage equality, to say nothing of the dozens of cases regarding the money power and corporate control of government that are the real goals of most of the people funding what Whitehouse called, "the schemes." Whitehouse even worked in his favorite statistic—that on those kind of cases, there have been 80 decisions handed down by the current court as 5-4 decision, and the business/conservative side of those cases, which almost always coincides with the interests of Republican donors, is 80-0.
The statistical probability of that NOT being a carefully crafted right-wing project are about as likely as that of the notorious “Red Shift” in voting tally irregularities, don’t you think?
In the following day’s session, Whitehouse spent most of his twenty minutes taking the judge to school in a surprisingly kind manner. Armed again with impeccable documentation and factual background, he walked her through the example of how the right-wing court/dark money nexus maneuvered a series of cases up to the Supremes over six years. In the end, they eventually gutted public service labor unions’ right to collect money from non-members for services rendered in the hideous Janus case – as soon as Gorsuch was enthroned in his stolen seat.
He then educated her on how Supreme Court Justices are actually held to a much LESS rigorous ethical standard than judges in lower courts, and how easy it is for dark money funders to hide behind sham front groups in cases brought to the highest court – with no mechanism in place for either the justices or the public to know who is pulling the strings.
Whitehouse implored her to reflect deeply on issues such as these as she takes her seat – and maybe even to try to do something about them.
Polite and sincere as he might have come across, I doubt that the senator is planning on holding his breath while he waits.
I wonder though if he might be playing a longer game.
In two short Senate hearings, Whitehouse has laid out an excellent framework of how the entire U.S. judicial system has been – and is being – co-opted by dark money interests – people, corporations and associations whose goals are not at all those of the rest of us.
In short, the courts have already been packed by the right – and in the most corrupt manner imaginable.
If things proceed as they no doubt will, what better reason could there be for We the People – acting through a new Democratic administration and Congress – to reset our nation’s judicial balance through the addition of an appropriate number of new seats.
P.S. – For those of you who might like to take a deeper dive into this most important of issues, I highly recommend you read Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Prof. Nancy MacLean – a remarkable expose of the decades-long Koch brothers’ conspiracy – and visit the related web site: UnChain our Democracy.
In the following day’s session, Whitehouse spent most of his twenty minutes taking the judge to school in a surprisingly kind manner. Armed again with impeccable documentation and factual background, he walked her through the example of how the right-wing court/dark money nexus maneuvered a series of cases up to the Supremes over six years. In the end, they eventually gutted public service labor unions’ right to collect money from non-members for services rendered in the hideous Janus case – as soon as Gorsuch was enthroned in his stolen seat.
He then educated her on how Supreme Court Justices are actually held to a much LESS rigorous ethical standard than judges in lower courts, and how easy it is for dark money funders to hide behind sham front groups in cases brought to the highest court – with no mechanism in place for either the justices or the public to know who is pulling the strings.
Whitehouse implored her to reflect deeply on issues such as these as she takes her seat – and maybe even to try to do something about them.
Polite and sincere as he might have come across, I doubt that the senator is planning on holding his breath while he waits.
I wonder though if he might be playing a longer game.
In two short Senate hearings, Whitehouse has laid out an excellent framework of how the entire U.S. judicial system has been – and is being – co-opted by dark money interests – people, corporations and associations whose goals are not at all those of the rest of us.
In short, the courts have already been packed by the right – and in the most corrupt manner imaginable.
If things proceed as they no doubt will, what better reason could there be for We the People – acting through a new Democratic administration and Congress – to reset our nation’s judicial balance through the addition of an appropriate number of new seats.
P.S. – For those of you who might like to take a deeper dive into this most important of issues, I highly recommend you read Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Prof. Nancy MacLean – a remarkable expose of the decades-long Koch brothers’ conspiracy – and visit the related web site: UnChain our Democracy.
7 comments:
As long as the Progressives continue to demand unending, undocumented migration into the U.S. which then creates hundreds of thousands of "legal" newborns from Undocumented parents, you are basically threatening your own Medicare.
I witnessed how the great California compromise killed my Mother even with me there every step of the way asking that the help my Mother was legally required be given to her, and it was not.
The refusal came from so many different corners It made me chance my politics. Think of me bro when you suddenly don't get the medical help you know you are entitled to because resources have been co opted to the throngs of Undocumented that will continue to ensure fresh meat for the Democrat Party.
What bothers me about Barrett is not that she is Catholic, but that her Catholic teachings seem to begin and end with abortion. Since Leo XIII the Catholic church has been very concerned with social justice and the excesses of runaway capitalism. That doesn't seem to have penetrated her conscience. (She has said that Catholic judges shouldn't hear death penalty cases, so there is that.) But she doesn't seem to worry about the creation of an aristocratic, oligarchic society.
Alessandro,
I'm sorry for your loss. But what about the needs of the others, including undocumented? Are they not worthy of our help? Would you have other people's mothers die for want of medical care? Don't we owe something to all fellow human beings?
joseph, Barrett's Catholicism is way outside mainstream. It's a patriarchal, misogynist sect filled with Stepford wives seeking a return to a middle class cultural purity that never existed. No blacks, gays or non-breeding women allowed. And we've all met serious intellectuals. They don't grin with delight while they bullshit honest opponents. Her academic pedigree is also misleading. She is morally bankrupt where it counts. When the covers are pulled off she's a self-serving, ignorant nobody.
The "liberal's Dilemma" exemplified by small-J joseph (regarding illegal immigration) simply cannot be adequately, rationally answered by the true believers in "wokeness". Their unbridled compassion for the world's have-nots inexorably blinds them to the reductio ad absurdam consequences of their crusade for a borderless (or police-less!) USA -- just as the profound "compassion deficit" of their right-wing opponents blinds those fist-clenching folks on the other side to the enormous, daily suffering of the world's underclass, who desperately long for a slice of the soon-to-spoil-and-rot, but still seemingly succulent American Pie.
After decades of serious study, contemplation and argumentation, I've come to believe that the ever-present (and now so dangerously bitter) ideological divide between right and left is, at its base, GENETIC: Every generation of humans enters life with either a gene-determined predisposition to selfishness or compassion, and the battle between the factions folks grow up to side with and represent will never cease -- until one or the other manages to "stamp out" the opposition's key psychological trait through mandatory use of some future "advancement" in the gene-editing technology of CRISPER.
And then imagine what a "Brave New World" we'll have!
What in the unholy name of Tezcatlipoca is Machi speaking of?
The only reason "resources" are inadequate, when they are, is that the Kochs and the Mercers and their foul ilk are not adequately taxed. Confiscate and redistribute the great fortunes, and resources for the common citizen will abound.
@Anon
Lots of big words but short on logic. Immigration, public health, taxation and representation are just a few of the subjects that you carelessly ignored to reach your preferred outcome......talk about ideological bend.....look no further than the mirror dude
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