Order in the time of chaos

The new basis for law and order

As is my wont, I spent some time today reading the latest missive from fellow baseball and politics nerd Craig Calcaterra. On many things, as you know if you've been here before, Craig and I, we reach. (Not on everything. I could not care less about European football and I have never been into indie bands like so many of my generational peers are/have been.)

Anyway, Craig devoted some of his newsletter today to his emotional state of mind regarding, well, the world, and in the wake of my Saturday rant I've been feeling much the same way. As Craig put it, "I do not believe it is hyperbole to say that America's 249-year old legal, political, and philosophical order has been effectively destroyed in a little over five months and whatever is left of it is severely wounded." I do quibble about the "five months" part, as the five months in question are in actuality a resumption of the destruction that started at a much slower pace in 2017 and was suspended in 2021, but the point is spot-on.

I don't think Craig is unique in this, I think a great many of us are freaking out to one degree or another as the POTUS47 regime and its compliant agents on the Supreme Court take a blowtorch to the Constitution without a peep of resistance from the majority party in Congress. I mean, there were big marches and stuff just a couple weeks ago. But the fact that despite the protests in the streets, despite the outrage and the lawsuits, despite the blatant betrayal of oaths, nothing seems to matter—at least, on a short- or medium-term scale.

In my latest spiral, my mind went where it most likes to go, to the universe of Star Trek; in this case, though, it wasn't uplifting at all. The Trek canon has been prescient in a lot of ways despite missing the mark on the eugenics wars of the 1990s (which has been suitably retconned to a few decades later). But ever since 1967 the shows were telling their audience that to get where we needed to go, we were going to hit the skids in a big way in the 21st century. Now that we're actually in the 21st century, the accuracy of some of the future history details is less impressive and more frightful. 

Craig is less of a nerd than I am in that regard, but he got to a similar place without the Trek references, living with anger and depression over the utter chaos being wrought. Order and the predictability of cause-and-effect, of action-and-consequence, are out the window because, again quoting Craig (who is a better writer than I), "we're living in an era of legal Calvinball." It used to mean something profound to be American, but now "even the most basic and explicit Constitutional rights mean nothing to this Court or this regime and that there is little if anything that can be done about it, at least any time soon."

Baseball is where Craig's and my nerddom intersect most completely, so when he discussed how attending a couple of games over the weekend provided a kind of therapy I completely understood. "Those games helped me feel like I was living in an orderly world," he wrote, continuing:

[I]t was worthy effort, because baseball is rooted in order. There are rules. They are enforced. There is a mathematical logic to how the proceedings in a baseball game unfold and following those proceedings required that I assume a logical and ordered mindset. There's nothing I know better or that I have known longer than how baseball works and retreating into a headspace where nothing was happening other than the baseball game in front of me had the same effect as reciting a mantra. It quieted my mind. It banished the chaos, at least for a while. It made me feel connected to something in ways I've not felt connected to anything for what feels like ages.

...  I felt more calm and centered than I've felt in several months. I know that feeling won't last because we live in an age of fresh daily horrors. I know that my disorientation at the lack of order and predictability of these times and my attendant depression will return the moment I begin reading the news once again. But any reprieve is a welcome one and the two ballgames I took in while in Detroit were just what the doctor ordered. They served as a reminder that, if I try hard enough, I can probably find my way through this shit.

 We can't take our eye off the ball, if you'll excuse the metaphor, but these reprieves are essential. We need to keep sane so we can eventually recover from the wreckage of the regime. If for you it's not baseball but something else, have at it. But take the break, clear your mind of existential dread, and come back fighting.

Because in the words of Captain Pike, "the future is what we make it."

Tagged Politics, Baseball, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on June 30, 2025 at 4:16PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Saturday rant

Being angry is merely the default state for most of us here in POTUS47’s reign of American carnage. How could it not be with every action, every speech, every embarrassing Troth-Sential post, every unhinged and tyrannical impulse to come out of the White House since noon on January 20th?

But today my anger had kicked up a few notches to irate.

And this time not so much at POTUS47, although he is, of course, a mammoth factor in all of this. No, today my ire is aimed at the entire Republican party.

Each and every Republican elected official and, yes, many of the people that voted for them. I know a lot of them were duped and hoodwinked, but others were all-in on ushering in bigoted despotism, so they get some emotional fury too.

Why the uptick in bloodboil? Look no further than the allegedly Supreme Court.

Yesterday the six corrupt and illegitimate justices occupying SCOTUS ruled that lower courts have no say over the lawless authoritarian power-grabs of President Temper Tantrum. They also overturned Supreme Court precedent on a free speech case, told public schools that parents can exempt students from learning anything they choose on religious grounds, and told Louisiana voters to shut up about gerrymandering until at least 2028, among other things.

SCOTUS has destroyed its legitimacy completely with the anti-Constitutional and pro-authoritarian rulings as well as the slow-walking approach in deliberately failing to hear critical cases over the past few years. The six so-called "conservative" justices have been tools of POTUS47’s fascist takeover and are as dangerous to the rule of law as is anyone in government.

And they are being allowed to be such, allowed to further shred the Constitution, allowed to whittle away the rights of everyone in this country, by the Republican party.

Republicans, thanks to our dumb electorate who already lived through the 2017-2021 horror show and apparently learned nothing, have the majority in both houses of Congress and thus have the power to put an end to these abuses of power right now. Today. In fact, they are the only group empowered to do so by legal means—I mean, the Cabinet theoretically could invoke the 25th Amendment and remove POTUS47, but the very reason most of them are in their positions is that they won't do that under any circumstances.

So that leaves Congress.

But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a feckless toady. Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer, Kevin Hern, they are either fascists or cowards; the rank-and-file House Republicans include even worse individuals. If they were not, if even some of the Republican House caucus actually believed in and abided by their oaths of office, they would bring articles of impeachment to the floor immediately for at least a dozen officials. If the Republican contingent in the Senate were even partly beholden to the Constitution and the values of a democratic republic, the impeached would be promptly convicted and removed from power.

The blob of sociopathic insecurity that is the president would be first among the list to be impeached, but Vice President Hillbilly Elegy has betrayed his oath of office as well, and then there are the Cabinet secretaries—the stunningly incompetent RFK Jr., the rage-drunk Pete Hegseth, the empty shell of Marco Rubio, the cruel criminal cosplayer that is Kristi Noem, the should-be-disbarred AG Pam Bondi—and at least four Supreme Court Justices. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are corrupt as hell, John Roberts uses his position as Chief Justice to support lawlessness, Brett Kavanaugh perjured himself countless times in his confirmation hearings. Gorsuch's seat was stolen. (Barrett's was technically legitimate despite the political opportunism that allowed her nomination, so there's less of a case for her.)

This Supreme Court has already:

• Ruled that women have no say in their reproductive health
• Ruled that Presidents can commit crime so long as it's "official" crime
• Declared that racial gerrymandering is fine so long as it can be masked as "partisan"
• Ruled that altering semiautomatic rifles to be automatic ones is perfectly fine despite acknowledging the intent of law to ban them
• Ruled that bribery is fine so long as its after the fact
• Allowed a purely speculative case with no standing and no potential redress from harm that sought to proactively allow a business to discriminate against homosexuals to gut a state public accommodations law
• Illegally took a case it had no right to hear as it was brought by entities with no standing in order to overturn a law passed by Congress regarding student loan policy, purely for ideological purposes
• Allowed municipalities to criminalize homelessness
• Ruled that the department of Health and Human Services may ignore the section of law that allows Medicaid recipients to choose their healthcare provider from "any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required" in order to penalize providers it disapproves of
• Ruled that the Executive Branch may, in effect, deport people without proper notice or due process so long as they do so before a lawsuit is filed
• Ruled that no court may issue injunctions against patently illegal actions by the Executive (or, presumably, anyone else) except as relates to the specific litigant bringing suit, meaning anyone's rights may be infringed at will unless and until one sues in court, and then only that litigant will be granted any redress should they prevail in court

You want to talk about "activist judges?" There they are.

We have this court because (a) Republicans in the Senate stole a nomination from Barack Obama and gave it illegally to POTUS45; (b) our dumb electorate was snookered into voting for Republican POTUS45 in the first place; (c) Senate Republicans chose to confirm three appointments to the court by POTUS45 despite  those nominees' demonstrated abuses, perjury, political intent, and fealty to a corrupt president; and (d) no Republicans in Congress will remove any of the justices despite their corruption and their wanton disregard for upholding law and Constitutionality.

There is so much about this time we're living in, this post-2016 era, that will require enormous repair if and when the despotic administration of Donny Cruel Whinybaby is overcome. So many safeguards that will need to be enacted, so many protections against rogue Justices as well as rogue and unAmerican electeds.

But that requires getting through to the other side of this safely, and right now I just see preambles to the worse that Star Trek told us we'd have to get through before the better comes. SCOTUS' blessing to criminalizing homelessness is a step toward Sanctuary Districts. SCOTUS declaring that the law only applies in certain areas and to certain populations puts us on the path toward balkanization of the United States and the second civil war. President Psychopath's bombing of Iran could easily lead to nuclear proliferation and escalation in that region that involves mushroom clouds, from which it isn't a big jump to WWIII and the post-atomic horror. We can only hope we get a visit from the Vulcans by then to shock us into sanity.

 

Tagged Politics, SCOTUS, Star Trek, Posted on June 28, 2025 at 11:38PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Patriot Day: Protests and baseball

I frequent this place a lot as an umpire. Today the fields were swarmed by protesters, eventually reaching 70,000 strong

A lot happened today. Most of which I didn't actively participate in, but it still deserves some mention here, I think.

I fully intended to attend one of the smaller No Kings protests this afternoon; one took place not far from my home, I was planning to at least go and take photos and add my voice for a little while. I'd intended to, but my nocturnal ways caught up with me and I failed. I was umpiring last night until almost 11:30, got home well after midnight, then watched the full Mariner game from earlier in the evening, then had trouble falling asleep... anyway, when my alarm went off at 10:30am I had only been asleep for maybe three hours. Still, I got up and fed the cats, but then plopped back down to check in with things on my phone and before I knew it I had fallen asleep again. (In a rather awkward position, to, leaving me with a nasty kink in my neck that is still annoying me.) I re-awoke around 2:30. A quick shower and I moseyed out to the protest site, but it had mostly dispersed by then. Alas.

But even without me, Seattle showed up in style, with over 70,000 people congregating at Cal Anderson park (often the site of my umpiring adventures) before marching to Seattle Center. Along with several smaller events around town, the greater metro area represented well in the nationwide protests today and I am most gratified to see the great masses of Americans giving POTUS47 a metaphorical (and occasionally literal) middle-finger salute on his birthday. It's especially gratifying to see the split-screen, as it were, of protest turnout on one side and the "crowd" at Donny's multimillion-dollar ego parade in DC on the other. I hope he's seething about it.

Seems the vast majority of the events were civil and trouble-free, but there were bound to be a few exceptions, like the Virginia MAGAt who drove his SUV into protesters and someone in Salt Lake City shooting a protester. The forces deployed to LA unsurprisingly escalated things there, but not until after the No Kings event had ended; I wasn't there, I have no way to really know if the violence perpetrated by law enforcement/Federal forces was appropriate or not, but my instinct is to believe it was at best an overreaction. I know the elderly veterans being arrested in DC for nothing more than protesting Donny's ego parade will have quite the case when they sue, though.

Anyway, I did not attend but fully support the No Kings events. After my abortive look at the remains of the small suburban one, I came back and fixed a sandwich and started to clean up a bit before heading down to the ballpark. Not knowing what traffic would be like after today's disruptions, I left pretty early but getting downtown turned out to be a breeze and I was over an hour early to the game. Still didn't get a giveaway Steelheads cap, though, that was a small bummer. (I'm over it.)

Turned out to be a fun evening. One of my umpees (hi, Neal) was there and had free seats near him down low, so my Spuds teammate Mona and I ended up taking in the whole game from pretty close in, which was pretty cool. I am still very much used to my perspective from 327, so tracking the ball was a little tough from the more expensive seats. It's a nice change of pace, though, and the opportunity was much appreciated.

It was a great game, too, with the hometown M's staging a 9th-inning comeback to win in walkoff fashion. One dude sitting in the row behind me struck up some conversation here and there during the game, first about my scorekeeping then about ballparks and then about game strategy. Always fun. Nice to talk with Neal a bit off the softball diamond, too, though the PA onslaught at the game makes for a less than stellar discussion venue.

All in all a good Saturday. (Edit: Events in Minnesota notwithstanding—I just read about that a few minutes ago. Jesus.)

Below are a few of my favorite photos/signs from the nationwide protests today. Please to enjoy.

 

From Los Angeles. The Constitution is a perfect prop for today, but I also really enjoy the sign held up by the guy in the lower left corner.

Handmaid's Tale imagery has been used a lot, but hey, cliches are cliches for a reason. The sign is great, too.

From Florida. Glad to see the rest of the GOP get a mention, but mostly I like rooting for gators here.

A little hard to read, but it says "You don't get to talk about what's illegal when you voted for a felon."

Truly inspired to use "Schoolhouse Rock" here.

No notes. 100%.

And, just for fun, the celebration after the win at the ballpark. J.P. Crawford (2nd form left) had a perfect night, going 3-for-3 with two walks
(though he did get picked off 2nd base).

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Baseball, Society, Posted on June 15, 2025 at 12:49AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Extortion of the press

I've always been a fan of Bob Costas, the legendary sportscaster that wrote a book on baseball back in the early 2000s that made me think he is the one guy in the world who could solve all of MLB's problems if he became baseball commissioner. He might be a little too Yankee-centric, but he's a pro's pro and he always knows what he's talking about when he's on screen.

Costas was awarded the Mirror Award for “distinct, consistent and unique contributions to the public’s understanding of the media” last Monday and used the platform of his acceptance speech to scold the news media in general and several media outlets in particular for failing to commit journalism.

Most of his address surrounded the sports news business, which included this beauty: "Network TV sports is the only business I can think of where the buyer must continually flatter the seller. 'Here's your billion dollars or more, and if we pulled the Brinks armored truck up to Park Avenue and haven't delivered it in the proper denominations, we apologize profusely and we'll be right back.'" Broadening his focus to news generally, he deplored the reluctance of (primarily) TV news from "identifying and acknowledging the elephants in the room."

"Beyond sports," he went on, "the free press is under attack." Excoriating ABC and CBS for "paying ransom" in the form of settlements to frivolous lawsuits brought against them by President Convicted Felon, Costas articulated what to most of us is the blindingly obvious but to news organizations apparently a novel concept: Journalism is about reporting fact, not propagating two sides of an argument. Especially when one side is completely nonsensical BS.

“What’s happening now are not matters of small degree,” Costas said, citing "ongoing assaults on the basic idea of a free press."

Costas approached the close of his speech with this:

Donald Trump’s view of the world ... is through a prism of what benefits him, there are no higher ideals. There are no principles at work other than what benefits him.

...Because he is the president, what he does and what is done in his name has been normalized so that "responsible journalists" have to pretend that there’s always two sides to this. There really isn’t two sides to much of what Donald Trump represents.... If someone is contending that the Earth is flat, in order to appear objective, you are not required to say, “Well, maybe it might be oblong.” No, it’s not. Certain things are just true.

And regrettably, something that’s true in America right now is that the President of the United States has absolutely no regard, and in fact has contempt, for basic American principles and basic common decency.

Seems like a good place to close this post as well.

Tagged Baseball, Politics, President VonClownstick, Bob Costas, Posted on June 12, 2025 at 5:28PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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This must not stand

Well, the news cycle sure took a turn.

On Sunday, when President Convicted Felon illegally seized control of the California National Guard to put down a rather mild protest against ICE, DHS, and POTUS47 deportation policy, the reaction in the "legacy media" was, "meh." Another day, another impeachable offense, whatever. But by Monday evening it apparently became clear to news directors that focusing on LA was critical—just not for the right reasons.

The White House would like us all to believe that (a) Los Angeles is on fire and out of control and severe military measures are needed to right this wrong; and (b) when Los Angeles was actually on fire earlier this year that the Federal government had no role to play in getting things under control. Sadly, legacy media news is abetting this propagandistic redirection away from the actual problem. The reality of the situation is that to the extent there is chaos in LA, it's due to the actions of the LAPD and the National Guard. POTUS47 is instigating trouble, not mitigating it. (And he's doing it with stunning incompetence.)

Seizing the National Guard and, now, deploying U.S. Marines to the two-block area of downtown Los Angeles that has been experiencing the sort of chaos that football fans celebrating a Super Bowl win would mock as tepid, is fundamentally illegal as well as counterproductive. The administration is attempting to rationalize the actions by claiming the forces are needed to quell an invasion of criminal gangs from Latin America, but of course there is no such invasion. The only legal way to do what POTUS 47 is doing would be under the Insurrection Act, which would have to be invoked to override Posse Comitatus, which bars the government from using military force, including Federalized National Guard, against the population within the U.S. (Normal, state-controlled, National Guard has different regulations.)

Unfortunately, the language of the Insurrection Act is fairly arcane and open to misapplication; the intent of the act is to allow for military involvement if and when state and local law enforcement are overwhelmed and Federal help is needed to "suppress rebellion." But while the language may have been considered definitive in the 1870s, today one can easily imagine unscrupulous actors twisting it to suit their own authoritarian aims.

To the extent the media should be focused on the LA situation, it should be on the illegality of POTUS47’s actions, the threat it presents, the waste generated, the escalation of chaos it generates, and the underlying criminality it is being used to support.

I'll close this post with another excerpt from our pal Craig Calcaterra:

Trump either wants [military troops] on the streets of L.A. to kill Americans who Trump has decided are his enemies or he simply wants make himself look like a military strongman. Neither of those things are compatible with American democracy or basic morality. Indeed, like so many other things Trump has done over the past four and a half months, this act is something that would get any single one of his predecessors impeached and removed from office.

... Last night involved scattered protests, a couple of trash fires, and a small handful of arrests. While the mood is certainly pitched, and for good reason, the situation is, kinetically speaking, barely lukewarm. Around 150 people have been arrested in Los Angeles since Friday. There are Big Ten football games which require more police activity....

Donald Trump is seeking bloody confrontation. He wants to foment a violent response and he wants to kill people. It could not be more plain....

The people of this country are unsafe until Donald Trump is, somehow, removed from power. Making that happen is the only thing that will end this Constitutional interregnum. And anything short of that is going to lead to unnecessary and unjustified death.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on June 10, 2025 at 4:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Sunday activity

Yesterday saw POTUS47 commit yet another impeachable offense by illegally deploying the National Guard to put down a protest and incite violence in Los Angeles. That's just par for the course in 2025, though, so it might not have made your particular newsfeed. But it happened. Since it happened 2,000 miles away form me, though, and this sort of thing doesn't move the media needle anymore, I wasn't aware of it because I was otherwise occupied on the ballfield.

We're having record-breaking heat here, so it was a taxing day for me. Fortunately, I am well-liked by the teams I umpire for (mostly), so I was kept well-hydrated when I ran out of my own water and gatorade by players tossing me bottles from their own coolers. I got through my games without any real difficulties. (The one time there was a problem no one complained; a batter hit a popup with runners aboard that was deeper than the infield dirt and not immediately near a defender, so I didn't call the infield fly rule; I should have, though, because the defending shortstop had proven himself to be quite good and in fact he did get under the pop and let it fall, proceeding to attempt a double-play. So I did the unusual thing and called the rule after-the-fact, owning my mistake and placing one of the runners back on base. Everyone was cool with it.)

The final game involved The Leftovers, who as readers know are among my favorites, and though they lost in a squeaker, 10-9, they always make a game more fun for me to work and this time they even invited me out to the bar with them after the game. So I joined them for a short while and shared tales from the umpiring side while they told of their experiences with other umps and other teams. We talked about the Mariners latest slide in the standings, our respective elderly parents, and how I am frankly so much older than all the other umpires in the league yet also the most active on the field.

It was a nice time, and when I returned home the heat of the day had caught up with me and I developed a gargantuan headache that was probably building all through the afternoon under the direct sun and I took some ibuprofen and read until I finally conked out. 

Tonight I have a briefer shift, tomorrow a standard three-gamer, Wednesday I'm playing, Thursday back for three, and Friday for two before a killer 8-hour day on Sunday. Here's hoping I can stave off the heatstroke.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Softball, Umping, Posted on June 9, 2025 at 5:06PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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LET THEM FIGHT

Who would have thought that two buddies with egos the size of the Hercules A galaxy, both narcissistic billionaires whose entire relationship was built on a shared desire to be cruel to other people and enrich themselves, would see their bromance blow up in a fiery explosion bigger than the conflagration following a failed SpaceX rocket launch?

Oh, right. Everyone. We all knew this was coming. In some ways, it's surprising that it took this long.

But it did take this long for the self-interest of these two malignant tumors of humanity to conflict, and now we all enjoy the show and pass around the popcorn.

It's undoubtedly entertaining to see—an entirely apropos situation for a reality-TV-show president—but I fear the collateral damage to come. Still, it'll likely be a net benefit in the end if the mutual takedowns succeed at all.

We're here at the point of conflict because POTUS47 insisted that his budget bill include every one of his legislative priorities, that it be "one big [redacted] bill." Then he cajoled Speaker Johnson and the House Republicans to ram through an approval of it in the dead of night without anyone having read the entire bill. Then someone read the bill and the details started to make the rounds.

Officially known as House Resolution 1 (that's right, this is the first piece of legislation the pile-of-manure Speaker of the House has brought to the floor in the five months this Congress has been in session), it's an enormous mountain of cruelty and theft, detailing the means to deprive millions of Americans of healthcare, student loans, services, and assistance of myriad kinds while redistributing all of that wealth to the richest of rich fucks, a full quarter of it to the oligarch class. It would be the largest redistribution of wealth from poor and middle classes to the upper class in generations. On top of that, it would blow another huge hole in the national debt—over a decade, it worsens the budget deficit, that is, the annual shortfall, by nearly four trillion dollars.

Let's put that in perspective. As I researched and noted in my 2024 voting aid pamphlet that apparently no one read, George W. Bush held the previous record for largest budget deficit when he ran the figure in his last year in office to nearly $1.5 trillion. The pre-GWB high-water mark, considered enormous at the time, was about $300 billion under W's dad (adjusting for inflation, about $460 billion in 2008 dollars, so less than a third of GWB's excesses). Barack Obama got it down from GWB's shocker to about $650 billion when he left. Then we got the first term of President Shitbag and it went from that to over $3 trillion before Joe Biden basically cut it in half. Now POTUS47 plans to make the annual shortfall exceed $6 trillion. The national debt is currently about $37 trillion, accumulated over 190 years since the last time the country's debt was zero (January 1835). Factor in interest and the POTUS47 plan would double that figure in no time at all—the CBO estimates that even without this clusterfuck of a budget, just the annual interest payment on U.S. debt will top $1 trillion next year.

And none of that deficit spending is to benefit anyone. None of it is for good things. Not only does this budget slash Medicare, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, SNAP, student grants and loans, the NEA, state assistance, disaster relief, environmental protections, et cetera, et cetera, it increases spending for defense contracts—guess who those will go to—and the Department of Homeland Security, home to ICE, HSI, and the various other agencies that make up this administration's burgeoning secret police.

But none of that is why the two billionaire BFF crybabies are fighting. No, no, neither of those moronic misanthropes gives a tinker's damn about fucking over the people or going bankrupt; the fight came about because the budget eliminates incentives and subsidies for electric vehicles while providing opposite measures for the fossil fuel industry. It's a direct threat to the existence of Tesla. Herr Elon might claim it's about excessive spending, but we all know that's a lie. It's because not enough of it goes to him.

So they're fighting. Throwing their takedown tantrums in public—on the social media platforms that each of them owns, which is just a chef's kiss to the whole thing—while the world laughs and while the reputation of the United States goes even further into the toilet.

What's coming next? Elon has already echoed a call to impeach Donny. Donny has already threatened to cancel Elon's many contracts. White House sewer troll Steve Bannon and Donny's shadow-president, the undead ghoul calling itself Stephen Miller, have called for Elon to be deported. Elon threatened to reveal what Donny's role in the Jeffrey Epstein saga really was. During the back-and-forths it appeared that each was just then realizing that the other was a corrupt, lying, amoral piece of shit when the rest of us knew they both were from the get-go.

Both of these people are fueled by grievance, take everything personally, and believe they are entitled to total deference and fealty. The escalation of revenge tactics to come promises to be pretty scary. The U.S. has quite stupidly become dependent on Elon for its space program, which could be all but destroyed in this mess. Who aligns with who among the oligarch class could have big economic effects on all of us. But if the end result is that the public sees proof that POTUS47 raped underage girls with Epstein, that Elon loses all his influence with the government and maybe even his companies and wealth, that the Republican Party fractures and self-immolates, then I'm here for it.

Let. Them. Fight.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on June 6, 2025 at 9:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Grifter in Chief

I've not done much posting lately on the plethora of horrors coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It's not that I haven't been aware of (at least some of) them, nor that they've been so numerous and unrelenting as to have overwhelmed my ability to comprehend—yet—it's just that I know I'm largely if not completely preaching to the choir here. At least when my uncle isn't lurking around.

Once more, I turn to our pal Craig Calcaterra to sum up what I'm trying to say but with better verbiage (emphasis mine to relate it to my own stuff as well):

Every single day something happens which reminds us that America is being torched by cruel, nihilistic bigots and ignoramuses for no reason beyond their destructive and psychotic whims. No country I can think of has ever so willingly and so deeply harmed itself like America is harming itself right now. Even countries who flung themselves into destructive wars believed, at last at the outset, that they were doing something to help themselves or advance their cause, whatever it happened to be. America, in contrast, is voluntarily maiming itself knowing full well that what it's doing will work toward its own ruin. All because we stupidly elected a Mad King who doesn't understand a goddamn thing and doesn't care that he doesn't understand a goddamn thing. And now that he's descending into acute dementia, a few dozen truly evil and hateful people who have attached themselves to him are doing whatever they want without a shred of oversight or consequence.

I try to roll with all of this awfulness most days. Some days I try to actively ignore it if I can manage to. Other days I try to find the bits of hope among the destruction or I try to focus on history and the longer view as a means of reminding myself that all things, even bad things, do eventually pass. For the past couple of days, however, I haven't been able to do any of that. For the past couple of days all I've been able to see is the bleakness and pointless pain and misery being inflicted upon millions by vile people who care about nothing and no one but themselves, their grievances, and their greed.

I really don't know what to do anymore. All I can muster right now is a bit of thankfulness that it's Friday and that I can fucking turn my brain, my computer, and my TV off for 48 hours or so and try to forget about it all for a little while.

In some ways, I think we are all Craig right now.

But yesterday was so egregiously corrupt, with essentially crickets from much of the press—the exception being Chris Hayes, who was rightly outraged/gobsmacked/incredulous on his show (see below)—so I need to vent a little bit.

President Corrupt, Cruel, Incompetent, Moron Fuckface raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and grift by hosting a contest: the 200+ largest purchasers of $TRUMP—which is an essentially valueless cryptocurrency (trading now at around $12 per "coin" after having declined from $75 around inauguration day to $8 last month) that POTUS47 makes money on via transaction fees, so any purchase or sale of any of it rings his cash register—win a dinner at Bribe-a-Lago with the grifter-in-chief, anonymously and with no reportage of the event, so trade favors and scheme safe from prying eyes, and a next-day tour of the White House with the man they bribed. The buyers of this corrupt access are largely unknown as they made their purchases under pseudonyms and/or usernames, though one admitted "winner" was Chinese crypto-bro Justin Sun, who was being prosecuted for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission until POTUS47 took office and put the kibosh on that. Because who doesn't like securities fraud? It's not a big jump to conclude that at least part of Sun's $18.5 million gratuity was thanks/payment for services rendered in dropping the legal case against him, and since most of the rest of the "donors" are anonymous, who knows what other quids were being quo'd last night.

I'll admit readily that I do not fully understand cryptocurrencies, but the nature of any currency is that it only has value to people/entities willing to accept it. National currencies (and international ones—the Euro is real) are governmentally recognized as legal tender "for all debts public and private" within a country's jurisdiction, but crypto has no such backing. If you try to spend bitcoin at the supermarket you'll find it's not worth anything to the merchant. If you try to spend $TRUMP coin, your only willing recipients will be fellow cultists. It's not currency, it's a digital trading card. No shade to card collectors, but they're a niche thing. I have a many-thousand-strong comic-book collection that is worth a fair chunk of money, but only to other collectors/enthusiasts/merchants. (Along with some junk and commons, I've got a Silver Age Superman comic for sale on eBay right now that's getting no bids among my fellow niche members; even within a niche people are fickle.) The president is grifting people with trading cards, and not good ones like Willie Mays or Honus Wagner cards, no, these are all Jeff Schaefers and Cliff Mapes.

One of the fools who copped to spending more than $100 million on presidential meme coin grift was a 27-year-old New Yorker named Vincent who has parted with far more than that amount in the service of making POTUS47 richer, as he boasted about having previously bought numerous Trump watches, Trump sneakers, Trump NFTs... Vince is the best mark there is for this regime of corruption, a cult devotee with money to burn. Sadly, he's not representative of the cult at large, members of which are just as easily suckered and might spend proportionately more when grifted, but reach a limit to their means/ability to go into debt a lot sooner. (The same people who, along with the rest of us non-multi-millionaires, would be utterly screwed if the budget House Republicans passed in the dead of night were to become law.) Vince is also a likely anomaly among the contest "winners," as most of them are thought to be foreign oligarch types and crypto-scammers looking for fewer obstacles to their own grift schemes.

This is, of course, on top of the acceptance by the US government of the "gift" of a glitzed-up Qatari 747 that the Qatari monarch no longer wanted and couldn't sell to anyone, a "gift" that us undoubtedly an attempt at a Trojan horse, a "free" gift that will cost American taxpayers on the order of a billion dollars to outfit as another Air Force One jet, a process that any sane Congress would kill dead in its tracks but might actually get rolling with these yahoos in charge.

Of course, even absent the rest of the voluminous impeachable offenses committed in just these four months, corruption on this enormous scale would get the president impeached and thrown out of office posthaste if the majority in Congress had any fidelity to their oaths of office. Sadly, Speaker Mike Johnson and the entire Republican caucus in the House, as well as most of the Republicans in the Senate, are traitors and/or cowards in the face of intimidation by the White House.

Midterms cannot come soon enough. Assuming we get them fairly; the level of election fuckery this regime will attempt is terrifying to contemplate. But we have to fight. And when those elections do come, we've got to turn out in numbers so vast that they overwhelm the cheating you know the regime will apply.

 

 

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Craig Calcaterra, Chris Hayes, Posted on May 23, 2025 at 4:52PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Worst. Commissioner. Ever.

The baseball commissioner is a corporate right-wing toady who doesn't give a damn about baseball

As if we needed more reasons to despise Commissioner of Baseball Robert D. Manfred Jr.—and former Commissioner Bud Selig, for that matter—he provided us with one by reinstating Pete Rose and all other permanently-banned-from-the-game individuals under the fig leaf excuse of, "well, they're dead, so let's say permanent bans end at death."

This action pulls the neat trick of both being wholly about Pete Rose and not really being about Pete Rose at all. It's about Rose because a comment about Rose was the impetus for this, it's not about Rose because of who the comment came from. It came from the cruel, corrupt, and incompetent fascist now occupying the office of President of the United States.

POTUS47 wants Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame for some reason. Why? Far as I know, POTUS47 is not particularly fond of baseball or versed in its history. But he does know the name Pete Rose, knows that Pete Rose was a supporter of his in 2016 and 2020, and he very likely knows that Pete Rose was the kind of man he likes best: selfish, criminal, and in love with his own "greatness."

I don't know if Rose and POTUS47 ever met personally or not, but since they're totally birds of a feather—well, except for one of them being a professional athlete with a standout career and the other being a failure in every business venture he ever undertook—it totally tracks that President Convicted Felon would stick his nose into this comparatively trivial matter.

There are a lot of horrible things among the autocratic agenda of the present administration, many of them shared by the Republican party as a whole, many of which have been on display over the past couple of weeks, many of which deserve far more attention than they're getting. But one of the underlying foundational elements of the POTUS47 mindset is not just racism and misogyny, but their corollary: glorification of despicable behavior by white dudes.

POTUS47 is himself a despicable white dude guilty of some of the worst behavior humanity has to offer, so he needs society to approve of other despicable white dudes guilty of terrible behavior so he doesn't stand out as the festering boil on America's face that he is. So all the January 6 insurrectionists get pardons (and perhaps get called upon to be thugs for him again), Jeffrey Epstein was "a terrific guy," Pete Hegseth gets to be Secretary of Defense, neo-Nazis are "very fine people," RFK Jr. and Elon Musk are "genius" level specimens, and Pete Rose should be idolized on and off the field.

Pete Rose was banned form baseball in 1989 by then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti (otherwise known as the last commissioner worth the title, apologies to Fay Vincent who let himself get steamrolled by Selig and company). Not for general assholishness (or for being a statutory rapist or for tax crimes, both of which were still not widely known about), but for specific affronts to the integrity of the game by way of gambling. Rose denied at the time but later admitted that he not only bet on big-league baseball games regularly, but that he also bet on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, for whom he was player-manager. This violated baseball's Rule 21(d), misconduct through gambling, which mandates a year's suspension for betting on games the bettor has no part in and a permanent ban for betting on games he participates in.

There have been arguments ever since over whether or not Rose's punishment was appropriate; of late, the arguments favoring his reinstatement center around how gambling has become normalized to the point of offensiveness, with sponsorships galore from gambling enterprises throughout the game. There have also been debates about others that are now, thanks to Rob Manfred's capitulation to one of the most heinous people on Earth, also re-eligible for the Hall, particularly Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was swept up in the Black Sox scandal of 1919 that ended up creating the position of commissioner in the first place (those unfamiliar should immediately go see the fine John Sayles film Eight Men Out). At first I sided with the pro-reinstate Jackson crowd, but upon reflection I will instead side with Bart Giamatti.

Giamatti was asked about reinstating Jackson shortly before he died later in ’89, and his reply was that the 1919 Series "and its aftermath cannot be recreated . . . I, for one, do not wish to play God with history. The Jackson case is now best given to historical analysis and debate as opposed to a present-day review with an eye to reinstatement." In other words, applying present-day judgments to events that occurred within their own historical contexts will inevitably miss key nuances and/or taint or sanitize history in ways that can't be predicted.

I would apply the same to Pete Rose now, particularly since we now know about some of his other gross behavior. I expect Giamatti would too, despite the idiotic remark by the guy who previously held the title of Worst Commissioner Ever, Bud Selig, who said, "I believe Bart would understand and respect the decision [to reinstate Rose] as well." Fuck you, Bud, Giamatti said he would only consider reinstating Rose if Rose worked toward living "a redirected, reconfigured, rehabilitated life," which he never did; Rose was unrepentant until the day he died last September. As Stephanie Apstein wrote in Sports Illustrated, "It’s hard to imagine a less savory character to whom to extend this grace. Rose agreed to the ban in the first place, then spent the rest of his life insisting he'd been wronged. He lied about betting on baseball until it became profitable to tell the truth."

Manfred, of course, isn't fit to lick Giamatti's loafers. The Rob Manfred era has been a nightmare of rule fuckery and greed and labor strife and greed and scandals and greed and, yes, more greed. Integrity of the game doesn't even make the top 20 in Manfred's list of priorities, all he wants to do is make more and more surfaces available for ad space (we now have ads on uniforms, ads on pitcher's mounds, ads on the grass in foul ground...), bully TV providers, and, yes, mingle with gamblers. When asked about Rose and gambling and the changes in baseball's attitude, Manfred tried to defend his office's relationship with gambling by saying "we sell data and/or sponsorships, which is essentially all we do, to sports betting enterprises." I leave it to the reader to decide if he meant, "we don't do any betting, we just encourage others to bet," or if he meant, "my job is first and foremost to sell data and ads to gambling outfits." No reason it can't be both, I guess.

But his job also, apparently, includes kowtowing to wannabe autocrats. I've seen one take that actually reflects well on Manfred, relatively speaking—that he reinstated Pete Rose as a sop to POTUS47 in hopes that it would get MLB some goodwill when it comes to immigration/deportations/renditioning of foreigners, that Major and minor-league ballplayers would be spared from ICE and HSI gestapo goons kidnapping them off the street or arresting them at airports. Maybe. I kind of doubt it, though. Even if that was the calculus it just means Manfred is as stupid as we all think he is, since you cannot appease the Bully-in-Chief, if you give him an inch he will take a parsec. Just ask Columbia U or the law firm of Paul, Weiss.

Pete Rose may or may not be bad for the Hall, depending on your metrics, but Rob Manfred is surely bad for baseball. Just as POTUS47 is bad for America and the world. All three deserve plaques in the Hall of Human Stains and Horrors.

 

Tagged Baseball, Politics, President VonClownstick, Rob Manfred, Posted on May 15, 2025 at 9:31PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Dispatches from the American hellscape

A few quotes and links for your Interwebs perusal...

 

•  From our buddy Craig Calcaterra:

Stephen Miller, the Trump Regime official who I feel is most likely to be torn limb-from-limb by angry mobs once the public learns who did what during this time, said this when talking about education:

"Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding ... we're gonna make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology."

I don't agree with Stephen Miller about a lot, but I agree with him to some extent here. I never wanted my kids' school to teach them about communism. They'd surely have gotten it wrong! That's why I made a point to teach my kids about communism at home, where they could get the straight dope. It's the responsible thing to do.

Anyway, I'm now gonna return to daydreaming about those mobs getting their hands on this Temu Roy Cohn over here and doing what mobs do.

 

•  From Will Bunch at the Philly Inquirer:

Most voters forgot, or never heard, the 2003 argument by some advocates that the creation of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the new Department of Homeland Security] to more aggressively hunt down undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil would create a 'monster' agency that would warp the entire national conversation around refugees. While it’s certainly and sadly true that waves of anti-immigration fervor are as American as cherry pie, from the anti-Irish 'Know Nothings' of the 1850s through the KKK resurgence of the 1920s and beyond, the 'national security' lens of ICE has taken us to a new low. ... Twenty-two years later, those 'monster' predictions feel understated. There’s no quick fix for the human rights nightmare of ICE and its sister agencies, because this warped experiment has gone off the rails in so many different ways.

 

•  From Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker:

This country was founded on the idea of habeas corpus. It’s a fancy legal term that, in plain words, means no government has a right to arbitrarily take your freedom away from you. Preserving habeas corpus is not some fever dream of the left wing echo chamber, it’s a fundamental concept of justice that people have fought and died for dating back to the Middle Ages. It was in the Magna Carta. It was considered by our nation’s founders to be so vital to our liberty that they wrote it right into the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson called it the essential principle of government. Benjamin Franklin opined that those who would give up habeas corpus for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security. And Alexander Hamilton wrote that the practice of arbitrary imprisonments has been in all the ages the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton. Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the most effective campaign slogan in history. It’s the OG of political messaging. So I mean, what do we think that Colonel Stark was talking about, if not this, when he said, 'Live Free or Die'?

Today it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow, it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Donald Trump.

There are plenty of people in this country who hold opinions that I find abhorrent, but my faith and our constitution dictate that I fight for their freedoms as loudly as I defend my own. And as a Ukrainian-American Jew who built a Holocaust Museum, whose family immigrated here as refugees from the Russian pogroms, let me say this to Donald Trump: Stop tearing down the Constitution in the name of my ancestors.

Do not claim that your authoritarian power grabs are about combating antisemitism. When you destroy social justice, you are disparaging the very foundation of Judaism. When the pendulum swings back, and it always does, you will have contributed to the climate of retribution that will inevitably follow.

...

We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools.

We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit.

We have an attorney general who hates the constitution.

We have a secretary of state—the son of naturalized citizens, a family of refugees—on a crusade to expel our country of both,

We have a head of the 'department of government efficiency'—an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him—who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself.

And we have a president who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them losers and suckers and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers.

...

If it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people that he has elevated. It’s because I am. You should be too. They’re an affront to every value this country was founded upon.

...

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.

They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.

 

•  From the great satirist Andy Borowitz:

ROME—A man who fell asleep during Pope Francis’s funeral was “already going to Hell,” God clarified on Sunday.

Although snoozing during the pontiff’s funeral was “beyond rude,” the Almighty said that the man clinched his place in the netherworld “decades ago.”

“If I hadn’t already made up My mind, the last hundred days would have made him a slam dunk for eternal damnation,” He said. “I mean, deporting a two-year-old? Come on.”

The Heavenly Father said the man’s decision to wear a blue suit at the funeral “wasn’t a factor” in his going to Hell, but was nevertheless “incredibly assholic.”

In another observation from the funeral, God noted, “Interestingly, Sleepy Joe Biden managed to stay awake.”

 

•  From, of all people, former POTUS45 National Security Adviser and longtime pre-Trump-Republican extremist John Bolton:

To be a fascist, you have to think at some conceptual level, which Trump never does. It's too far above Trump’s capabilities. He has no philosophy. He has, in the national security space, no grand strategy, and doesn’t do policy as we conventionally understand that term. It was difficult for me to accept. … There are plenty of people around him with problematic philosophies, people who do have the ability to think at a more conceptual level. What they say may ultimately be reflected in certain Trump decisions, but it’s not because he shares their worldview or anything like that.

 

•  And, finally, from POTUS47 himself, to ABC News reporter Terry Moran in an interview in the Oval Office, who had the temerity to ask him about the Supreme Court's order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador and about his discussions with Vladimir Putin:

You're doing the interview. I picked you because frankly I never heard of you. But that's okay. But I picked you, Terry, but you're not being very nice. ... I don’t trust you. I don’t trust a lot of people. I don’t trust you. Look at you. You’re so happy to do the interview, and then you start hitting me with these fake questions.

I'd like to know how a question can be a "fake question"; the implication of a question could be dishonest, which POTUS47 knows all too well from his own practices, or the subject of a question could be whether or not something is fake (e.g., "Mr. President, do you think Neil Armstrong actually went to the moon or was that merely a propaganda op?"), but a question is a question, it's neutral.

Actually, I don't care about that bit of semantics here, it's just telling to see that whenever our president (barf) is presented with reality instead of obsequious bootlicking he will immediately resort to condescending attacks and some sort of Pee Wee Herman impression with a version of "I know you are, but what am I?"

 

Good times, right?

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on May 2, 2025 at 4:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Life problems on the micro and macro scales

I spent much of the past week feeling sick. I mean that in a literal, there-were-germs-and-a-rhinovirus-involved kind of sick, not in a I'm-nauseated-by-our-fascist-convicted-felon-president kind of sick, although that type is ever-present these days.

This may or may not have something to do with my umpiring 6½ hours in steady rain a week ago Sunday. Can't say, really. But it was the sort of thing that is mostly annoying, saps your energy and fills your head with copious amounts of mucus. Not that big a deal, though it did force me to bail on more than a couple hundred dollars' worth of ump shifts over the weekend. I was listed as day-to-day, as it were, on the ump's injured list, but I thought I was OK to go last night so I reported to the field for three games at Capitol Hill.

Probably not a good idea. I mean, I got through it and wasn't any worse for wear, but I was seriously off my game. A congested, foggy-headed, cold-medicine-addled, slow-witted umpire is not exactly the ideal circumstance. It was a playoff night, too, so everyone except me was extra-amped up, and all three games were close, I couldn't even just coast through a blowout.

One team, the oh-so-cleverly named Sons of Pitches, was quite pissed with me after their game, as three bang-bang calls went against them, including one that ended the game. Not only were some of them yelling at me directly, but I overheard their captain and others badmouthing me in the dugout, and you know, (a) I had zero patience for any of that last night, but (b) they might well have a real beef, because aside from the last one (which I have no doubts about) I have no idea if those close calls were correct or not. Honestly, I didn't even see one of them, I was out of position and looking into the setting sun. Usually, if I blow a call or am even unsure of it, I'll own it on the spot. I'll even ask players what their view was. Nine times out of ten there's no going back on it, but I feel like it's better for everyone if we just say, "yup, that was a brain fart, let's do better" and move on. But I wasn't having any of that yesterday, all I wanted to do was get through the damn shift. SoPs was the only one of the six teams I had last night that didn't know me very well; I'd done maybe two games with them before, whereas everyone else has been around for years and I'm on a first-name basis with half of each squad and they all cut me a little slack. Oh well, I can live with not being one team's favorite umpire.

The other two games were without any acrimony, but they dragged on and I was completely gassed by the time we finally wrapped up about 25 minutes behind schedule. Fortunately, when I got home my neighbor Sean offered me a late-night homemade mac-and-cheese dinner that I didn't have to prepare myself, which lifted my spirits a bit. Thanks, Sean!

I'd have been better off trying to negotiate a trade of last night for tonight or tomorrow's shift, but as we say on Earth, c'est la vie.

 

Meanwhile, in the greater world, POTUS47 and the White House staff are now lying through their teeth about Supreme Court rulings while defying judges and going full-on fascist and yet Republicans in Congress remain silent feckless toadies when they could end this nightmare right now.

Nazi Stephen Miller, who if you can believe it is the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy—he's the Josh Lyman of this group of totalitarian fuckers—was both caught on mic in the Oval Office and deliberately went on television to say the the Supreme Court's 9-0 ruling affirming a lower court's order that the administration must facilitate and effectuate the return of the mistakenly-deported Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, from the El Salvadoran gulag DHS and ICE abducted him to, was actually a 9-0 ruling that no judge can tell the administration to do anything about Mr. Abrego Garcia. Pure fiction, 180 degrees—well, thanks to John Roberts and his predilection for obfuscation, say 170 degrees—from the truth, and for good measure also claimed that when several officials admitted that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake that those officials were the ones in error and Abrego Garcia was picked up intentionally! If anything, that would make this whole matter even worse, as Abrego Garcia had a prior court order in good standing specifying he could not be sent to El Salvador as that was the country he was seeking asylum from, meaning if we take Miller at his word (as if) then the administration is willfully defying a wholly different court order in addition to the one he is lying about the contents of.

It irks me greatly that this malevolent speck of a man, this evil creature, has the same name as one of my friends from high school, but what can you do. The guy's name is the least of his problems.

The regime has made it clear yesterday and today that it has no intention of complying with the court's order to retrieve Mr. Abrego Garcia and even intends to widen the net of DHS abductions, with President Convicted Felon telling the El Salvadoran dictator that he needs to build more gulags for all the "criminals" he intends to send there.

The entire White House communications apparatus—or, perhaps more appropriately, the propaganda division—has been twisting the words that Roberts added into the Court's ruling away from their obvious meaning and into a pretzel that claims they mean something completely different. "Facilitate" simply means, according to the White House, an update to immigration status. Roberts included other language—"The intended scope of the term 'effectuate' in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs"—that has been seized upon by Miller and the rest of the White House fascist regime to mean whatever they want it to mean, that "deference" is functionally the same as "absolute deference" and that "may exceed" is the same as "massive overreach," not to mention that the word "effectuate" is not at all in need of clarification. What John Roberts did there is find a way that he could throw the regime a bone while still not completely blowing up his credibility as an adherent to the Constitution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor felt the need to append Roberts' order with her own statement that lays out the egregiousness of this case. Her statement reads, in part:

The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.... Because every factor governing requests for equitable relief manifestly weighs against the Government, I would have declined to intervene in this litigation and denied the application in full. Nevertheless, I agree with the Court’s order that the proper remedy is to provide Abrego Garcia with all the process to which he would have been entitled had he not been unlawfully removed to El Salvador. That means the Government must comply with its obligation to provide Abrego Garcia with “due process of law,” including notice and an opportunity to be heard, in any future proceedings. It must also comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture. ... In the proceedings on remand, the District Court should continue to ensure that the Government lives up to its obligations to follow the law.

It's that first line that should make every Congressperson call for immediate impeachment of POTUS47 right this second. "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene." The White House's statements and inactions since this ruling make clear that it is no mere implication, that is precisely what this regime wants to do.

Tagged Softball, Umping, Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on April 15, 2025 at 6:04PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Free radicals

I've been having a pretty good week, which is unusual for post-January 20, 2025. I think the huge turnout at the protests last Saturday (I went to a small suburban one for a short while) and the apparent impact they're having in DC has helped a lot, and my general attitude has been more free and easy, as it were.

I'm also buoyed somewhat by the actual good-if-not-ideal news out of the Roberts Court today—the ruling that Secretary Noem, DHS, and ICE must "facilitate the release" of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the El Salvadoran torture prison he was rendered to by ICE without even the patina of due process of law. It remains to be seen if President Convicted Felon's regime will obey that court order, which has to go back to the originating court for "clarification" of the term "effectuate," as that court's order called on the government to "facilitate and effectuate" Garcia's release and return to the United States. That seems like a stupid delay tactic on Roberts' part, but fine, OK.

This should have been a foregone conclusion, but then it also should have been so obvious a call that the Supreme Court should have opted to not even hear the argument and say the prior order stands well and good. It's also on the heels of Roberts and company declaring that class actions against ICE for their illegal and extrajudicial kidnappings of people off the street are not allowed and that each of the kidnappees can have their due process only if they each get a lawyer (from detention/foreign prison?!) and file a habeus petition within the local jurisdiction that they were abducted in. So you can't predict how far the Roberts Court will go to protect the man they already granted immunity for "official acts" or criminality and his staff of thugs and goons.

Anyway, I bring up the Garcia case mostly because I kind of hope my uncle is reading this. You may have noticed that he left a comment on my post about the Dodgers tarnishing their reputation by visiting the White House.

Bob, I know that your comment was at least partly tongue-in-cheek, and I do take it in that fashion (though it's often difficult to parse MAGA attempts at humor, there's always an element of cruelty in them) but really, man, I do hope you poke your head up from the right-wing propaganda bubble and see what's really going on every now and then.

Anyone who thinks opposing this POTUS47 regime is something "radical" needs a remedial vocabulary lesson:

Radical (rad•i•cal): A person advocating thorough or complete political or social reform; a member of a political party or bloc that pursues such aims.

We are living under a regime now that is literally criminal. The president himself is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist and fraudster, has admitted to being a tax cheat, has gotten away with violations of the espionage act only because he has a corrupt Florida judge in his pocket, has a history—which may well include this week—of securities fraud, and uses extortion as a primary means of "negotiating." His cabinet of corrupt incompetents is also a mass of humanity steeped in moral, ethical, and intellectual deficiencies.

And that's just the criminal aspect. Then there's the un-American aspect. The despotic aspect. 

The Department of Justice is being reorganized to be, essentially, a base for the Joker's henchmen to operate from. Congress is a thing to be circumvented. Treaties are for suckers.

In a mere three months—not even, in fact—this criminal regime has not only done the typical Republican stuff of trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and make middle-class and poor folks pay more taxes so the filthy rich can hoard more money; demonizing immigrants and making policy based in racism and misogyny; and rhapsodizing about how government is by its nature bad. They've also gone out of their way to decimate public health infrastructure—on the heels of a global pandemic!!—and utterly destroy the United States' standing and reputation in the world, alienating (former?) allies and perhaps intentionally wrecking the global economy. 

All of it—ALL OF IT—illegally.

On this matter in isolation, my position is conservative while the regime's position—and that of the Republican party writ large, at least so far—is radical. A radical attempt to fundamentally alter the nature of the United States, to take it from a representative democracy revering freedom and the rule of law to an autocratic dictatorship ruled by a small cadre of oligarchs and the whims of one idiotic pathological liar.

I support retaining the societal adherence to equal justice under the law and the protections of the U.S. Constitution. The regime supports decimating the rule of law and trampling the Constitution.

There are other areas where you might call me radical, depending on your interpretation of normal. For instance, I support national health insurance (e.g. Medicare for All), strict gun control measures, a return to an 80+% marginal tax rate, and substantial reforms to our election laws that ban the unfettered influence corporate wealth. Personally, I think that's pretty mainstream and I think polling would back me up, but I can see were even a 20th-century version of a rightward Republican would consider those things somewhat radical. But none of those things defy the basic tenets of American society. President Convicted Felon's regime defies those tenets multiple times every day.

Regarding the Dodgers and their contributions to normalizing this in-progress fascist takeover, I can make some allowances for many of the guys that made the trip. Because (a) they are largely quite young men, (b) living the lives of professional athletes and thus paying scant if any attention to any news outside the sports press, and (c) the duration thus far of this administration has been while they were busy with Spring Training and concerned about making the team and traveling to Tokyo. Plus, (d) they travel in their own bubble of protection and do not have to worry about the harassment and other dangers the general public—especially brown-skinned and non-English speaking members of the public, like many of the Dodgers—does now when traveling in this country. So there is an ignorance that can be assumed. Non-players, though, should know better. Including manager Dave Roberts, who has studied history and is smarter than this. Owner Fred Wilpon is filthy rich and probably hasn't figured out yet that the leopards will eventually eat his face too, but there are plenty of people involved in the decision to go to the White House and shake the hand of the man who let Los Angeles burn not so long ago and who would happily rendition a bunch of them to a Salvadoran gulag who knew better.

Opposing this regime is not radical. It's at its core what this country was founded upon.

Tagged Politics, Baseball, President VonClownstick, Posted on April 10, 2025 at 11:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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