Bipartisan Betrayal of American Revolution

Two Corrupt Political Parties Will Not Keep Faith

"On This Day in 1775, the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired during the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts," announced the U.S. Dept of Defense this morning, April 19.

The irony of our 250th anniversary, when the fighting began, is as thick as the indecency of the Trump administration betraying our Constitution and liberty for which so many brave and loyal souls gave their lives. 

Not in my lifetime have I witnessed a presidential administration partake in such sadistic pleasure in delivering torture and inhumanity onto our planet in ostentatious defiance of liberty that is American DNA. Nixon was a classical liberal in comparison to Trump.

And the Democratic Party has become a repository of cowardice and collaboration, as the Democrat  administration declared itself the arbiter of truth prior to Trump, as reported by Greg Collard today. 

What way forward?

Do something political, something you believe it. Celebrate and honor, then fight.

Oh, and by the way, fuck Israel.

Trump Escalates Republican War Against Voting in Cuckoo Recount Effort

Jacob Lawrence - from the Migration Series (1940–41)

Updated - Madison, Wisconsin — In modern America, the Republican Party's war against voters is waged as a full-spectrum assault against liberty, accelerating in the last ten years.

Destroying black and brown lives, stripping human beings of dignity and liberty, have long been sport for white folks here. But Republicans have escalated  systemic destruction of the foundational right to cast votes (see Article III, Wisconsin Constitution; Ballotpedia).

Trump's new effort to ultimately convince courts to declare that 100,000s of voters' ballots are illegal is the latest of this anti-human project.

Trump's campaign gives County Canvassing Boards names of disfavored voters and says, throw out these ballots.

Extreme action for certain, but business as usual in a broader sense.

I worked as a Wisconsin election inspector (poll worker), for some 60 shifts between 1998 and 2016.

It used to be funny — because it was pathetic — to witness the sudden chill in the room, uncomfortable shifting in chairs, worried expressions of white poll workers morphing into grimaces bordering on disbelief as young black men entered the polling place in the morning shift at the old Fire Station Number Two in Fitchburg, Wisconsin (Alder Dist One).

Well, who can blame the white folks? 

You should have seen the voters' black hair, dark-brown skin, often adorned in golden jewelry and tight dark tee-shirts of I don't know what. You know what they do, who they are. 

And our white votes get cancelled out by these guys?

It's the way it is.

White poll workers and the Fitchburg City Clerk's office were not amused by black folks. In fact, they were hostile to anyone who reported Fitchburg racism. I know. [By the way, anecdotal reports from the 2020 presidential general elections indicate the voting experience is getting better now.]

This is Wisconsin, so it may surprise readers what one becomes inured to, but from a first-person stand-point, I can say I tried to alert the political world about Fitchburg. See also Kaleem Caire, president and CEO of One City Learning Centers, and his experience with Fitchburg.

Nothing surprises me here.

Trump's latest absurd forays into obliterating swaths of voters can be seen as a continuation of white efforts to troll black and brown folks, ongoing Republican work to transform election law to stop non-Republican voters and a heightened operation against entire jurisdictions such as Dane County and Milwaukee County. (See Beck, Glauber and Marley, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Nichols, The Capital Times).

In 2016, in the voting rights litigation, One Wis­con­sin Insti­tute v. Thom­sen, much Repub­li­can vot­er-obstruc­tion leg­is­la­tion was swept away, opening up metro voting districts to help voters vote and have those votes count.

Of course the Republican legal empire struck back.

In June 2020, Judge Frank Easterbrook, from the Seventh Circuit, using his propensity to play loose with facts, penned Luft v Evers; One Wisconsin Institute, Inc. v Jacobs, (Nos. 16-3003, 16-3052), (Marley, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).

Easterbrook reinstated most of the Republican-enacted restrictions on early voting.

Easterbrook sees no racism in Republicans' Wisconsin election law, as long the Republican Party's animus toward minorities includes an animus toward Democrats. A bizarre judicial doctrine.

Crazy is the order of the day.

You hear about the Trump campaign attorney heading up the stop-the-ballots effort here? 

Trump's lead attorney, Jim Troupis, and his wife's votes would be invalidated, were Trump to prevail in his current recount-and-stop ballots efforts in Wisconsin (see Beck, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and Law and Crime). 

This is because Trump wants early voting, (in-person, absentee), votes invalidated in Dane and Milwaukee counties. 

One can think of a few Due Process and Equal Protection problems with Trump's sought-after remedy for an imagined injury at the hands of Dane and Milwaukee counties.

Bear in mind, limiting early voting and racial intent and effect in Republican efforts to halt voting in jurisdictions where black and brown people live is fine, [no Constitutional problems], with Easterbrook.

But even Easterbrook, were this case to reach the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, would recoil.

It's crazy time in Wisconsin, but crazy is pretty much standard-going the last ten years, and is consistent with Wisconsin's secular religion: Most white folks really don't like black and brown people very much.

Calvary Gospel Church in Madison, Wisconsin Revealed as Apocalyptic Cult Assaulting Children

Pentecostal Calvary Gospel Church in Madison, Wisconsin
is the subject of allegations of widespread sexual assault
occurring over 30 years, (Ferral, The Capital Times).

Madison, Wisconsin — We all have encountered youth obscured in high school, who later become police, court services investigators, for example, or a member of the Republican Party and a fundamentalist church.

But nowhere have we seen the partners-in-violence work of authoritarian institutions become so codified as the white fundamentalist churches and the Republican Party.

Not many saw it coming four years ago, but the triumph of the white supremacist Trump taking over the Republican Party seems natural in retrospect.

The same dynamics are to be found in Wisconsin.

Spiteful, petty and pathetic, the Republican Party has become a repository for the bullied and dull, now seeking revenge.

But no institution is as woefully destructive as the white Christian fundamentalist.

Protected by the Republican Party's stopping the Wisconsin Child Victims Act bill, a 1,000-member Pentecostal church on Madison's east side has been revealed to be an apocalyptic child sexual abuse cult this morning.

Writes Katelyn Ferral in The Capital Times:

A Pentecostal church, [Calvary Gospel Church], on Madison’s east side has concealed allegations of sexual assault among its congregants for over 30 years, and continues to perpetuate a culture of fear and control that fosters abuse, former members say. ...

Children were told the end of the world was always near — that Jesus would soon return and choose who to send to heaven and hell. They were taught that they would go to hell and send others there, too, for dishonoring the church and its leaders — which some believe are divinely appointed by God — by reporting abuse outside the church.

The fascist, the abuser, the cult member, the Republican — all find refuge in authoritarian institutions requiring obedience in exchange for minor authority and the chance to seek revenge. The innocent suffer the most.

Ohio Set to Reject Rove and Kasich in Working Families' Win, Wisconsin Next

Photo: Carolyn Tiry / Flickr

Working families are just trying to make it. Sell their labor product at a fair price. Raise families. Maybe even have a home for their children. But not if Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers and John Kasich have their way.

Now, working families are fighting back.

A new poll in Ohio shows overwhelming hostility to the Rove-Koch-Kasich anti-working family bill, Senate Bill 5 [Issue 2], that citizens of Ohio look to reject in a binding election Tuesday, just one week before the start of the recall of fellow anti-family governor, Scott Walker of Wisconsin for his signing a similarly unpopular law with support from anti-family billionaires.

Senate Bill 5 targets health care, collective bargaining, pensions, and is seen as effort to continue the enterprise of attacking private working families by moving the attack against those families working in the public sphere.

As Mike Lofgren, who retired on June 17 after 28 years as a Republican Congressional staffer, said in September 2010,

I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and ‘shareholder value’ the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP’s decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren’t after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be ‘forced’ to make ‘hard choices’ – and that doesn’t mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

Obama and Progressives

President Obama was elected as an agent of change with the energetic support of the peace-and-justice, civil-liberties-loving, Constitution-following, reality-based community.

So it comes as a disappointment to see Obama bow to those who are opposed to change and hostile to civil liberties.

What's going on?

Mike Madden in Salon says, "Obama's just not that into you," asking if progressives and the president are really meant for each other.

Paul Krugman says, "So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. ... So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back."

Obama needs to make a decision: Cater to Sarah Palin and her off-the-wall, white GOP or make good on the shiny, progressive promises of the last campaign that saw Americans break all manner of new ground in their thirst for real change.

77 Percent of GOP Sens Committed Against Sotomayor

Update: For Puerto Ricans, Sotomayor's Success Stirs Pride

With Judge Sonia Sotomayor poised to be confirmed as Supreme Court Justice, the Republican Party did not disappoint its political opponents expecting it to overwhelmingly oppose confirming the first Latina on the high court.

Of the 40 GOP senators, 31 have committed to opposing Sotomayor. That's 77 percent. The White Party remains true to its ultimately destructive and contemptible form.

Nationally, the Southern Strategy is still employed, it just does not work as well in a changing America.

Sotomayor is a wise Latina judge, and the White Party remains mostly foolish, oblivious or hostile to the concerns of brown and black America.

Dick Cheney Stays on Point

Update: Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP

Dick Cheney is competing with Rush and Newt as the leader of the new GOP.

We wish him luck.

Maureen Dowd and Juan Cole analyse Cheney's macabre machinations that apparently will not stop ever. From Cole:

This week's news is about the grand old pit bull's struggle to continue to define his own party. Cheney emerged last Friday to warn on a North Dakota radio program that it would be a mistake for the Republican Party to moderate its message. (Does that mean it is now radical?) Then on Sunday Cheney told Bob Schieffer of 'Face the Nation' that it was a mistake to stop using waterboarding and other forms of extreme interrogation, and that they did not constitute torture. He also poked fun at Colin Powell, questioning his credentials as a Republican and expressing a preference for the waspish Limbaugh as the party's leader.