Ursula Faw

Nobody can write a lede better than Charlie Pierce, so let him catch you up to date on the latest developments in NC-9. Esquire: Those of you who have been following the madcap antics down in the Ninth Congressional District in the newly insane state of North Carolina may have wondered how in the hell Mark Harris, the Republican preacher whose campaign got caught ratfcking absentee ballots so cold that Harris got finked on by his son and then called for a new election himself, was planning on running in the do-over election with his scandalous first campaign hanging around his neck like a stole made of roadkill possums. The white suit has been worn to better effect than Rushing does it. As you probably know by now, the answer is, Harris is not running, he chose a replacement. And what a replacement. A white tornado, Boss Hogg look alike, anti-Saturday Night Fever-dream, none other than Stony Rushing, depicted in the photo above. Rushing owns the Take Aim Training Range, a store that sells both guns and classes in how to shoot ‘em. Rushing has been a County Commissioner in Union County since 2014. This is the only undecided congressional race from last November. And the GOP has a candidate who’s a poster child for the Three Biggest Killers of Americans, namely obesity, tobacco, and firearms. I’m going snowblind just looking at Rushing. Do you suppose Stony is hoping that old hippies will vote for him? Don’t even want to speculate how he got that name. Free advice to the GOP: Get another candidate. District 9 is a very strange place.  Let me see if I’ve got it all straight, the preacher with the election scandal so bad, that his own kid dropped a dime on him, is now endorsing this all-hat-no-horse clown, have I got that right? And he thinks this guy is the answer? The image of statesmanship to which Republicans aspire. Sweet Jesus. I will always say vote for the Democrat, friends, but in this case, it’s not only a no-brainer to do so, this clown, Rushing, is a candidate for the Darwin award. Finally, here’s a link to the Democrat, Dan McCready’s campaign. My God, I haven’t cringed at the difference between candidates like this since the Moore v. Jones imbroglio. Let’s bring it home for the Democrat, friends, or District 9 is going to be as perverse as it’s science fiction cinema namesake. To receive articles of mine not published elsewhere become a patron on Patreon. Please follow me on Twitter @ursulafaw56  

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit court ruled Tuesday that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel is constitutional. This is not good news for Stephen Calabresi, chairman of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, who published a 21-page memo arguing that Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional. He now looks rather foolish, but it’s far from the first time Calabresi has authored a controversial memo — or been wrong. Think Progress: Calabresi also authored a later-withdrawn memo arguing that Congress should double or even triple the number of federal appeals court judges after President Trump’s election with the goal of “undoing the judicial legacy of President Barack Obama.” As a presidential candidate, Trump promised that, if he were elected, “we’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.” Since Trump took office, the Federalist Society and its executives played a major role in selecting Trump judges — including Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court. […] According to Calabresi, Mueller should count as a principal officer because he “is investigating a large number of people and has already charged defendants with many different kinds of crimes” and “that’s too much power for an inferior officer to have.” “Only a principal officer, such as a U.S. attorney, can behave the way Mr. Mueller is behaving,” Calabresi incorrectly wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed summarizing his argument. (U.S. Attorneys are inferior officers, and a federal statute permits the Attorney General or a federal district court to appoint these officers.) Make no mistake, whatever ignominy Trump leaves office with, he will leave a lasting legacy for an entire generation, one cobbled together by Mitch McConnell: he will have appointed a vast number of conservative judges, all handpicked and delivered by the right-wing Federalist society. They have already been successful in placing two Supreme Court justices on the bench, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.  Restructuring the federal judiciary is the goal of this administration and the sole reason that McConnell sold the GOP’s soul to Donald Trump to begin with. So far, McConnell has achieved this goal in a stunning fashion. Trump has already appointed 154 judges. On November 7, 2018 McConnell said, “We intend to keep confirming as many as we possibly can as long as we’re in a position to do so,” which is GOP-speak for, “until we are finally forced to cut bait with Trump for the preservation of the party.” McConnell’s gambit the last two years of the Obama presidency has paid off. The obstructionist Senate didn’t approve a single judicial nominee of Obama’s, leaving 112 federal judgeship vacancies for Trump to fill, more than twice what Obama had to fill. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, that strategy would have backfired on McConnell big time. But McConnell apparently counted upon the political pendulum swinging back to a Republican victory. And maybe he knew about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Not saying he did, but in the event that he might have, then it would make a lot of sense for him to obstruct all the judicial appointments in the last two years of Obama’s term, and leave the field so fertile and open for Trump. After the circus sideshow of the Trump administration is long gone and just a laughable walk down memory lane, the awful reality of a stacked ultra conservative judiciary will still be with us. It’s taking […]

It’s been said ad nauseum that we live in two countries, America and Amerika, co-existent and contiguous. Here is more grist for the mill of that proposition. Trump/Pence sends out a regular email to supporters, usually asking for a contribution. Here is today’s, claiming that the Trump wall, of legend and lore, is actually being built. It seems pretty obvious that Trump is counting on residents of Amerika to only read his emails and watch Fox News and listen to his shills on the radio. Unfortunately, if they talk to residents of America, may find out unpleasant facts, such as there has been zero new construction on any wall, much less that a $6.3Bil project is underway, without a dime’s worth of approval from Congress. You can’t blame Trump for trying. He convinced enough rubes to vote for him, why in the world shouldn’t he assume that he can just keep it all going, spin more lies and weave more fraud tapestries?

Evangelical wingnut Pat Robertson got his knickers all in a twist this morning. He was incensed over an appellate court in Philadelphia considering the issue of whether to renew a Catholic adoption agency’s contract with the City of Philadelphia. The agency doesn’t want to place foster children in LGBT homes, which is a violation of Philadelphia’s non-discrimination policy, and so the Catholic agency might lose it’s contract. That hits Robertson right where he lives, because he’s been hoping like hell that he can make his, and Mike Pence’s, “religious liberty” b.s. the law of the land, and send human rights and the LGBT people back to medieval times. So Robertson went on an epic rant. Right Wing Watch: “The incredible thing about the homosexuals is they are willing to destroy lives and destroy the whole fabric of society so long as they and their weird way of doing sex is legitimized,” he said. “That’s what they want and they will take away everything; they will destroy marriage, they will destroy families, they will destroy, in this case, the foster children. They are willing to tear down the entire edifice in order to have the majority of people recognize the way they do sex.” “I think if Christians begin to speak out and insist that if some politician goes along with the gay agenda, that they’re going to be voted out of office,” Robertson added. “Once they get that message, they’ll start saying, ‘We want to listen to the majority of the people in our society.’ Until they do, that small minority is going to be dominating everything we do and every aspect of our lives.” Christians taking over the government is not a new idea to Robertson. He started preaching that particular gospel back in the 80’s. Yuricare Report: “During the 1980’s I began taping and transcribing Pat Robertson’s 700 Club show because of the alarming anti-Christian political philosophy he was endorsing. He began a drum beat for drastic political and cultural changes to this country. Robertson’s guests did something I’d never seen before: they reversed the scriptures and called it immoral for the citizens to help the poor through taxation, which, by the way is expressly required in the Old Testament. The accusation was and is that taxation robbed the rich to help the poor. On April 4, 1985, Billy Graham appeared on the show, and in a startling announcement said, “I’m for evangelicals “… getting control of the Congress, getting control of the bureaucracy, getting control of the executive branch of government. If we leave it to the other side we’re going to be lost.” On September 25, 1985, Tim LaHaye, appeared in a film clip with Phyllis Schlafly on the show. In that clip, he laid out the plan to take over the government of the United States. He said: “Suppose that every Bible believing church—all 110,000—decided to…raise up one person to run for public office and win… If every church in the next ten years did that, we would have more Christians in office than there are positions…there are only 97,000 elective offices.” Robertson and his cronies are serious as a heart attack about stacking the courts with anti-gay judges and electing anti-gay politicians. In his rant on television Monday about the Philadelphia case, he made the point that the gay population is only two percent of the country. Robertson […]

The innovators of the “Barack the Barbarian” comic series, Devi’s Due comics, have come up with a new title, to be released May 15, the “mother of all one-off commemorative comics: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez And The Freshman Force. Issue #1, New Party: Who Dis?” The Hill: The comic book is titled after a fiery response the freshman congresswoman directed towards Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in January after he said he hopes she is not the future of the Democratic Party. Ocasio-Cortez fired back in a tweet at the time, asking, “New party, who dis?” The Chicago-based publishing company said in a release that the new comic book will see Ocasio-Cortez “engage in a series of super-heroic mini-adventures, taking on the GOP establishment from within.” “To boot, this anthology comic satirically skewers everyone from President Trump to his near-endless team of morally-compromised Republican cronies,” the company also said in the release, while also adding that book will feature “bonus” activities and games like “Where’s Mitch?” Good news, the publishing company says that a portion of profits will go to America’s United Service Organization and RaicesTexas.org, which provides free legal services to immigrant families and children. Maybe the Congresswoman will have a book signing and leap tall buildings with a single bound. To receive articles of mine not published elsewhere become a patron on Patreon. Please follow me on Twitter @ursulafaw56  

Here it is, the de facto life sentence for Paul Manafort. The guideline is purportedly over 800 pages, so I fail to see how a position has not been taken. Apparently we’ll find out. Two thoughts come to mind: one, Manafort’s fear of Russian retribution must be greater than the fear of prison — although who’s to say the Russians can’t get him there? Two, does Manafort have anything else to trade out with Mueller, or is this the last hurrah?

What a week this has been in the nuanced-not world of Donald Trump and thugs. First, Roger Stone chimed in Monday, putting judge Amy Berman Jackson next to a clear and obvious cross-hairs symbol in an Instagram post.  Now, on Saturday, comes this image. This is a thinly veiled assassination message, just like Stone’s post, nothing more, nothing less. And don’t ever forget who got that ball rolling, none other than Donald Trump with this quote about Hillary Clinton. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, where the Sandy Hook massacre took place, tweeted in response to Trump’s comment in 2016, “Don’t treat this as a political misstep. It’s an assassination threat, seriously upping the possibility of a national tragedy & crisis.” That’s what that was and that’s what this is, too. This isn’t a dog whistle, it’s an air raid siren, and it comes mere days after the wingnut Coast Guard officer with the guns and the hit list. We’ve already had one journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, brutally murdered and the deaths of the other five journalists shot to death last summer in the Baltimore-area newsroom.  It is no coincidence that the extremist officer’s hit list contained the names of journalists and prominent Democrats. The opposition party, along with the fourth estate, is considered the enemy of the people, by Trump. He makes no bones about it, either. This isn’t at the level of innuendo, this is blatant and in your face. And never let it slip your mind, the profound connections between the NRA and Russian money. the Russian threat against America is pernicious and it is pervasive — and images like the one above are just grist for the mill, in a political climate where the government is held hostage by somebody in hock to Vladimir Putin and the NRA. We are so totally numb to outrage, that nothing sticks to these creeps, and they keep going with this agenda of violent rhetoric — sometimes followed up by actions like the sending of pipe bombs through the mail. What is it going to take, seriously, to make this stop? The death of one of our most valuable leaders, either elected or cultural? I pray not. To receive articles of mine not published elsewhere become a patron on Patreon. Please follow me on Twitter @ursulafaw56  

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” — Dostoyevsky Sarah Huckabee Sanders is to Pinocchio what an F-22 is to “Flyer,” which is what the Wright brothers called their first bi-plane, back in the days of Kitty Hawk.  She is the liar ne plus ultra, the high priestess, nay, the supreme goddess of lies. Her most recent contribution to lying, which she has modeled into a veritable art-form, in her time as White House press secretary, is to claim that Donald Trump does nothing but condemn violence — she assures us that he is the first person to do so — and that any misunderstanding on that topic is due to mis-reporting and not to anything Trump ever said. Friday a reporter asked Sanders to comment on the topic of the Coast Guard lieutenant armed with guns and a hit list, which included Democrats and journalists. Here was her response in the Washington Post: Sanders: “I certainly don’t think that the president at any point has done anything but condemn violence — against journalists or anyone else. In fact, every single time something like this happens, the president is typically one of the first people to condemn the violence and the media is the first people to blame the president.” There are white lies and then there are giant bold faced whoppers, and this last one was a doozy. And bear in mind, it’s not an original lie. She said the same thing, in so many words, in June, 2017, when she claimed Trump, “in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence. If anything quite the contrary.”  Apparently, the Washington Post couldn’t stand it, and so they sent Sanders an email Friday afternoon containing these facts. And bear in mind, that the Washington Post interactive fact checker has over 8,000 lies on record since Trump took office. But the Post only asked Sanders to comment on a few short squibs. If Sanders had been unaware at that her categorical words amounted to a continuation of Spicerism from the briefing room lectern, PolitiFact, The Post and others highlighted the several occasions on which Trump, often at rallies, either smiled on violent acts. Just one example, from a February 2016 rally in Iowa: “So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell . . . I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.” There are several others along those lines. The president has encouraged violence through body language as well. At a rally before last year’s midterms, Trump praised Rep. Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who’d body-slammed a reporter for the Guardian during his 2017 campaign. “Never wrestle him. You understand that? Never. Any guy who can do a body-slam. He’s my kind of . . .,” said Trump last October. “He’s my guy. . . . So I was in Rome with a lot of the leaders from other countries . . . And I heard about it. And we endorsed Greg very early, but I had heard that he body-slammed a reporter.” Amid those […]

This is not the Roger Stone we’ve come to know and loathe, although his characteristic over the top ditziness is still there. Here’s a partial transcript of what Stone told the court this morning at his Order To Show Cause hearing on why his bail should not be revoked, for his egregious attack against Judge Amy Berman Jackson, Monday, on Instagram. “‘I’m hurtfully sorry for my own stupidity. I’m kicking myself, but not as much as my wife is kicking me. My consulting business has dried up. I’ve exhausted my savings. I am being treated for emotional distress. I let myself down, my family down, my attorneys down. It was a momentarily lapse of judgment. I heard political commentators people have been talking about the likelihood that I’ll be raped in prison. It’s been a stressful situation. I’m having a hard time putting food on the table and making rent.” Roger Stone’s net worth has been estimated at between $5 to $7 million. It’s highly unlikely he’s stone cold broke. He just wants to sound pathetic so that Alex Jones can convince the rubes to send money for his defense. He did manage to achieve that in court this morning. CBS News adds that Stone said, “I can only beseech you to give me a second chance. Forgive me the trespass.” Alternet says Jackson issued a full gag order And on Thursday, the judge in his case issued a gag order on Stone. She had previously issued only a limited gag order on him within the vicinity of the courthouse, while also restraining what his lawyers could say publicly. Now, he cannot say anything about the case, the investigation, or anyone involved in the proceedings. If he violates this order, she said, his bond could be revoked and he could be detained until his trial. House arrest would have been nice too, but this is a good ruling. To receive articles of mine not published elsewhere become a patron on Patreon. Please follow me on Twitter @ursulafaw56  

You are judged by the company you keep, and southern California billionaire Geoffrey Palmer has been involved in a lot of shady lawsuits, centered around his underhanded political strategies and slumlord activities — so it’s not surprising that he gave Donald Trump’s Rebuilding America Now PAC $2Mil in 2016 — or that there’s a class action lawsuit filed by abused tenants on his horizon. NBC Los Angeles: Palmer has long been a controversial figure in Los Angeles development circles. In 1991 he was charged with paying employees to make political donations to a campaign that opposed the incorporation of what is now the City of Santa Clarita. In the decades since, Palmer has been involved in a number of lawsuits over development projects and affordable housing regulations in the city, including one lawsuit for tearing down the last cottage in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood. Now, over two dozen former tenants of Palmer have sued him in small claims court for keeping damage deposit money that he was not entitled to. Same old story, different day: the wealthy guy stays wealthy by stealing from poor people who can ill afford it. “I’m a hardworking single mother and if you have all that money and you’re ripping hardworking people off, it’s just not fair,” said former tenant Latasha Jennings. Jennings said Palmer’s company tried to charge her $1,038 for new carpet after she moved out of the River Ranch Townhomes in Santa Clarita. “I left that place spotless from head to toe,” said Jennings. “They even did an inspection and said everything was good before I signed the papers to leave.” Shades of Jared Kushner. His company in Baltimore was sued for charging late fees when nobody was late and court costs not approved by any court. Kushner is positively feudal, using his wealth and lawyers to steal from working class people just trying to get by. Palmer appears to be cut from the same bolt of cloth. And they’re both in orbit around Donald Trump.